home > Origins > Loading battle in world of tanks. Artillery focus XVM experiment in World of Tanks. Game freezes on startup on Mac OS X


Loading battle in world of tanks. Artillery focus XVM experiment in World of Tanks. Game freezes on startup on Mac OS X




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Game freezes on startup on Mac OS X

To resolve the issue, reinstall Codeweavers Mac Wrapper from .

Codeweavers Mac Wrapper is not developed by Wargaming.net and World of Tanks on Mac OS X is not supported. With any questions, you can always contact the developer:

Game won't launch when switching to enhanced graphics

This happens if the computer configuration is lower than required for the game to work with the "Enhanced Graphics" setting. To solve the problem:

  1. Download the archive.
  2. Unzip it and run the .bat file - it will automatically delete the game settings.
  3. Start the game.

Screen resolution out of range

This message appears if the game client was launched at a resolution higher than that supported by the monitor or video card. To solve the problem, remove the client settings:

  1. Download the archive.
  2. Unpack it and run the .bat file - it will automatically delete the game settings files.
  3. Start the game.

Update problems

Problems when starting the game

When launching the game client, the following error may occur (the file name may differ from that indicated in the screenshot):

  1. Open Game Center.
  2. Select World of Tanks at the top of the window.
  3. Click on the "Game Settings" button.
  4. In the settings, click "Restore game".

To solve the problem, you need to check the integrity of the client. If you launch the game via:

  1. Launch launcher.
  2. Go to settings (click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the launcher).
  3. Go to the "Support" tab and click on the "Check" button.
  4. Wait for the process to complete and click on the "Play" button.

Read about solving other problems when starting the game.

Olenemer (part of the XVM mod) is a "fucking shit" that should be banned from the game immediately. I wish [bad life] to the developers of this modification- this is how a wave of protest started in the EU in the summer against the use by players of one very unpleasant part of the XVM mod - displaying player statistics in battle. Apparently, there in the West they also realized all the pain (it dawned on them) that many players in our cluster are experiencing.
Further, one player from America promised to conduct a thorough investigation of this problem, and show whether it is all fiction and a strained problem. In mid-August of this year, he published a topic on reddit with his results. The first of the Russian-speaking media personalities to study the user under the nickname WardJumpforJesus drew the attention of G1deon. The post, by the way, was later discussed far beyond the tank community, players pointed to similar cases in other games.

“It is far from a secret that the statistics of players according to the XVM version often come around to them in the form of increased attention from the enemy (and the allies, to be honest, sometimes blow the roof off). Of course, players with weak or even average stats tend to reject excessive focus, but people with high and even unique stats swear that there is a difference, and sometimes focus can be really unbearable!

Many attribute this fact to some kind of prejudice and / or style of play between extras and crayfish, i.e. more skillful players take up firing positions faster and are highlighted earlier than others, taking on the main focus of the enemy team. Under such conditions, it is difficult to assess how much XVM statistics data can affect the final focus, so I decided to conduct an experiment to quantify arta focus using two WoT accounts that are radically different in statistics.

As a methodology, it was decided to compare the number of stuns from artillery hits that a player was under during 1000 battles on both accounts. I tried not to take into account hits from artillery at close range, since such shots are only self-defense, and there can be no talk of any special focus.

To begin with, I fought 1000 battles on the main account, which is ~2500 WN8, 59% of victories, vehicle levels - 8…10.

Artillery distribution statistics in battles:

357 battles with three arts;
- 342 battles with two weapons;
- 161 battles with one artillery;
- 140 battles without artillery at all (hello, Malinovka!).

TOTAL: For 1000 fights on this account, I got stunned 622 times.

The experiment was clearly getting interesting, and for maximum compliance, I continued to play only medium tanks on the second account (~200 WN8, 42% wins), owned by my, hehe, younger brother. The level of battles was similar: 8…10 levels.

Artillery statistics:

401 battles with three arts;
- 276 battles with two arts;
- 154 battles with one artillery;
- 169 battles without artillery.

TOTAL: For 1000 battles on such an account, the stun reached out to me 104 times!

I didn't change my playstyle enough to affect such a significant reduction in art focus, and I was able to afford more daring attacks that would have been unequivocally stopped by the enemy team on the main account. There were quite real situations when I shot at dozens on a cardboard tank, and in the light of day the enemy team fired exclusively at a level 8 tank next to me, but not at all at me. This just may be a confirmation of the aforementioned fact of bias, and this does not apply to statistics. Both accounts were not members of clans and both were from the NA cluster.

To be honest, I've never had such pleasure playing World of Tanks, especially when the battles didn't require you to give all your best and pull obviously draining rollers.
I know it's a pipe dream, but XVM should have no place in this game! - it only provokes toxicity and is, among other things, an expanse for game trolls when they do what they love: they spoil statistics for other players.
Ohhh, how I suffered from arta ...

So, both XVM (part of the mod - approx. WOT Express) and art are big problems for the game, but taken together it is definitely a dream for game trolls. Is WG aware of this real issue at all?"

With all this toxicity, this focus on the color of statistics on EN / NA is MUCH less than ours. Who dares to repeat on RU?)
The author's study gained quite a lot of popularity and received 94% approval ratings. Some in the comments admitted that they deliberately choose more skill players for their goal. WardJumpforJesus was also supported by some Western streamers.

