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[Veroule]

I am having trouble figuring out why everything is so slow.  I have a 1GHz Athalon w/512Mb ram.  Roughly about 4 years old.

Just starting with the game and reading through the manual but it takes between 3 and 4 seconds to respond to a single keypress.  Turning off the music helped. I turned on the FPS for a little while and it read 0.  That seems perfectly right since the screen isn't changing at all while waiting for me to press a key.

However at the same time it is eating a pretty consistent 90% of my processor.  Responsiveness for activating and working with other apps does not seem to be a problem at all.  Which leads me to think the message loop it is using is decently smooth, but it makes no sense for DF to be using that much processor when it should be only waiting for a keypress.

I have it in running in windowed mode, but full screen doesn't seem any better.  Anyone have any ideas?

[Veroule]

I played around with it some more during the late stages of world generation specifically the offloading units stage.  Having all apps closed helped, and going to full screen made a large difference.

So it looks like it is an issue with determining what parts need to be repainted.  Or possibly something with my dual monitor setup and drivers.  Since I have little to no problems with some other programs that have intensive graphics I have to conclude that there is room for improvement.

It will be quite difficult for me to actually use full screen mode since it causes major problems with everything on my desktop.  It is an issue for many games I have tried since going with the dual monitor system.

Hopefully something that can be improved by the time this goes to beta.  I am still looking forward to actually getting a chance to play. Everything I have seen in the manual and the forums here makes me say this game definitely has very good content.

[TotalPigeon]

You need a better CPU - DF relies heavily on it. I only get 60 at best with a 2.8 ghz processor, and that drops through the floor once I get around 100 pop.

[Toady One]

If you are getting 0 FPS on the title screen, it's most likely something with the OpenGL rendering.  People that have reported problems like this have often been able to fix them by updating their video drivers.  My CPU usage is 0% on the title screen.

[ March 27, 2007: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Veroule]

I am actually glad to hear I am not the only one to have problems with this.  I am also glad to hear that the problem is most likely driver related and not in your code.

Sadly drivers are one of the great problems with my dual monitors.  They are on seperate graphics cards, and in order to have scrolling work quickly I have to have new drivers running on one card and old drivers for the other.  Using newer drivers for the one card causes all sorts of crashes as soon as the second monitor is activated.  Time to tweak around again, thank you very much for the help.

[Jaqie Fox]

geforce 6000 series cards with built in dual monitor support (I should know I use dual monitors) are well under $100 now.  Perhaps it is time to upgrade.

[Veroule]

Alright, finally looks like I got system stability and speed back.  Down 1 monitor though; I can always work at getting that back in later.

Now I have a nice FPS of 41-43 at the main menu and good responsiveness.  Can you tell me what it is actually drawing?  Just seems to me to be a large waste of processing time to redraw when nothing has changed.

[Toady One]

I think it refreshes the full screen text every frame.  It's possible to modify its behavior, but I'm not eager to muck around with the graphics code, and 2000 8x12 quads shouldn't be an issue on a system from the last many years, so there might still be some kind of driver or video card issue.

[Jaqie Fox]

You said you had a socket A 1Ghz system, but not what chipset it uses, so I will sum up a few problem ones specific to the Socket A era here.

SiS chipsets (especially the older ones) have serious performance issues and should be replaced.  The same goes for any PCCHIPS mobo, and ULi chipsets.

VIA chipsets (especially older ones) have serious bugs and performance issues that were worked around with the newest reference drivers. If you have a via chipset, use the reference driver for your chipset from www.viaarena.com

nvidia chipsets (nforce2 et al) should be using the reference drivers.  OEM drivers tend to lag behind in performance and some have serious bugs which were never fixed.

Replacing them is getting to be a very attractive option now that socket 939 based technology is hitting rock-bottom in price.  As an example, take this set. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138269  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103023  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835166069
For under $140 shipped you get a very speedy motherboard, cpu, built in video, and heatsinkfan.  If your system already uses DDR (pc2700 or faster) you can use this as a drop-in upgrade.  The motherboard even has a PCIE 16x slot for when you wish to buy a new videocard.  The only additional thing I would recommend is a good pc power & cooling 310w PSU for it ($55 shipped direct from them).

Also make sure you update to the newest drivers for *everything* in your system from network to sound as well. One bunk or non-WHQL driver can ruin your performance and reliability.

[Veroule]

No offense to Jagie's amazing intelligence and knowledge of computer hardware, however the point remains that for the graphics being done a savy programmer could make a Commodore64 do the same faster.  The lovely old C64 with a whopping 16Khz clock speed and only 60Kb of memory to play with for all the graphics and code.

I should know I actually did assembly programming with them 20 years ago.

So not to be abrasive Jagie, but please stop suggesting I upgrade my system.  I am only trying to get Mr. Toady to consider that it could be very well worth it to deal with the extremely large performance bottleneck in his code sooner rather then later.

[Jaqie Fox]

I am not disagreeing with you at all, just trying to help you.

For the record, I totally agree with you - and posted a thread in suggestions about a few things I think would help.

This game is free and alpha, which is why I did not feel as compelled as you to say what you said.

[Bas Cost Budde]

But... 16 kHz? That is a model C64 unknown to me. Or you must be counting the interlace in.

IIRC the clock speed is 4.77 kHz. Now where is that bloody manual...

Found the manual but still unsure, too many clocks at this hour.

[Jaqie Fox]

IIRC it used a MOStech CPU that ran at 1Mhz.

checking...
Yep.
64KiB RAM, as well. (FYI: KiB is technically correct as is MiB GiB TiB etc when dealing with multiples of 1024. KB MB GB TB are multiples of 1000, which computers being Base-8 is not an 'even number' to the computer and thus is a little more kludgy to deal with to the computer)

[ March 31, 2007: Message edited by: Jaqie Fox ]

[Bas Cost Budde]

Confirmed now from the schematic in the back of the manual.

I knew it had to be somewhere   Now where I get this 4.77 from remains to be found.

Anyway.

A C64 version of DF then, anyone? Wow Veroule, you know the 6510 too? My bet is that the Motorola 68xxx and this one have too much in common for coincidence.

I doubt a full world would fit in its memory, though. 63K (screen memory must go somewhere)  is exhaustable.

[Jaqie Fox]

4.77Mhz is the original i8086 speed.  Both famous and infamous.

And for those that say an 8086/8088 can't do anything useful anymore...
Full screen full motion video with sound playing at 30FPS constant on the original IBM PC.

[ March 31, 2007: Message edited by: Jaqie Fox ]