Camera won't stay still

[dluke]

I managed to get Darwina to run and not crash after 3-4 seconds by disabling one of my processors with Apple's CHUD utils.

Of course, now I can't seem to actually play since the view keeps jumping around no matter what I seem to do (it doesn't appear to be responding to keystrokes or the mouse).

I can hit 'h' and get some of the help to start (it has me pull up a menu and do a gesture), but I can't go much further as I'm supposed to click on an area to start there, but I can't get the view to stabilize long enough for me to see a highlighted area (much less click on it).

(Hardware: Upgraded G4 AGP graphics to dual G4, one processor disabled with CHUD, Geforce 2 MX video card).

[archangel]

I get the jumping camera when there are not enough processor resources. Try opening a Terminal window and type 'top -u'. Look in the list if there is a program cominung much CPU time and how much idle time you have. When the idle time is < 50% on my G4 800 the game is unplayable because of the camera jumps. If I quit resource-hungry programs I can play again.

[dluke]

I should log in from another machine while the game is running to look at it, but I'm not running any other CPU-intensive apps in the background.

If I don't disable one CPU, the camera isn't jumpy so it does seem like a CPU saturation issue (although since the game only runs for 3-4 seconds with dual cpus, I might not be giving it enough time to get jumpy).

I've got dual 1.2Ghz processors on a G4 AGP graphics machine.

I suppose disabling one CPU with CHUD could be causing it to be really slow, but I wouldn't expect the game to be unplayable on a single 1.2 Ghz processor.

[dluke]

Update:

Disabling 1 CPU with CHUD doesn't seem to make it very slow.

If I kill off some non-cpu intensive background tasks, and wait for the camera to calm down (no touching the mouse for ~60 seconds after the program has launched), then I can play for a little while before I get a crash (same as the ones I already uploaded backtraces for).

Logged in from another machine, with or without the background tasks running, I have about 1% idle CPU (with top taking 10-15%).

[John]

Thanks for the reports. Please could you check to see if this is still an issue with beta3?

Thanks

John

[dluke]

It doesn't crash, but I still occasionally get violent camera shakes (it seems more prevalent when the mouse is over a white area, like the 'oceans').

Since I can run with both processors, it is at least playable.