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Author Topic: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm)  (Read 4595 times)
player1
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v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm)
« on: September 08, 2003, 07:05:26 am »

Well, maybe I was a little bit harsh while naming this thread, but v0.3 has some serious preformance issues.

I have 333Hmz Celeron, 64MB RAM, Intel 740 graphics.

With 0.24 version (which, in my opinion, is more polished then some gold versions of new commercial games), I had no performance problems at full-screen 320x240. Just never (with high quality sound included).
If using 640x480 then only small slowdown in case of visiting planets with ruins (never in melee).

Now, with v0.3 even in melee there are severe slowdowns. Especialy with trilinear melee scaling (default setting).
When I change it to "nearest" is becomes a little bit more bareable, but still choppy.

Of course this doesn't help at all when visiting plantes, when slowdowns are now siginificant too.


Anyway I don't know what you did guys, but you made this game pretty unplayable at my comp.

Now, I just need to wait for some v0.31 patch or maybe link to old 0.2/0.24 version.   Sad



P.S.
All other settings were deafault.
« Last Edit: September 08, 2003, 08:00:24 am by player1 » Logged
player1
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke?
« Reply #1 on: September 08, 2003, 07:07:20 am »

Of course, maybe there is some hidden setting I need to find in oreder to make it work just before.
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke?
« Reply #2 on: September 08, 2003, 07:19:01 am »

Note: I tired both with zipped and unzipped versions of content dir (I first assumed that unzipping causes slowdowns).

No notable difference in both cases.
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Michael Martin
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke?
« Reply #3 on: September 08, 2003, 07:35:19 am »

I'm impressed you got it to work originally; my 500MHz Celeron couldn't handle 640x480 mode at any time without massive slowdowns.

I'm not sure what would cause that, however, unless you're running stuff in background, because the changes between 0.24 and 0.3 are mostly bugfixes, IIRC.  No part of the core engine got overhauled in between the two, except for IO (which only would delay transitions; everything stays in memory in between).
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke?
« Reply #4 on: September 08, 2003, 07:51:21 am »

UPDATE:
I've installed 3do music files (ogg) and now most of performance probelms are gone (with trilinear melee scaling included).

Same for planet exploration too.  Smiley Smiley Smiley


P.S.
Now only there is slowdown during playing victory music in melee.

Now, I suspect that slowdown comes from not-so-good optimisation of "MOD-player".


P.P.S.
The only real question is it new slow-down or part of 0.2 too.
I can't say since I always played with 3d0 ogg music.
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player1
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke?
« Reply #5 on: September 08, 2003, 07:57:41 am »

Quote
I'm impressed you got it to work originally; my 500MHz Celeron couldn't handle 640x480 mode at any time without massive slowdowns.


The key is using full-screen mode which in my experience is faster.

Later I switched to 320x240 since without scaling filters there is really no difference between two of them.


Of course, I suspect then my game would be faster if I could use OpenGL option which is doesn't work for now (from 0.1-0.3).

Although there are many OpenGL games which work well with my card (Quake 2 engine, etc...)
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Michael Martin
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #6 on: September 08, 2003, 09:19:59 am »

There's a frightening amount of pixel-level operations in UQM.  As a result, OpenGL (which is designed around vertices) is being abused pretty heavily - the rendering on the screen is just one giant quad, and the screen itself is a texture.  Cards that are optimized for rapid texture upload (GeForce cards seem to handle this well) react the best to OpenGL mode.

It never worked at all on my old Voodoo 3.  (It couldn't handle textures of the dimensions required.)
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke?
« Reply #7 on: September 08, 2003, 02:32:27 pm »

Quote
I've installed 3do music files (ogg) and now most of performance probelms are gone (with trilinear melee scaling included).
Now only there is slowdown during playing victory music in melee.

Now, I suspect that slowdown comes from not-so-good optimisation of "MOD-player".

If the game slows down horribly when playing MODs but not otherwise, the MOD player (or its sound output) is definitely at fault. Try decreasing sound quality. As far as I can tell, though, a 333 MHz Celeron should be able to play 4 channel MODs at 44 kHz with linear interpolation without using more than about 10 % CPU. If the MOD player is doing some really heavy filtering you could get a noticeably slowdown, but I don't think UQM's MOD playing routines even support anything that CPU intensive.
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #8 on: September 08, 2003, 03:16:52 pm »

Quote
If the game slows down horribly when playing MODs but not otherwise, the MOD player (or its sound output) is definitely at fault. Try decreasing sound quality. As far as I can tell, though, a 333 MHz Celeron should be able to play 4 channel MODs at 44 kHz with linear interpolation without using more than about 10 % CPU. If the MOD player is doing some really heavy filtering you could get a noticeably slowdown, but I don't think UQM's MOD playing routines even support anything that CPU intensive.


The really strange thing is that mp3/ogg should be more CPU intensive then 10year old MOD standard.

Luckly, with 3do music used it's not much probelm for me anymore (dialog screens are not much CPU intensive and victory music is played after the battle is won).
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #9 on: September 08, 2003, 03:46:19 pm »

UPDATE:

When I changed sound quality back to medium, all slowdowns disappeared.
It looks that MOD resampling is more CPU intensive then I thought.
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #10 on: September 08, 2003, 05:57:46 pm »

OpenAL seems to be a lot more complex than MixSDL, so it may use a lot more CPU power. MixSDL uses very little CPU power in my experience.
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #11 on: September 08, 2003, 11:38:01 pm »

Quote
When I changed sound quality back to medium, all slowdowns disappeared.
It looks that MOD resampling is more CPU intensive then I thought.


Your computer is way too slow for using high quality sound settings, and that's why UQM defaults to medium which should be enough for most ppl anyway. High quality mode changes resampling to be cubic instead of linear, and enables hqmixer in MikMod which gives somewhat better quality for mod music but requires fast cpu.
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #12 on: September 09, 2003, 02:16:21 am »

Well, thanks for help everybody.
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Novus
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #13 on: September 09, 2003, 12:54:03 pm »

Quote

High quality mode changes resampling to be cubic instead of linear, and enables hqmixer in MikMod which gives somewhat better quality for mod music but requires fast cpu.

As far as I can tell from the source code:

  • High quality is 44 kHz, cubic interpolation, high quality mixer.
  • Medium quality is 44 kHz, linear interpolation, normal mixer.
  • Low quality is 22 kHz, no interpolation, normal mixer.

In other words:

  • Low quality should be OK on a 486.
  • Medium quality should be OK on any Pentium.
  • High quality apparently takes a noticeable chunk of power out of a 300 MHz Celeron.
For the sake of comparison, PC SC2 seems to play at approximately 8 kHz with no interpolation, which can only be described as "horrendous quality". Funny, it sounded much better at the time. Smiley
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Re: v0.3: Is this a joke? (EDIT: maybe false alarm
« Reply #14 on: September 09, 2003, 01:03:58 pm »

If you already mentioned it novus, what my computer has to have to run the game with the highest setting? (not including the 1024x768 resolution)
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