Re: Windows Resource Limits (was Re: Pathfinding)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at comhem dot se>]

>Anyway, I applied SP1 to Win95 and that did not help the situation
>(i.e., comctl32.dll was not updated). I ran their common controls
>updater and now Xconq is working just fine on Win95.
>
>So, now I wonder whether I should bundle the component updater with the
>Windows installer and increase its size by about 500K uncompressed, or
>whether I should just put a note on the downloads Web page telling any
>Win95 volk that they need to acquire it and run it before they can use
>Xconq. I really doubt that there are too many Win95 users out there;
>this was probably a pointless exercise except for the fact that Xconq on
>Win95 is my only means of working on the GDI memory problem.
>(Incidentally, all the images seem to have loaded with the Bellum test
>case I have playing right now, and everything looks normal. What sort of
>symptoms am I supposed to be looking for, Hans?)

Since the problem was with Tk84.dll, you could also test if Tk83.dll works
with the original Win95. Otherwise, I think anybody still running Win95 out
there should have updated, but then again, if you don't update the OS
itself for 10 years, perhaps you don't care about service packs either ...

As for the GDI resource problem, the fixes I implemented (fewer terrain
images, no transitions on pre-NT systems) work for most games, including
Bellum. However, they are not enough for a few games. Thus, Cobra and
Cherbourg still run out of GDI resouce memory.

One solution would be to get rid of terrain images altogether on pre-NT
systems and only use solid colors. But this seems like a draconian fix when
most games work fine.

There is not much info about this problem on the web, but here are some
links I found:

http://www.spcug.org/reviews/bl9803.htm

http://techtv.com/callforhelp/answerstips/story/0,24330,2113339,00.html

http://www.endurasoft.com/techtalk/statbar.htm

The last one suggests that you have to explicitly release GDI resource
memory when you no longer need it:

For this control, or any other control using additional memory, be sure to
release the memory and/or resource when you're finished. In my case, I
added the
CAnimateCtrl::Close() operation to my CMainFrame::DestroyWindow() function.
This is more than just being nice?memory is a limited commodity and should
be
used properly. This is even more critical when you use the very limited
"GDI Resource" memory, which an AVI file would use. When that gets filled,
Windows
could crash.

Hans