Hugely jumpy, erratic mouse

[shinygerbil]

It's an intermittent problem, and I'm not the only person to encounter it.

Basically, the game drops to a really low framerate (2fps, maybe?) and the camera starts moving madly. I actually recorded a video of it with my camera phone, which I'll upload!

I get the feeling it's related to a crate drop; it only seems to happen quite randomly, and very suddenly, and in no particular map.

Often, you end up randomly zooming miles away from the action and can basically take no further part in the game.

I don't think my computer is so bad as to fail this much ;-;

Anyone have any ideas what is causing it? I'ma go hunting for it...

[bert_the_turtle]

The camera zigging is definitely caused by the low FPS. <smug>That's what you get from Explicit Euler</smug>. Now, what causes the low FPS is hard to say. If it happens suddenly, it may be worth paying attention to what happened at that moment.

There definitely is a gradual performance drop if games go on for too long (>1 hour for me to be noticable, so not much of a real problem), but I guess that's not it.

[shinygerbil]

I think it might be trees that are causing the problem.

It's weird, I've had the problem suddenly disappear and allow me to carry on playing as normal - this doesn't seem like just low FPS. :S

Here is a video, sorry I took it with my phone, it's the best I could do

http://www.shinygerbil.co.uk/files/Video005.zip

(it's still in 3gp, I has no encoding stuff set up :/)

Note how it suddenly goes still when I press enter to chat...

[RabidZombie]

The camera stops moving when you enter chat because chat locks the camera in position.

If this only ever happens with low FPS, this is in fact the cause.

Otherwise, do you have a multicore system?

[shinygerbil]

Single-core system - an Athlon XP 2000+ which I rather suspect is the cause. The rest of my hardware should be able to cope with much more....

There does seem to be something very specific that causes the extremely low FPS, though, which is my problem - it doesn't happen every time :/

edit: also, I'm on Vista - I've tried various compatibility modes (which apparently can have drastic results) to no avail. I'm going to try to get it running in Wine, see if that's any better

[RabidZombie]

Oh, yeah, the low FPS could be caused by a whole manner of things.

If you haven't already, turn building detail down. It makes the trees less graphics hungary.

[Pox]

Oh, yeah, the low FPS could be caused by a whole manner of things.

If you haven't already, turn building detail down. It makes the trees less graphics hungary.

What's the "lowest" building detail in preferences.txt? 3? Even with that, it seems to make little difference on the eee... still get massive fps drops with trees on the screen.

[shinygerbil]

Building detail doesn't seem to do anything to trees.


Also, it would be nice to be able to change RenderLandscapeDetail, but I assume that would cause too many sync errors.

I've been reduced to playing in 640x480, and it still gets laggy...