game halts when messages appear

[richard.a.p.smith]

Hi

I tried a couple of searches to see if something like that has already been posted but I'm not exactly sure what to call this. It's a fairly regular annoyance in the game and while I do not actually think it's the fault of Shield Capacitors that's where it shows up most prominently.

On launching, stuff appears in the HUD (MilHUD not 4000 in my case), text messages saying various things. The Shield Capacitors Charging one comes up ten times or whatever it is. With each one, there is a fraction of a second loss of response from the computer as the text appears which makes keyboard flight commands sort-of "jump" while the game . I think I'm not explaining this well but I hope it's easy enough to work out what I mean. It comes up in combat which is a real pain, also when attempting to pick up cargo when, if you're going quickly at least; you don't know exactly when to take your finger off W or S or whatever it is you need to do, so you end up ramming the canister or missing your target if you're shooting.

I guess (for that is all it is) that Oolite is hunting for the text or digging in its reference files or something like that and it takes a couple of hundred milliseconds to do this to print to the screen. Anyone else familiar with this? Is it normal? Can anything be done about it?

Rich.

[CommonSenseOTB]

You must have an awful lot of oxps in your addons folder to cause a slowdown when a text message appears. Try removing a few. Otherwise, check out the readme in the Shield Equalizer & Capacitors1.3 oxp and see how you can customize the output of text messages or sound by using a safe text editor like notepad++ to change a default in the script file. This allows you yourself to turn the text or sound off. It's made to be customized in this way and a few of my huds like the ChupacabraHUD and the NumericHUDv3 have guages for the capacitors and so they turn off the sounds and text by script, which is why I designed it as such.

I hope this helps.

[richard.a.p.smith]

You must have an awful lot of oxps in your addons folder

Is 78 OXPs a lot? I'll try a few things like you say. Ta, Rich.

[Wildeblood]

Anyone else familiar with this? Is it normal? Can anything be done about it?

Yes, yes and not much. Avoid OXPs that write console messages during combat, or buy a faster computer, is about all.

[Svengali]

Post Latest.log. Maybe it gives a clue.

[Wildeblood]

I eventually decided that the effect I was seeing was Oolite becoming unresponsive to the keyboard while console messages were written. If I'm pitching or yawing with the keyboard (hereinafter "slewing"), the slewing stops or slows for a fraction of a second as the message appears, then the orientation jumps to where it would have been if the slewing hadn't slowed down. This gives a noticeable stutter in the slewing. I guessed it was something to do with Oolite's buffering of key presses being interrupted and resuming.

Richard has mentioned a different apparent cause, so I don't know whether we were seeing the same effect or not. I haven't played enough with Oolite 1.77 to know if the problem still persists.

(My year 9 English teacher, Mrs Lysaght, would disapprove of the tense changes mid-paragraph above. Oh look, it's after midnight.)

[richard.a.p.smith]

Hi. I posted again about this as I'd forgotten this previous post of mine, although eventually I did remember it. The newer thread is https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14232. I believe Wildeblood's observations are exactly the same thing. The solution is to switch off spoken messages in F2-options noting that saving a file seems to be necessary for the option to be remembered by Oolite. Rich.