[horridfred]

i've been tryin out some of the new builds and the effects packs and stuff recently and was gettin quite worried when i had some serious slowdown almost constantly during any mission i tried
(athlon 2200xp, 512ram, radeon9000)

is this somethin thats goin to get better with each of the newer builds or worse as the effects get piled on?

dont get me wrong, the effects look gr8! but im fraid prefer smooth runnin to em!

help, comments, suggestions, replies much appreciated!

[Flipside]

The latest effects are probably a little bit beyond all but the highest level processors, Radeon 9800 etc, even a 9000 might balk a bit at the sheer number of pixels being thrown at it To be honest, I think this is the best way to go anyway, it is forward development

The whole texture system is being looked at to see if it can be run a bit faster, but don't worry, you are far from alone

[ShadowDrakken]

Yes, Flipside, it's always a good idea to leave behind those of us who can't afford unecessary hardware updates, thus making sure you have no users left to annoy you with bug reports and feature requests, and exceptional content.

[Lightspeed]

blech - its not like you have to USE everything SCP *OFFERS* to you.

[ShadowDrakken]

LS: you're right, but explain to me why FSO runs worse than games with twice the content? I think FSO has a lot of code problems, not content problems, and throwing more content at a broken engine isn't exactly a good route to take.

[karajorma]

The problem comes when you use Hi-res special effects with a low end card. Dump the hi-res TGA planets for the low res DDS ones for a start.

[jdjtcagle]

Originally posted by horridfred
i've been tryin out some of the new builds and the effects packs and stuff recently and was gettin quite worried when i had some serious slowdown almost constantly during any mission i tried
(athlon 2200xp, 512ram, radeon9000)

is this somethin thats goin to get better with each of the newer builds or worse as the effects get piled on?

dont get me wrong, the effects look gr8! but im fraid prefer smooth runnin to em!

help, comments, suggestions, replies much appreciated!

Tell me something, is it something you read taht makes you somewhat itimidated??

(dont hurt me!)

[SadisticSid]

Originally posted by ShadowDrakken
LS: you're right, but explain to me why FSO runs worse than games with twice the content? I think FSO has a lot of code problems, not content problems, and throwing more content at a broken engine isn't exactly a good route to take.

Uhhh, let's clarify something here. FS2 ran like **** before HTL boosted frame rates through the roof across the board. I imagine the code problems aren't nearly to blame on the SCP team... IIRC the code was already at the spaghetti junction stage when they started work on it. They've fixed so much and made hundreds of improvements to both the engine and its featureset, and I'm sure some or most of the guys have never worked on such a large and complex project before. So yeah, of course it's never going to be as good as a financed software house whose products are backed with millions of dollars.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by ShadowDrakken
LS: you're right, but explain to me why FSO runs worse than games with twice the content? I think FSO has a lot of code problems, not content problems, and throwing more content at a broken engine isn't exactly a good route to take.

Then don't use more content with it. It is the player's choice what content he wants to use with fs2_open, not the developer's, not the guys' who made the stuff.

These things are being worked on, but bugfxes and feature requests are also on the to-do lists.

Everyone wants FS2 to be faster and better-looking, but those other games you're mentioning were built from the ground up to take advantage of the newest hardware acceleraleration features. There are sections of the FS2 code that still deal with software rendering, because replacing them would cause bugs or many headaches tracing rogue branches of code. See the FRED HT&L build.

[Flipside]

ShadowDrakken, that's what forward development means. In two years time, when Freelancer and the like are looking even more dated, Freespace 2 will just be capable of running at full capacity on 'Normal' video cards around at the time. If you don't intend to upgrade your video card in the next 2-3 years then don't expect to be able to play the most up to date stuff at it's full capability, as lightspeed says, you don't have to install it, and it's not as if the older maps make the game look unplayable.

