2006 PGD Annual: Stage 5 feedback

[Huehnerschaender]

1. You have 256 MB memory, while the game practically requires 512 MB (currently loaded game takes up about 260 MB, summing it up with other system processes means that you definitely need > 256 MB). This can explain such ridiculous long loading times.

2. ATI Radeon-specific problems. More on this later.

I think point 2 is the case. I have 1 GigaByte Ram, not 256 MB (which is the Ram of my video card)

By default "Mouse horizontal sensitivity" and "Mouse vertical sensitivity" should be 0.09, and their allowed range is between 0.01 and 3.0. If you initially had something bigger (you can test it by deleting castle.conf file and starting the game again) then this explains why mouse control was too fast initially, and this means that I have some problem in loading values from config file.

I guess you have a problem converting, because the initial value is not set to 0.09, but 9.0! :shock:

Yes, blood is planned. I can only hope that I manage to implement it within the time.

Hope so, too ^^

It seems so... Traveler's screenshots comparing radeon and geforce confirm this. And since your laptop has 512 MB memory, the memory can't be the problem this time. That's alarming --- I will have to find somewhere some computer with ATI Radeon card and test my game there. Until now I tested it only on various nVidia cards --- that's what I have and all my friends have... But the game should be absolutely portable to every OpenGL implementation, it doesn't even use too many OpenGL extensions, and none of them are nVidia-specific.

What I'm doing while loading ? The most (time- and memory-) consuming process there is "Loading creatures" when creature's animations are prepared. This means loading VRML files, creating intermediate animation frames by interpolating between two models, and then creating a display list for each animation frame. The last part, "creating a display list for each animation frame", is the place where your graphic card comes to play, and I guess that there is some problem.

Maybe ATI Radeon is not able to create too many display list ? That's the only explanation that comes to my mind. I uploaded 0.5.6 version on http://www.camelot.homedns.org/~michalis/castle.php, it checks all glGenLists results (something that I often forgot to do) and if the OpenGL can't allocate more display lists, you should see error box like "Exception EOpenGLNoMoreDisplayLists : No more OpenGL display lists available ....". If I can ask you to spend more time testing my entry,
1. could you download and try this new version, 0.5.6 ?
2. The second thing: 0.5.6 allows you to change "Creature animation smoothness", this should reduce "Loading creatures" time and the amount of display lists needed. Can you check if reducing this to minimum helps ?

I hope I find the time to test it again... I will download it now and see if I find the time this evening to play around with the new setting.

You mean the "black fog" inside the gate ? Once you enter it, you should be transferred to the next level. The fact that game seemingly stopped there for 10 seconds could be caused by the same problems with Radeon.

No, I mean fog! Grey fog, as you can see on the first screenshot from Traveler. Thats the way it looks at my laptop, but I don't have transparency issues, so I thought thats the way it should look like. I didn't even see a gate!

You don't need them in the first 2 levels. But you can play with them and see how flying works, that's their sole purpose

Ah, ok

Hopefully I can upload a new beta version of my game today, too.

Greetings,
Dirk