[General Battuta]

I'm not sure. It may be the more detailed models patched in, but they should be better-optimized in general. War in Heaven as a whole is a lot more demanding on your CPU due to the increased complexity of the mission space.

[_nanox-i7_]

@General Battuta

You think war in heaven is gonna eat up my CPU?

Ok lets see... Freespace 2 with war in heaven mod againts a pc with a Intel i7 2600K Unlocked processor overcloacked on 4.5GHz, 8Gb Ram and Asus (Nvidia) Geforce 560Ti with 1024Mb Ram

What are the odes at that?

[General Battuta]

@General Battuta

You think war in heaven is gonna eat up my CPU?

Ok lets see... Freespace 2 with warr in heaven mod againts pc with a Intel i7 2600K Unlocked processor overcloacked on 4.5GHz and 8Gb Ram plus Asus (Nvidia) Geforce 560Ti with 1024Mb Ram

What are the odes at that?

I have pretty much the same setup, and I can run WiH pretty smoothly, but the problem is not that your CPU is underpowered, it's that the FreeSpace engine can create situations with large numbers of collision pairs that would challenge any gaming computer, no matter how powerful.

Diaspora is an example of another mod with the same problem. It's not a matter of having insane graphics - it's just that there are so many physics objects on the scene and the engine just isn't very good at handling these in a smart fashion, so it devours your entire CPU.

Also, uh, FSO is not multithreaded and only ever uses one core, so having a quad core doesn't help. Sorry.

e: Genuinely curious, I haven't tried - what kind of FPS do you get on the bp massive battle mission in the techroom?

[Black_Yoshi1230]

Got some new data from the debug...

... after crashing at least six times in "Darkest Hour" I pretty much resorted to using 800x600 resolution in the debugger of all things (yeah, 1024x768 and the 16:9 resolutions lagged like hell in the debugger). Frequent crashes were on dialogue (strangely enough, the more bombers my team destroyed, the more prone the game was to crash early, so I would have attributed to all the scraps of rubble all over the place).

Now, I could play at 1024x768... so much for the cinematic widescreen experience.

With the new interceptor (yay, it's a sweet ride), I'm getting some common complaints (now at the mission where I have to capture the GTVA repair frigate). The other attached file says it.

I can run WiH pretty smoothly, but the problem is not that your CPU is underpowered, it's that the FreeSpace engine can create situations with large numbers of collision pairs that would challenge any gaming computer, no matter how powerful.

Diaspora is an example of another mod with the same problem. It's not a matter of having insane graphics - it's just that there are so many physics objects on the scene and the engine just isn't very good at handling these in a smart fashion, so it devours your entire CPU.

Also, uh, FSO is not multithreaded and only ever uses one core, so having a quad core doesn't help. Sorry.

No multicore processing? I'm kinda sad of *insert irrelevant ramblings in favor of the Source Engine here*



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[General Battuta]

You aren't trying to play the campaign with a debug build, are you? You need to be playing with a release build to actually run the game with smooth framerates, and most of these errors seem like the type that wouldn't occur in a release build.

Did you know that the Source Engine is developed by a large corporation of professionally paid developers, whereas the FS2Open engine is developed by a tiny group of unpaid volunteers working desperately in their spare time? I don't mean to be sarcastic - really, we'd all love to have multithreading - but it's hard.

e: Delete the Blue Planet 2 advanced graphics VP, you shouldn't be using it with Intel integrated graphics. If you want to play this campaign in full resolution with a smooth framerate I'm afraid you'll need a dedicated graphics card.

[Black_Yoshi1230]

You aren't trying to play the campaign with a debug build, are you? You need to be playing with a release build to actually run the game with smooth framerates, and most of these errors seem like the type that wouldn't occur in a release build.

Did you know that the Source Engine is developed by a large corporation of professionally paid developers, whereas the FS2Open engine is developed by a tiny group of unpaid volunteers working desperately in their spare time? I don't mean to be sarcastic - really, we'd all love to have multithreading - but it's hard.

e: Delete the Blue Planet 2 advanced graphics VP, you shouldn't be using it with Intel integrated graphics. If you want to play this campaign in full resolution with a smooth framerate I'm afraid you'll need a dedicated graphics card.

1: Even with the release build, I still had crashiness. I'll try it for the last time.

Edit: See point 3... now I feel like swallowing a bullet. However, landing in the Indus fighterbay results in a crash.

2: Yeah, like a team of 200 guys are at Valve (and according to their leaked handbook, Gabe > every other employee in the company).

3: I mistook that advice as take out the advanced GFX VP from the original Blue Planet folder (if you meant take out ALL Advanced GFX VPs in my FS2Open directory, then I wouldn't be here being an itchy bastard). I mainly play on 16:9, in 1280x600 (black bar effects, cinematic-ish, not having the screen stretch out and eating my processor power). Now I need to find another twelve hundred bucks for a dedicated tower short of begging the mob.

There was one small point I'd like to present: When I scratched out the Advanced GFX MediaVP from my FS2 MediaVP folder, I was playing the mission "Ken," and a big fraction of the Earth background was missing (mainly, the dark, lighted background), along with the scary special effects. It only happened for that mission.

Cripes, I'm asking for an ejection notice.  In space, no one can hear me rant.

[Kolgena]

Definitely kill that, as well as the advanced VP in your MediaVPs folder.

Well, having a few less problems now (thankfully it's not as prone to crashes)... but I kinda have to wonder...

... I was able to run Aquarius and stock FS2 just fine with the advanced VPs (well, with Open 3.6.12), I mean, what changed during the creation of Heaven? Was there an even higher system requirement put in place, or have there been a number of factors I missed?

I think your original install with AoA was old enough that the mediavps were still using per-vertex lighting. That means lighting is calculated once per corner on the model, and by most means, should be playable on even an intel card. Newer mediavps installations/executables (and definitely the WiH package) use per-pixel shading, which calculates lighting once per visible pixel of a model. This will invariably tank/rape intel processors, except maybe the HD3000. (Edit: I realize that you have an HD3000. I guess that it's not good enough. Probably anything under a ATI 4650M will not be good enough to play at high resolutions)

Anyways, slowdowns with capships in view are most likely due to the GPU choking on the high demands of the per-pixel shaders if there are a lot of ship pixels in view. Getting a better CPU will do nothing for you.

[Black_Yoshi1230]

I guess the best option would be to find all of my shader files and kill them? Or disable them at least? Or play in 4:3?

Yeah, I kinda realized that my laptop pretty much does almost everything entertainment-wise on medium or high sans post-2011 FS2. Every other mod hasn't given me the amount of grief that Heaven has (ironically enough, I'm in system-wise hell).

I felt sad enough that I had to go to my power options and set the graphics power plan to "maximum performance" with my charger plugged in. On average, I bought myself another minute and a half against crashes.

Final Edit:

I had to kill a lot of the custom FS2 graphics settings... it works like a charm in 16:9 resolutions. Rarely any crashing. One question, though: What the heck is with the massive star density out in deep space? I mean, I get it if it's astronomically correct or not, but still...

[General Battuta]

[quote author=Black_Yoshi1230 link=topic=80771.msg1607989#msg1607989 date=1336891190
Final Edit:

I had to kill a lot of the custom FS2 graphics settings... it works like a charm in 16:9 resolutions. Rarely any crashing. One question, though: What the heck is with the massive star density out in deep space? I mean, I get it if it's astronomically correct or not, but still...
[/quote]

The Sol skyboxes were done up by local astronomy nut Herra to more accurately represent what you'd actually see in space.