And let's face it, the SCP doesn't look like it's close to finished yet, there are big plans afoot, so it's not exactly as if the community can just sit around twiddling it's thumbs waiting for it, there'd be no community left in a very short space of time. So developing improved content sounds like the best way to support the SCP, and if we hadn't done it, we wouldn't know half the problems were there in the first place

[ShadowDrakken]

all I'm meaning is that it needs a serious engine overhaul more than it needs the super high res stuff that so far isn't even noticable in-game

FS2 runs great on my old Stealth 3 and my Athlon 700, FSO runs like **** on my GF4 with Athlon 1800... something just ain't right there

Oh, and it's exceptionally annoying not having ANY organization in the builds... there's half a dozen people that make their own builds and no order to it... it makes it tough to know which one I've got and which features are enabled, disabled, or just plain broken

[WMCoolmon]

Most of the high-res effect makers aren't coders, so it really isn't impeding progress...


What I want to know is if you're running FSO with any graphical improvements - if you are, it's not indicative of anything except your computer can't handle the installed media.

If FSO is running slower with retail data only and the same everything as the vanilla EXE, then something is wrong.

I don't think anything is required to run FS2_open besides the retail data, except for maybe mv_core.

[Flipside]

If you mean the builds in the Latest SCP Builds thread, those are really feature test builds, decals, environment mapping, mod stacking etc etc, usually the first post in the thread will tell you what new features are added. I think they are meant mainly for the testers to help the coders with their post 3.6 work

I think as far as an engine overhaul is concerned, theres actually been quite a lot of streamlining done already, and there is more on the way, FSOpen runs far faster with everything turned off than Vanilla FS2 ever did

I'm actually glad there are people out there who ARE playing FSOpen with just the original content except the .exe. The reason is because it is these people who detect the more 'subtle' problems, that sometimes get overlooked, or even never reached, in the flurry of graphics testing

[horridfred]

cheers for the replies
i'll wait and see how it runs with the next official release before i start slashing effects out of it myself though!

[SadisticSid]

Originally posted by Flipside
I'm actually glad there are people out there who ARE playing FSOpen with just the original content except the .exe. The reason is because it is these people who detect the more 'subtle' problems, that sometimes get overlooked, or even never reached, in the flurry of graphics testing

Such as? If something doesn't work the way it's supposed to it's just as noticeable regardless of whether I have classy nebulae installed or shinemaps enabled, etc etc.

[Flipside]

Quite simple really, you won't notice if the wrong ANI is playing for one of your wingmates, or you are likely to ignore it for now if you are having problems with frame rates etc, it's the least of your concerns, whereas for people who are running on the standard graphics options, it's easier to spot, because they are not looking out for hi-spec graphical errors.

[Nix]

I can see the slowdowns too and honestly can say that installing the latest Media_VP caused a lot of the FPS hits.  I really got worried when I played HomeSick for the first time, facing the huge convoy and getting maybe... 20-25 FPS.  I'm running basically the same setup as ShadowDrakken is, my card is a GF4 4400, 1 GB RAM, Athlon 1700+ 266MHZ FSB.
I bet upgrading my card to a Radeon 9800 would probably help things out a lot in the GPU department, but a total architecture update would be the best thing.

[Bobboau]

yeah, I'd recomend a card upgrade, but you should be able to run things with good framerates, I just made an improvement to the rendering system, same build as in your other post.
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,23779.0.html

[ryuune75]

Originally posted by Nix
I can see the slowdowns too and honestly can say that installing the latest Media_VP caused a lot of the FPS hits.  I really got worried when I played HomeSick for the first time, facing the huge convoy and getting maybe... 20-25 FPS.  I'm running basically the same setup as ShadowDrakken is, my card is a GF4 4400, 1 GB RAM, Athlon 1700+ 266MHZ FSB.
I bet upgrading my card to a Radeon 9800 would probably help things out a lot in the GPU department, but a total architecture update would be the best thing.

I know it's sad, but your card is not adeguate for ANY modern game you will find in stores, the SCP guys can't develop things worrying about old cards, no developers do that, not even paid one.

If you can't play with super high-res textures, switch back to old ones, that's the only way, but you can't ask to keep things like before, the SCP project exist for the sole purpose of upgrading things.

[KARMA]

well but we are not talking about doom3 or hl2 or u3 or whatever with hundred thousands  polygons on screen and lots of fancy graphic effects...yeah, ok, scp guys made many wonderful effects and will continue to, new high poly models and new high res stuff will be slowly developed, and he'll surely have to update his sytem to play fso one day or the other, but it sound strange to me if a system like that get killed now.