Help a newbie please

Bronsi · Post by **Bronsi** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:05 pm

I've come across this wonderful thing that is Oolite and the nostalgia trip is fantastic BUT.....

I've run it on a desktop which is a 3Ghz Athlon (32-bit) with a 6600GT Nvidia card and it has been absolutely fine, no bother at all.

I'd prefer to run it on my lappy though, which is a 1.8GHz Turion with a Mobility Radeon X700 on board. Win XP Pro 32-bit.

From what I've seen so far, stock Oolite 1.72 doesn't seem the most demanding game I've ever run. But on my lappy every time I get anywhere near a space station it slows right down to about a frame every couple of seconds on approach. As soon as the space station is very close (filling the view) it then speeds up again!! This makes docking near impossible. I suppose I could hack myself a docking computer which would get around this (quick docking - not the long winded job), but I was wondering if there is anything settings wise I should be looking at?

This doesn't seem to be a part of the other Radeon problems on here that I can find.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Post by **another_commander** » Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:48 pm

Inside your Oolite installation there should be a file called Latest.log, found inside <Wherever Oolite is Installed>/oolite.app/Logs. Please post its contents here. I suspect wrong or old drivers resulting in no hardware graphics acceleration. One other thing you can try is going to the Game Options screen, seeing if the Shader Effects option is available and setting it to Off.

Diziet Sma · Post by **Diziet Sma** » Sat Aug 29, 2009 12:27 am

Hi Bronsi, and welcome to "the friendliest board this side of Reidquat!!"™

Mobility Radeon graphics in laptops can be a thorny problem, for sure.. I'm having a battle with a Mobility Radeon X2300 in an Asus laptop at the moment.. it is utterly unsupported by AMD (or anyone else except Asus) for any platform.

The problem seems to be that most laptop manufacturers don't cooperate with AMD and use custom versions of graphic chips, forcing their customers to make do with whatever the manufacturer can be bothered to release. I'm on the verge of modifying the BIOS in my X2300 to see if I can get it to work under Linux that way.

Fortunately your X700 is well supported, however.. if you go to the AMD support site you should be able to get the latest drivers installed. It may well make all the difference.

Good luck!

Bronsi · Post by **Bronsi** » Tue Sep 01, 2009 1:41 pm

Finally got some time to play a little more. I've downloaded 1.73 and have the Reduced Detail set to on, Shader Effects set to off and it seems to be working a lot better. Plus I have the OpenGL bit of the ATI display settings all set to "Performance" rather than looks. As far as I can tell it is not making a huge impact on how Oolite looks but it does seem playable now.

All that time I lost in my mid-teens - time to go and waste it all again!

Sendraks · Post by **Sendraks** » Tue Sep 01, 2009 2:57 pm

Bronsi wrote:
All that time I lost in my mid-teens - time to go and waste it all again!

Time you enjoy wasting is never wasted.

Now get out that space dock and waste not just time, but some Thargoids as well!