Spring RTS Engine

SO....
In the old days, I used to play on this 1,4Ghz rig with integrated graphics and 512mb. This was in AA2.23 times. Was very playable except the fact that I had to use frozen fish and/or broccoli to cool it and avoid downthrottling CPU under heavy load. Damn smelly setup. Now I play on a 1,8Ghz laptop with 1gb mem and 256mb ATI and seldom have any load issues (except those damn new BA plasma shields).

SO.... they keep lowering the price on the netbooks with them 1,6Ghz atom cpus. Really need something lightweight to travel with, but as you know I'm addicted to Spring....SO....Can I expect playable 5v5 dsds on this if i set all gfx settings to ~minimum? (1gb ram, integrated gfx). Oh and BTW....Spring on this would be awesome http://www.openpandora.org yeah yeah I know its impossible...but DAMN!

Spring is barely playable solo on my 1.6 atom+intel 945, let alone in 5v5 dsd.

With the LosMipLevel patch BA should in theory be faster than in AA 2.23 days, as long as you disable LUPS and any other meddling widgets.

My HP 2133 netbook with 1.6ghz Via C7-m processor, 2 gigs of ram and full wxga resolution (1280x768) can run spring at full settings and get 60-80 FPS.

Just kidding, it's lowest settings and gets 1 FPS when the game is ten minutes in. I use it to spec small-medium sized games until it burns my lap and I have to shift-esc.

Total Annihilation would probably run really well on a netbook.


edit: just checked out that Pandora thing... talk about awesome.

Pandora is the next Indrema.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indrema

I used to play on a single core computer with a inbuilt graphics card chipset.

I moved up to a quad core with a nvidia 9800 x2 just before Christmas time.

I came a little built when i saw the difference.

No more pauses for me every 5 minutes, it meant i could stay within +20 min games and i'd always be one of the first to path so i'd always have the start position i want, rather than be on the front line with 1-2 mexes like i used to.

My advice would be not to buy the laptop if you want to play spring.

well unless you want to leave every game you play because it gets laggy after 3 windmills are made

you disable LUPS

how?

Limiting the unit draw distance has big impact if the gfx card is weak.

I use full draw distance so that units never draw as icons no matter how far I zoom out. When I moved up from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600 resolution the frame rate dropped quite a lot, so my 8800GTX is obviously too weak for this...

About the Pandora: I can't imagine playing Spring (nor any RTS for that matter) without a mouse.

Some previous topics concerning Spring performance on low-end computers:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=12703&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
viewtopic.php?p=238975#p238975
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15169
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=12888
viewtopic.php?p=262012#p262012
So it would seem there's some luck involved - sometimes you can run a 8vs8 DSD with no problems, sometimes even a 2vs2 can get unplayable. (A fresh windows installation might be the key)

For integrated graphics, you should worry about whether it has a correct OpenGL support, and the only real way to know is to test it - all information about my graphic card tells me I should be able to run Spring, but it crashes at startup:
viewtopic.php?p=330831#p330831

I too would really like to know how Spring runs on recent netbooks, I'm thinking about bying an eeePC this year, I'll tell you about it...

If you had read more than half a sec about pandora, you would know that pandora offers USB...

MOUSE!!!!!!!!!

Oops my bad. I was fooled by the fact that it looks so much like a typical handheld console.

Anyway, most Spring mods are too complex to be enjoyed on a 4.3" screen. Maybe Kernel Panic?

BlueTemplar wrote:Oops my bad. I was fooled by the fact that it looks so much like a typical handheld console.

Anyway, most Spring mods are too complex to be enjoyed on a 4.3" screen. Maybe Kernel Panic?

No good. KP still involves hordes of units that would be impossible to see what's going on, plus would be too much memory.

Think small unit counts. Argh's Merc Squad mod for example.

Thats true and its very unlikely that 128MB RAM will be enough to enjoy Spring...
The screen is another point as you mentioned.

BTW:
It is already sold out, so i dont think it will be a flop.

bobbelurman wrote:SO....
In the old days, I used to play on this 1,4Ghz rig with integrated graphics and 512mb. This was in AA2.23 times. Was very playable except the fact that I had to use frozen fish and/or broccoli to cool it and avoid downthrottling CPU under heavy load. Damn smelly setup. Now I play on a 1,8Ghz laptop with 1gb mem and 256mb ATI and seldom have any load issues (except those damn new BA plasma shields).

SO.... they keep lowering the price on the netbooks with them 1,6Ghz atom cpus. Really need something lightweight to travel with, but as you know I'm addicted to Spring....SO....Can I expect playable 5v5 dsds on this if i set all gfx settings to ~minimum? (1gb ram, integrated gfx). Oh and BTW....Spring on this would be awesome http://www.openpandora.org yeah yeah I know its impossible...but DAMN!

Ive been doing some research (i've also been looking at netbooks) in the reviews ive seen most netbooks suck for 3d games like they only get 4fps in hl2 on low graphics.

I been looking at an Asus n10j netbook with nvidia 9300 that is ok for games more then enough to run spring, however the slow atom processor is the week point of the system. considering spring is such a cpu heavy game (expecialy in big dsd games) i wouldnt know how great it would work.

People have been able to overclock the processor to 2.1ghz easly without problems. http://www.n10user.com/topic22-how-to-o ... tures.html. I wonder if that would be anygood with spring.

some screens on ra3 and comments on ra3 on n10j http://www.n10user.com/topic25-red-alert-3.html

The Asus n10j isnt cheap its about $1000aud where models like the msi wind are closer to $600aud

Im trying to save the money for one now (if you do buy one please say how it runs spring :))

I believe you can handle small games at low settings, but the CPU will be your bottleneck.

Q: would a linux build of spring running on linux on an atom processor or the windows version running on xp on same atom processor have better performance (eee 901 btw) ? Does this question even make sense?

Here´s a tip: netbooks are NETBOOKS. They are designed for surfing the internet, and thats pretty much it. A GAMINGLAPTOPBOOK would be more suitable for spring.

One thing that can be tested is to limit the number of units in the game. I'm seriously considering this myself to make Spring44 and an intel 965 GPU get along nicely.

Might change the nature of the game (maybe ruin it, maybe turn it into something surprisingly intresting), especially if an AI is the opponent (who might have a suboptimal production strategy given that he only may have X number of units before production temporarily halts..).

Worth a try though, IMO.

I repeat, my netbook gets 10 FPS when starting the game (that's just 2 units) on a small map. Then it's all downhill from there. Don't bother. My netbook is excellent for all sorts of things like browsing the net, running small apps, RDPing to my desktop. Not Spring.