Spring RTS Engine

Hi. I've been away for many years (5+?).

When I left, I was happilly playing Spring with a much lower spec computer. Now I have a better computer (although not by much - it was a mid~low spec laptop 5 years ago) but Spring runs much slower... I'm trying 1024x768, settings set to Very Low / Low, and in Windows and in Ubuntu (think it actually runs faster in Ubuntu, fortunately).

I notice that even though I've set the settings to the lowest possible settings, I see some extremely(!!!) expensive graphical goodnesses going on - the distortion effect of the exhaust's pipe of a plane passing by. In other games (ex: Starcrap 2), when that effect comes up, performance goes down the drain. Also, I see shadows and the planes' flaming trails (all quite unneeded).

Though, it might be unrelated to GFX performance... The game always starts very fine and it slows to a crawl when lots of units start to exist, even if they are not on screen (ex: if I zoom in the camera into an empty place) (could the rendering be rendering units outside of field of view?). Also, my CPU usage soon gets reported to be at very high levels.

I'm planning on buying a new computer (actually did so some months ago but that Optimus crap doesn't work in Linux so I returned it). Still, I ask:
Is this supposed to have happened to Spring from a few years ago to now? Have features been added that are supposed to slow the engine down, maybe to accompany computers' evolution?

post your current specs

My current craptop:
AMD Turion X2 Mobile RM-74 (2.2 GHz)
Mobility Radeon 34xx
4 GBs RAM


My oooold desktop had a fantastic Duron 1300 MHz and maybe a GeForce 4 MX 64MBs, though I might have been using some other desktop I might have gotten after that - bad sectors in my brain, getting too old.

That is a laptop?
Make sure it uses the primary gfx card and there is no power saving mode.

I am often wrong, but I believe that if you were to disable all the optional bells and whistles that have been added in the intervening years and play a Game that didn't take advantage of any recent advances on a map in the old format... you would actually see significant performance improvements.

knorke wrote:That is a laptop?
Make sure it uses the primary gfx card and there is no power saving mode.

Yes, laptop.
And yes, I'm definetely using my primary GFX in Windows. In Linux glfinfo tells me I'm using the Radeon as well. (think I don't even have an integrated alternative)

SinbadEV wrote:[...] I believe [...] disable all the optional bells and whistles [...] added in the intervening years [...] significant performance improvements.

I guessed that too. That's why I found it odd that I'm having such bad perf playing it. Of course the adittion of graphical goodnesses by the engine or the "games" would also be a strong possibility.

To be sure, read ~/.spring/infolog.txt and look for "GL vendor".

I thought you were only away for three years or so...

I had two laptops with Mobility Radeon cards series 3x and 4x, they are pure shit. Was barely enough to handle 4v4 on Altored Divide. Starcraft 2 FPS would also drop in the way you describe.
Plus lots of random reboots when they overheated, and I live in one of the coldest countries on earth!
Sent the last laptop in for repair 3 times. A Thinkpad if you would believe it(never buy this brand, it is built using refurbished rice cookers nowadays).

Then I built a custom stationary, and everything has been smooth sailing since then.

No offense, but what are you guys thinking trying to play games on these piles of crap?

As long as it can compile code and allow testgames..

Hardwarecism.. or is it just opt-coding-phobia?

Forboding Angel wrote:No offense, but what are you guys thinking trying to play games on these piles of crap?

Probably same things as when trying to play games on anything else?

btw, ATI cards tend to perform badly in Spring

Forboding Angel wrote:No offense, but what are you guys thinking trying to play games on these piles of crap?

Hum well I was a broke ass student for one thing. I also moved around a lot, so having a stationary PC wasn't practical.

gajop wrote:btw, ATI cards tend to perform badly in Spring

They make up for it by mining bitcoins well.

Playing on a laptop is an unimaginable usecase for evo developement purposes, i hear. >.>

Cute, also entirely false. Feel free to read the download page on the site.

Cute, also entirely false. Feel free to read the download page on the site.

I was mostly referring to the "it's okay for evo chili to eat up half the screen because you can't optimize for lowest common denominator".

Quote inaccurate because weblobby doesn't store logs.

Forboding Angel wrote:No offense, but what are you guys thinking trying to play games on these piles of crap?

If it has wheels then people will race it.
If propellers can be attached then people will fly it.
If it has a screen then people will play games on it.

Belongs in ZK forum? engine is not responsible for expensive lua graphics and their toggle-ability.

dansan wrote:To be sure, read ~/.spring/infolog.txt and look for "GL vendor".

[f=0000000] SDL version: 1.2.14
[f=0000000] GL version: 3.3.11627 Compatibility Profile Context
[f=0000000] GL vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
[f=0000000] GL renderer: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series
[f=0000000] GLSL version: 3.30
[f=0000000] GLEW version: 1.6.0
[f=0000000] Video RAM: total 237MB, available 409MB
[f=0000000] GL info:
haveARB: 1, haveGLSL: 1, ATI hacks: 1
FBO support: 1, NPOT-texture support: 1, 24bit Z-buffer support: 0
maximum texture size: 8192, compress MIP-map textures: 0
maximum SmoothPointSize: 63, maximum vec4 varying/attributes: 32/29
maximum drawbuffers: 8, maximum recommended indices/vertices: 16777215/2147483647
number of UniformBufferBindings: 45 (64kB)