Oolite Bulletins

Has anyone tried Oolite with Windows 7 beta yet. If so, please report on results.
From what I read it seems to be a lot better than Vista (no exactly an achievement but good news).

Since I'm stuck with Win because of work it would be great if Oolite worked well on Win 7

It worked apparently without problems under VMware Fusion, but that has no OpenGL acceleration and Windows 7’s software rendering was a bit crap. (For starters, it apparently doesn’t support textures…)

I actually did have the Windows 7 beta running on a partition that was temporarily free, but I forgot to test Oolite (!) before overwriting it with something useful.

Ahruman wrote:

It worked apparently without problems under VMware Fusion, but that has no OpenGL acceleration and Windows 7’s software rendering was a bit crap. (For starters, it apparently doesn’t support textures…)

I actually did have the Windows 7 beta running on a partition that was temporarily free, but I forgot to test Oolite (!) before overwriting it with something useful.

Hmmm. I might have to take down the game server I have set up for the kids. Needs reinstalling anyway.... Well, no time over the next few days.

If I can sneak it on to our Win7 test rig without the boss noticing - I'll let you know. (although test rig is deliberately a low spec Athlon 1400+, 1GB RAM, 128MB GF6600GT)

I was planning a rebuild of one of my work systems... If no one else gets to it, I'll try as well.

like buses - no offers and then four come along at once...

Sems to work reasonably well - however my spare system runs an ATI card and so its difficult to say. On the AMD x2 4200 seems smooth, stars appear as points but no nebula. Will try it later with some oxps

OK tried it with oxps. Seems to run well. No major faults seem (although haven't spent an extended period playing). Same problem though even with the new ATI windows 7 drivers, (squares on start field) so obviously this will not be fixed any time soon...ah well.

Baza wrote:

OK tried it with oxps. Seems to run well. No major faults seem (although haven't spent an extended period playing). Same problem though even with the new ATI windows 7 drivers, (squares on start field) so obviously this will not be fixed any time soon...ah well.

Well, given all the noise going around about OpenGL support from ATI (AMD), I suppose that the problem is more likely to be ATI drivers then Windows 7. Not good that the problem remains in Windows 7. Someone should really talk to these ATI guys.

Anyone got Windows 7 working on a machine with a Nvidia card? My test rig (currently running CS server and some other stuff) has an ATI card.

Gimi wrote:

Well, given all the noise going around about OpenGL support from ATI (AMD), I suppose that the problem is more likely to be ATI drivers then Windows 7. Not good that the problem remains in Windows 7. Someone should really talk to these ATI guys.

Thats what I did post in the other thread: ATI explicitly requests that everyone experiencing problems like bad OpenGL behaviour does fill in the driver feedback with a bug report, in order to increase the priority of that problem so that it could be fixed.

Stupid company. Knows about a showstopper and still requires people to massively use their feedback. Told them that with OpenGL acceleration missing, the ATI card does miss a property that's advertised in germany, thus germans should be able to sue the producers of their cards.

Instantly someone else jumped in requesting reimbursement as the cards are defunct for months - a time in which their value rapidly drops.

Even if people complain everywhere, please, if you have an ATI card and experienced problems, take the little time to give them some proper feedback!
http://ati.supportcenteronline.com/ics/ ... 6&type=web

With the 9.1 drivers, ATI almost has OpenGL 3.0 support. Almost. They forgot to include the shading language version 1.3 when they claimed full support and with a few things I'm not sure if that's really the way to do it, as these features sometimes fail to identify as working during tests on other peoples machines:
GL_APPLE_flush_buffer_range (GL_ARB_map_buffer_range)
GL_APPLE_vertex_array_object (GL_ARB_vertex_array_object)
GL_NV_depth_buffer_float (GL_ARB_depth_buffer_float)
GL_NV_half_float (GL_ARB_half_float_vertex)

Furthermore, they messed up movie hardware support with the current drivers.

Funny is that the guy leading the driver development claims that his job is fun and that the 9.2 drivers are just in preparation to be released (while they had trouble to release working drivers in january and obviously then took a damaged one because they had to release a driver before the month was over).

On the other hand, the 9.1 drivers have one good thing for me: I can see the nebulae properly almost everytime! However, the speed setting of the memory is messed up and still CPU and GPU can be idle while the game lags. Someone traced that to OpenGL supporting multiple ways of requesting the amount of video RAM and that ATI only reports back properly over one way and returns a video RAM amount of 0 to all other ways of requesting this amount. That is said to be the cause of all those performance problems, where CPU and GPU are idle while the software (not only oolite!) is lagging. The card is said to operate with systems RAM instead of the built in 2048GiB GDDR5 and thus preventing CPU and GPU from doing anything but waiting for all those transfers of textures.

That company needs to feel the pressure, if you ask me. The problem is, if we all switch to nVidia, like germans KM Elektronik suggests because of massive ongoing driver trouble, we'll create a monopoly and that's no good for any of us!

Screet

Is anybody who's testing Oolite with Windows 7 able to provide an updated report on the situation?

Bump... does anyone have any progress to report re Windows 7?

I only found out about OOlite last weekend after playing 'Elite - A New Kind' for a bit of nostalgia and wondered if anyone had produced a version with updated graphics, and what did google throw up - Oolite.

I've been running 1.72.2 on the Windows 7 Release candidate for a few days now - And have not had any problems on my desktop PC, although my laptop occaisionally crashes when switching between apps in full-screen mode - probably graphics driver related.

Anyway, have been very impressed with OOlite, it really brings back the memories of my childhood with the BBC Model B version of Elite!

Great Stuff!!

M.

MerlynUK wrote:

I only found out about OOlite last weekend after playing 'Elite - A New Kind' for a bit of nostalgia and wondered if anyone had produced a version with updated graphics, and what did google throw up - Oolite.

I've been running 1.72.2 on the Windows 7 Release candidate for a few days now - And have not had any problems on my desktop PC, although my laptop occaisionally crashes when switching between apps in full-screen mode - probably graphics driver related.

Anyway, have been very impressed with OOlite, it really brings back the memories of my childhood with the BBC Model B version of Elite!

Great Stuff!!

M.

Welcome aboard, many of us here have followed the same path the great thing with oolite is not only does it allow most of the original game play but it adds the ability to trade in your ship and even design your own or pick from all oxps that ahve been made out there. You can mod it to your hearts content whilst still keeping the original game core game play intact. Its still elite, theres just far more you can do if you want to

I've just downloaded the 64-bit version of this today! I've never seen a 64-bit OS before, i'm quite excited about trying it out, it all sounds very futuristic, so hopefully if all goes well with the install, when i next appear on the forum my posts will arrive out of a 2001 style tunnel of light effect, sunglasses at the ready everyone!

I am speaking to you from the Future!