Oolite Bulletins

Hi Guys

Been playing Oolite (and now terribly and dangerously addicted) on my laptop whilst travelling and now back at home I installed on my desktop PC and copied the save file accross.

The game is running like a dog on my desktop PC! It's a AMD Phenom 8400 tripple core processor with 4GB RAM and a Radion X600 series graphics card.

What would you suggest I do first to try and improve the game performance? Graphics Card, memory or something else? When the game runs and you are in flight it seems like the screen is refreshing something like every 1 second or so.... jink.... jink .... jink.... really poor!

Suggestions appreciated!

Mark.

g0mgx wrote:

What would you suggest I do first to try and improve the game performance? Graphics Card, memory or something else? When the game runs and you are in flight it seems like the screen is refreshing something like every 1 second or so.... jink.... jink .... jink.... really poor

Shift-F will bring up a frame rate display, so you can see exactly how bad it is (and also see if it's any better while docked, or while in flight and looking at your F5 screen)

That much memory should easily be sufficient unless you have a ridiculous number of OXPs installed, or are running lots of other memory intensive apps at the same time, and a 2.1GHz CPU should be fine too.

So it might be a problem with the graphics card not being correctly handled and so shoving all the rendering into software. What does your Latest.log say about graphics? There'll be some lines near the top that say what your graphic card is, what OpenGL extensions it supports, and a few other things.

Temporary workaround might be to disable shaders and turn the detail level down, in the game options page.

Ah, excellent - someone who clearly knows stuff - thanks....

Shift-F whilst docked gives me FPS:4 and in flight also FPS:4.

Log file says this (these are the bits that look relevant to me):

10:41:25.148 [rendering.opengl.version]: OpenGL renderer version: 1.1.0 ("1.1.0"). Vendor: "Microsoft Corporation". Renderer: "GDI Generic".
10:41:25.148 [rendering.opengl.extensions]: OpenGL extensions (3):
GL_EXT_paletted_texture, GL_EXT_bgra, GL_WIN_swap_hint
10:41:25.160 [rendering.opengl.shader.support]: Shaders will not be used (OpenGL extension GL_ARB_shading_language_100 is not available).

So in the game options the Shader Effects are greyed out and "Not Available" it then says GAMA: IIIII.....(1.0)

I only have a few OXPs installed and little or nothing else running at the same time....

M

g0mgx wrote:

Code: Select all

10:41:25.148 [rendering.opengl.version]: OpenGL renderer version: 1.1.0 ("1.1.0"). Vendor: "Microsoft Corporation". Renderer: "GDI Generic".
10:41:25.148 [rendering.opengl.extensions]: OpenGL extensions (3):
GL_EXT_paletted_texture, GL_EXT_bgra, GL_WIN_swap_hint

I'm not an expert, but this seems to be the cause of your trouble (and yeah!, playing at 4FPS sucks big-time, it's amazing that you're even able to do anything; I had 4FPS when I first installed Oolite 1.65 on a first generation iBook—I deemed it unplayable and only returned to it when I had bought a new computer).

Well, there's the problem - your graphics card isn't being detected. A quick Google search for "gdi generic opengl" suggests that updating the card's drivers might help, with "misbehaving security software" as another possible cause.

Well Gents, following the advice I have changed the graphics card in the desktop PC and now have a FPS of 60 when docked and in flight - the game is very much improved (to put it mildly!). I am intrigued as to why I have a FPS of 99 on my laptop which I thought was a rather cheap and low spec - buy hey.

Busy doing some mining today with my newly acquired Ore Processor - how cool is that? Also met my first Rock Hermit.

All great - have reached Above Average - just need to make lots of cash now....

Thanks,

M

Thargoid wrote:

I'd suspect the max sync rate of your monitor is 60hz. Hence 60FPS.

... and the laptop probably has a graphics card / driver combo that does not contain the OpenGL extension for controlling VSync, hence 99FPS.