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[Toady One]

I put something up.  It'll probably be very slow on most computers, but I need more feedback on that.  It shouldn't be that hard to fix, given that the graphics aren't all that complicated.
www.bay12games.com/download.htm

[Demon]

YAY!!  The speed dosent work on my 550 MHz athlon, but I'm sure that you'll get it optimized soon!  Thanks for doing so much hard work to entertain us!

[Toady One]

All right.  So what just how slow was it?  Completely unusable, or could you hold down the left arrow and rotate the screen for instance?  If you press T and walk around the travel map, does the map move slowly or quickly -- since the travel map doesn't draw large polygonal meshes, that would give me an idea of what kind of optimizations I need to focus on.

So far I think I've found a way to get about 4x as much out of the meshes, and there's another way to shoot that up by another 20 times actually.  I'll probably do both this weekend.

[DireWolf]

No speed problems in the open, and only a tad slow near buildings.  300MHz Pentium II, 192MB RAM, 64MB TNT2 card.  Crashes every now and then when I'm hacking bits of stuff off creatures.  

[Toady One]

300, and only minor speed problems?  That's impressive.  Maybe the video card is the limiting factor on the other computers that have had difficulties?  In any case, I doubled the frame rate tonight, and might manage to double it again tonight if the next thing I try works.  The one other thing I had on my mind would (possibly) lead to even more dramatic improvements, but I'd have to implement it just right.  I should be putting out an updated version of the game with the speed optimizations within the next few days, unless some real life incident comes up.

Crashes during fights?  Alanor and I have sat in the midst of 80 rats hacking them into pieces until the screen is a sea of yellow diamonds, but it hasn't crashed on me yet, so this might be hard to reproduce here.  Any particular circumstances when it occurs?  Are you running anything else (music, etc.)?  There are quite possibly some bugs with severs, etc., that manifest themselves differently from computer to computer.

[Demon]

I just got the version with a bit of speed fixes, but it still runs pretty poorly...  My video card isnt impressive though...  Its only bad on the main view, not the tavelling map...  Everything else seems to be fine.  I think you should add a confirmation to the escape key though, I tend to hit it to get out of menus without thinking.  Keep up the good work!

[Toady One]

Those speed fixes should mainly affect the top down view (when you pull back the camera as far as possible).

If the travel map works, then because of info reported here (and on Tom Proudfoot's message board), and some internal tests, I think the speed is mainly a function of the number of triangles printed (rather than poorly written code, although that might contribute in places  .  Right now, the game is printing about 3-5000 triangles out in the wilderness, and as many as 17000 when you are just outside the palace.

This is because the game is building meshes that are meant to account for the fact the walls, hills, etc. will be able to be removed and have tunnels carved in them.  However, that doesn't mean that the palace needs to be made out of roughly 10000 triangles (unless the player digs millions of little holes in it, in which case we'll need a work-around).  Actually, the current palace could be made from... lessee...  24 triangles I think.  The ground itself also contributes to the problem, and I'll need to work on that as well.

[ October 14, 2001: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[DireWolf]

The crashes seem to occur whenever I'm switching back to the main view from another screen (eg, from combat options, or from the travel screen).  It's also kind of weird, because it seems to happen with increasing frequency until I reboot the computer (this is with the new version).

Otherwise, I'm running Win95b with just the minimal stuff (ie, no virus scanner, etc).

Heh, this is starting to sound like the massive slowdown problems that the 1.2 GHz people reported in Arcanum.  

[Toady One]

All right, that should be annoying to fix, although I usually only use the travel interface, so it might be lurking around the other interfaces.  Some memory leaks might also accrue in between games if the cleanup isn't done properly (I think it is, but who knows).  I'll try to get it to happen here tonight.  I've had no luck reproducing the error so far.  Any specific interface menus you quit that crash it?  Or does it happen in all of them at random?

I'm down to roughly 2000 triangles in all views (sometimes less).  This doesn't count the buildings (which have been temporarily removed except for their floors), but as I mentioned above, they can be made negligible.  I'm running out of ideas, since I need 2000 triangles to cover the ground in the view accurately (especially in hilly areas) -- I've already reduced the number of triangles used to cover far away terrain, and you can watch it refine the mesh as you get closer.  I'm going to look at some online samples to see if there are some more GL-specific optimization tricks (other than the ones I'm using now).

[DireWolf]

So far it seems to be only the combat interface.  The more frequent crashes occur when switching from area view to the main view.

[Toady One]

I think the only other thing I need to know to narrow it down is (especially when it crashes switching from area to main), is it after you've killed a lot of things/played some characters, or can it happen when the world is fresh?

[Toady One]

Okay, Direwolf, I was finally able to reproduce the combat interface bug, so it will be gone when I get around to updating that interface.  I haven't been able to recreate any problems with the travel interface, although the two could be linked in some way.

[Zonk]

im using my portable computer,but the demo does not seem to work...i need OPENGL,right?...well i have a file called OPENGL in a system directory...slaves of armok doesnt work in the sense that when i click on it i get a black window with no grapich

[Toady One]

Yeah, you'll need opengl32.dll and glu32.dll I think.  What operating system are you running?  What type of video chip/card?  Is that portable computer your only computer, or did you also try it on another one?

[Alanor]

one thing you can try to do if opengl doesnt seem to be working right is go to
http://www.opengl.org/users/downloads/index.html

You can download the opengl drivers... just in case you dont have them..
and you can also download GLSetup..
which will set up your GL drivers.. this helps if they are messed up somehow..

Anyone with speed problems should probibly try that and see if you get any performance increase and or working system!