I noticed somehow that on my computer maps in WoT are loaded for a very long time - more than a minute. You go, it happens, into battle, and he has been walking for 30 seconds. And sometimes you even find your tank already in the form of burning debris. My computer, of course, is old and has been asking for an upgrade for a long time, but at first you can try to do something programmatically.

So, the first thing is to determine the cause of the brakes. The list of suspects, in principle, is not very large:

  • The ineptitude of the game developers
  • Barabashka
Let's start operational-search activities with a confrontation. We take the excellent Process Monitor utility from Sysinternals, run it, add monitoring of the worldoftanks.exe process to the filters, and let's go. We start the game, start the battle, wait for the map to load and look at the monitoring results.

As you can see from the screenshot, CPU, memory and network loading are far from maximum. But the HDD loading schedule is very uneven, there are peaks and dips. Let's take a closer look. Click "Tools->File summary...". Bingo! Here we see a whole bunch of I / O operations (70,602 pieces, to be exact).


The total amount of data read during loading is approximately 450 MB, the time of file operations is more than 50 seconds. This means that it is file operations that take up most of the map loading time. It is not surprising - in WoT there are well-designed maps, tank models, all sorts of houses \ trees \ stones. 450 MB of readable data seems like a reasonable price for all this. But how can we speed up loading times? After all, all this data the game still needs to read. There is an old proven way to speed up file operations - RAM disk. But here's the trouble - it won't work on the forehead. The game takes up 11 GB and my machine only has 4 GB of RAM. That is, even by creating a 11 GB RAM disk and placing the whole game on it, I will not deceive the laws of physics and the operating system - the disk may be created, but the data on it will be swapped to the same hard disk, from which we want to get away. Not an option.

Well, let's dig deeper - let's see which files take the most time to access. Open the "By folder" tab and see the following picture.


Most of the resources are consumed by accessing files in the %World_of_tanks%\res folder. Here you can select the following subfolders:

  • audio: 14.48 sec - folder occupies 200 MB
  • content: 9.93 sec - folder occupies 844 MB
  • spaces: 6.19 sec - folder occupies 419 MB
  • vehicles: 8.60 sec - folder occupies 1.7 GB
If we could put files from some of these folders into memory, then the map would load much faster. For example, by placing files from the audio and spaces folders into RAM, we will win 21 seconds of time at the cost of 619 MB of RAM - not bad at all. But it won’t work out of the box - how can you explain to the game that some of its resources are here, and some are there? At this point, I already wanted to hit hard hardcore in the spirit of Harkonnen "a:
  1. Loading the required files into memory
  2. With the help of some Microsoft Detours or ApiHijack, we hang hooks on the CreateFile, ReadFile (and maybe something else) functions in the Worldoftanks.exe process.
  3. In hooks, we determine which file WoT is trying to read. If one of ours - we give it data from memory, if the left one - we transfer the call to real file input / output functions.
But, unfortunately, it didn’t work out - an idea came to my mind that made it possible to make everything much easier and ruined everything :). The idea was that, they say, how cool it would be in this place to be a user of * nix systems, where there is a wonderful mount command that allows you to mount anything anywhere. There is no such thing in Windows ... Or is there? Some vague memories hovered on the periphery of consciousness, and I got into my head and Google for information (when the guys from Google finally do a search in my head, they are completely lazy about something!). So here's what we have under Windows:
  • subst - does exactly the opposite of what we need. Allows you to create a new virtual disk, the root of which will be the specified folder. And we need the opposite - to link an existing disk with a "virtual" folder.
  • The method described in Microsoft KB - at first glance, does what we need. Allows the NTFS file system to create a link between a certain folder and the root of a drive. Great stuff, but unfortunately didn't work with my RAM drive (even when I formatted it to NTFS).
  • And finally, I decided to look where such a search should have started from - in the list of utilities from Sysinternals. And, of course, there was what I needed. The utility allows you to mount any path in our file system to a specific folder (there is another similar one - linkd).
So the final algorithm looks like this:
  1. We take any RAM-drive (for example, from this list). I took this one.
  2. We think how much RAM we can allocate for caching.
  3. We rewrite the folders with the game resources on the RAM-drive (we rename the original folders - we still need them).
  4. Using Junction, we mount the folders on the Ramdrive to the game's resources folder. Something like this:
    "junction D:\Games\World_of_Tanks\res\audio r:\audio"
  5. Let's start the game and enjoy.
By the way, all these items can be implemented in one batch file, and in the second - the rollback of everything back.

Of course, in this whole business it is important not to overdo it, so that the volume of files on the RAM-drive does not become so large that the OS decides to use swapping - then the whole idea flies to hell. But here's what I got:


The time for accessing files in folders on the RAM-drive dropped to almost zero, the map began to load much faster, I began to appear often even before the prelaunch countdown, to have time to exchange a couple of phrases with allies before the start of the battle. In general, what I wanted - I achieved. It’s a pity that I didn’t have a chance to dig deeper into the depths of the game and use hooks - but my method does not violate the WoT license agreement, which is also important.