Spring RTS Engine

Hi,
I used to play total annihilation on old computers, like a PII at 400Mhz with 128ram and an old graphic card as well. Playing against a bot with a reasonable number of units will never result in a slow down of the computer.

I got spring installed on my linux Debian/Sid P4 2,8Ghz, 512ram, 64gram (ati 9000) and I was surprised to realize that spring was rather slow, espcially moving the pointer in one direction or another (compare to ta on the old computer). I was wondering if this had anything to do with the linux version compare to the windows version (note DRI is enabled on my linux)
or with an enhancement of the capabilities of spring compare to the original ta, or if this was due to something else...

Sure my computer is old compare to today's new machines but yet, I thought it was reasonably powerfull to get spring to work out of the box.

Thanks.

argt wrote:Hi,
I used to play total annihilation on old computers, like a PII at 400Mhz with 128ram and an old graphic card as well. Playing against a bot with a reasonable number of units will never result in a slow down of the computer.

I got spring installed on my linux Debian/Sid P4 2,8Ghz, 512ram, 64gram (ati 9000) and I was surprised to realize that spring was rather slow, espcially moving the pointer in one direction or another (compare to ta on the old computer). I was wondering if this had anything to do with the linux version compare to the windows version (note DRI is enabled on my linux)
or with an enhancement of the capabilities of spring compare to the original ta, or if this was due to something else...

Sure my computer is old compare to today's new machines but yet, I thought it was reasonably powerfull to get spring to work out of the box.

Thanks.

Spring is rather heavy on the GFX card, so that's probably the reason it's running a bit slow. In my experience, spring will run somewhat better under linux than windows.

Comparatively, spring is pretty scalable, most games with similair features have higher system requirements.

However Spring is full 3D, OTA is not. Spring has 3D terrain and greater featuresets, and as such requires more cpu and gpu power.

for the answers.
Do you know if there are any option I could change (and how) to help the game consume less cpu and gpu ? I imagine changing the resolution should have some effects, but likely, there should be other things possible.

argt wrote:for the answers.
Do you know if there are any option I could change (and how) to help the game consume less cpu and gpu ? I imagine changing the resolution should have some effects, but likely, there should be other things possible.

Nope, most CPU time is eaten by the tphysics and pathfinding. Can't simplify those since they're critical for keeping the game in sync.

actually, OTA WAS true 3d. It did not, however, support 3dcards, and did all of the rendering on the CPU, from a fixed angle. Which makes how well it ran even MORE impressive.

There is a lot of room for optimization in spring. For example, the collision detection algorithm is horrible, near as I can tell. Collision detection is a very hard problem to program, and using the best algorithms makes a WORLD of difference, although it is incredibly hard to do. Spring is especially vulnerable to this problem when aircraft (particularly construction aircraft) are swarming. OTA skipped this issue by allowing aircraft to fly through each other. Spring is also very strict about friendly fire, while many units in OTA could fire through each other, easing the burden on the CPU.

Some intelligent reworking of the aircraft pathfinding algorithm could probably yield a 2x improvement in the speed of large games alone. Sadly, although I have the theoretical background in algorithms and information theory to figure out by watching and playing what the spring developers must be doing, I don;t have the practical experience to make it easy enough for me to fix it. If someone else wants to step up and make the game better for all of us, that would be wonderful. Or we could just start making the game very multithreaded and wait for 100 core chips.

OTA featured lots of kludges to make it easier.

And I know they did some gfx card based work if not all.

For example OTA pathfinding is terrible, and the AI is very simple. Their rendering system itself is orthoganal too, not perspective based.

OTA also had an army of paid developers.