Tranen wrote:Ok, afterall the eeepc is an ultra-mobile pc, it's first aim is not to play videogame.
Why are we saying this so much? Warzone 2100 is a game that was released in 1999. It ran quickly on those computers. Even in software mode, I've never seen the retail version stutter. Nowadays, besides shadows, Warzone's graphics haven't improved much, so it shouldn't be using significantly more resources.
The Eee has specs comparable or superior to computers of 1999. It should therefore be able to run Warzone with no problems. So why can't it? Don't get me wrong, I love this game, but the performance problems just don't make sense.
We no longer have, or make use of a software renderer. Therefore in order to play the game you need hardware accelerated OpenGL support. The software renderer was removed several years ago — one of the reasons being because no one was willing to maintain it (it is not the easiest thing in the world, and would add little long-term to the game).
The Eee just has a glorified frame buffer; with almost none of the OpenGL pipeline being offloaded onto specialised hardware (GPU).
Furthermore Eee is actually slower in the graphics department than 1999-era hardware. A 64MiB GeForce 256 (Oct 1999) would blow it out of the water, no question. One of the reasons for this is because the GMA 900 and GMA 950 chips have no support for hardware transform and lighting (which, a GeForce 256 does support, along with OpenGL 1.2).
The conflicting thing about the hardware argument mentioned here is that I've seen Warzone 2100 running just fine with Zenwalk Linux on the Asus EEE 900 with Intel GMA 915, but with Mandriva it is not playable on the same hardware.
It's also running nicely on my friends MSI Wind with Xubuntu and Intel GMA 945.
Maybe it's a driver issue, but I haven't figured it out yet. I have xorg 1.4.0.90 and intel driver is listed as ver. 2.2.1. Tried with and without xaa / exa. OpenGL is activated.
Yeah, well I'm running a celeron 500mHz with a Mach64,4mb.... it's not running at a playable speed for me either. I compiled my xorg stuff from scratch (crux linux), and it's all optimized... I doubt I'll be able to get this thing to ever play it. Any ideas? I'm willing to go so far as to make a separate bootable partition for game playing, and optimize every damn thing in it to pentium3.
FYI: I've got DRI/OGL support using the (latest) snapshot drivers in git, so that isn't an issue. Maybe there's an older version of the drivers before they added that slower safe-blitting feature...
For these low end machines, I would think that 2.0.x version of the game would be better than 2.1+.
Yeah, 2.0.x isn't supported anymore, but that is the way the cookie crumbles.
There are a few things you should know, before comparing today's Warzone with the original release:
The old software renderer that you could use on platforms where you did not have any hardware acceleration of 3D is no more. You must have hardware accelerated OpenGL-drivers to run the game. If the drivers run in software mode, 1-2 fps is to be expected.
The original game had two kinds of textures - a low-res set for the software renderer, and a high-res one for the hardware renderer. We got rid of the low-res stuff a long time ago.
The original game only drew a small part of the map at once, and had a low limit on how far you could zoom out. We now draw many, many times as large part of the map for each redraw than the original game did to allow for greater zoom and visibility.
People want improved graphics. To allow us to do that, we need to change the graphics engine to do things the way modern hardware expect us, and that means eventually leaving the oldest hardware behind. The amount of work required to support both old and new ways to render graphics is just prohibitive. We are gradually rewriting the engine, although you cannot see the results of any of this work yet, and we try hard to support old hardware for as long as possible.
Processor: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1016MB RAM
Video Card: Mobile Intel(R) 945 Express Chipset Family
Sound Card: Realtek HD Audio output
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236)
Really! Not any issues running 2.2.1! Just wanted to let you know...
master_volkov wrote:I have thet trouble with warzone 2100 2.2.1 on gentoo linux with core quad and nvidia 7600.
When i disable sound - all is good, but when i enable sound ...
My core quad + nvidia 7600 = 1-2 fps !!!
I had the same problem and i use Gentoo too. It was related to the openal library (openal-1.7.411) which behaves badly with this version of Warzone (but the problem seems to be solved in the trunk version, so hopefully it will disapear in the next release).
The workaround i found is to install openal-0.0.8 . Unfortunately this package is no longer available in gentoo. So i installed openal-0.0.8 manually, then i hide the other openal library (as root : mv /usr/lib/libopenal.so /usr/lib/libopenal.so.hide), emerge warzone2100, and put back openal for the other programs (mv /usr/lib/libopenal.so.hide /usr/lib/libopenal.so)
nux wrote:
I had the same problem and i use Gentoo too. It was related to the openal library (openal-1.7.411) which behaves badly with this version of Warzone (but the problem seems to be solved in the trunk version, so hopefully it will disapear in the next release).
The workaround i found is to install openal-0.0.8 . Unfortunately this package is no longer available in gentoo. So i installed openal-0.0.8 manually, then i hide the other openal library (as root : mv /usr/lib/libopenal.so /usr/lib/libopenal.so.hide), emerge warzone2100, and put back openal for the other programs (mv /usr/lib/libopenal.so.hide /usr/lib/libopenal.so)
AFAIK, you should be using openAL-soft. 2.2.2 should be allot better in the sound department.
Issue:
The game gets slower and slower all the time, but I think it's caused by how many units have been built and how much of them are on the screen. The more units were built, the more CPU power is needed. Example:
Strating the game I got around 50-60 fps. After about an hour I got something around 10. At this point there are around 800-1500 units in a 8 player skirmish game. So the game getting slower is logical....
