Startup Error

[danielwellsfloyd]

When I start Darwinia up, the camera randomly switches views and the game is very slow to react when I press "h" for help or "alt" for the task manager. It simply continues to switch views and makes this funky sound like a pacman remix which I'm not sure is supposed to sound like it does or not, since it is a retro game. If you need any more information, feel free to ask.

EDIT: Also, the sound jumps from speaker to speaker, sometimes playing on both, but mostly playing on one or the other (I have only two speakers, no surround sound speaker setup or anything like that.).

[andy]

Sounds like you've just got a terrible frame rate. Lots of people are seeing this sort of problem, maybe we should pop up a dialog box telling you to spend more money on your graphics card when the frame rate drops below 10 fps

Seriously though try reducing the graphics detail in the prefs file, particularly the screen res.

[andy]

According to our records you've got an Intel graphics card in your machine - "Intel(R) 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller" apparently. I can't find any benchmarks for that card - but it seems to be bundled on your motherboard rather than being a seperate AGP card. Does your graphics card report itself as "Intel Extreme Graphics 2" in Windows display properties? I'll even hazard a guess that the machine is a Compaq.

I'd be interested to know if you can confirm these specs and let me know what graphics details you've tried.

[danielwellsfloyd]

Here's a copy of the way I edited the prefs file:

ServerAddress = 127.0.0.1
BypassNetwork = 1
SinglePlayer = 1
IAmAServer = 1

TextLanguage = english
TextSpeed = 15
HelpEnabled = 1

SoundLibrary = dsound
SoundDriver = -1
SoundMixFreq = 44100
SoundMasterVolume = 255
SoundChannels = 16
SoundHW3D = 0
SoundSwapStereo = 1

ScreenWidth = 800
ScreenHeight = 600
Windowed = 0

RenderLandscapeLighting = 0
RenderLandscapeOverlay = 1
RenderLandscapeDetail = 1
RenderWater = 1
RenderWaterDetail = 1
RenderClouds = 1
RenderNegative = 0
RenderPixelShader = 1
RenderSmoothLines = 1
RenderHighDetailVirii = 0

RecordDemo = 0
DemoFrameRate = 25

StartMap = mine

TestHarness = 0
ShowIntro = 0

Though the speed of the game has greatly improved, the camera tilts up just a little bit at startup, then down a little farther, and then in starts to go so far up and down so fast that it looks like different picture views are just being posted on the screen. I'm able to move around with the keyboard and the mouse wheel, but the camera just seems to go frantic. Any ideas?

[danielwellsfloyd]

Shortly after posting that, I turned "RecordDemo" to "1" instead of "0," and the game ran without glitch.