Hard Light Productions Forums

General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: High Max on February 24, 2005, 07:20:26 pm

Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: High Max on February 24, 2005, 07:20:26 pm: I have a good system: 512MB, Athlon 2600+ processor that runs at 1.916GB, Win 98, and a Radeon 9800 128MB video card. I use FSO 3.6.5 and I have all the extra stuff that goes with it (modles, glowmaps, effects, etc.) except for the new music. However, for some reason, I experience a lot of hanging when I start a mission. I notice when it hangs, my hard drive's light is flashing real fast like it is very busy and you can hear it working. My hard drive only has a capacity of around 14.3GB and 5.76GB
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: StratComm on February 24, 2005, 08:46:19 pm: That's why the animated glowmaps are optional, the things are dog slow on everything but the best rigs. The current shockwave ani seems pretty bad too. If you won't ditch the animated glowmaps then there isn't much I can suggest to help.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: Mongoose on February 25, 2005, 01:40:25 am: Quote
Originally posted by StratComm
That's why the animated glowmaps are optional, the things are dog slow on everything but the best rigs. The current shockwave ani seems pretty bad too. If you won't ditch the animated glowmaps then there isn't much I can suggest to help.

Really? My vid card is anything but the best (64 meg Radeon X300), yet I don't experience any major slowdowns with the glowmaps/shockwaves. It stutters a little at the start of the mission, but after that there's no problem.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: StratComm on February 25, 2005, 01:39:54 am: You're still using an X-series Radeon though. And the two of you are describing the exact same problem, only you accept it and he's complaining. The animated glowmaps WILL CAUSE SLOWDOWNS the first time they are loaded into memory; i.e. the first time a ship of a new class comes on screen. There's just nothing we can do about it.

Timewarp! This goes below Mongoose's post.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: TrashMan on February 25, 2005, 06:31:32 pm: Turn off tga/jpg.. It KILLED my PC. As soon as I turned it off the game run smoothly...and I didn't even notice no visual difference.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: Fractux on February 25, 2005, 06:52:06 pm: What you should probably do is try FSO without any options on and see how it reacts.

Then start turning on options and see what happens. Also try swapping out some media vp's (like mv_adveffects) and see what happens.

Cheers!
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: WMCoolmon on February 25, 2005, 07:33:57 pm: The big performance killers are mv_hieffects.vp (Big memory/processor usage), -pcx32 (Big memory usage), and antialiasing (Big processor usage).

In your situation it sounds like either you didn't enable the 'preload mission sounds' option, or you did, but enough memory is getting taken up that they're being stored in virtual rather than real memory.

Another thing you can try besides disabling the stuff in the first paragraph is to enable -pcx2dds, which will compress all textures to DDS format. There's virtually no slowdown in decompressing them on the fly (X-series definitely have hardware support for it). They also take up dramatically less memory than the usual textures.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: karajorma on February 26, 2005, 05:20:35 am: I found enabling mipmaps caused me a big slowdown so it might be worth avoiding them.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: Triple Ace on February 26, 2005, 03:52:35 pm: I have the same problem. But when I turn off the glowmaps, all of the shivan ships turn dark grey.
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: WMCoolmon on February 26, 2005, 08:37:55 pm: It's under "Game speed", select "Compress PCX". :)
Title: Freespace open and slowdowns
Post by: StratComm on March 01, 2005, 03:17:24 pm: It's a known error, LoadGun07 doesn't actually exist. Copy one of the gun interfaces, like the Subach's, and call it LoadGun07 to make that work.