One little problem...

[Radiobuzz]

There's only one thing I didn't like about Darwinia.

I mean, it's an absolutely awesome game. I love that the game is so non-mainstream; that it's only 2 MB (the other is music and sounds) in the DVD era; that you don't have to kill Iraqees; that the graphics are not realistic 3D, but just plain beautiful 3D, etc...

But the thing that I didn't like much is the fact that the game requires such a popular video card like a Gforce. I don't have one of those. They are way too expensive so I'm stuck with a SiS on-board video card. And the first time I downloaded Darwinia's demo and opened it, the game was running at 1 fps, as much. So I cursed all of you... lol.

With the time I found out about the options, and give it one more try. Now I play it at 15 fps when there are little objects in the screen. Of course, when there are a couple of virii, the game slows down to like 4 fps.

So, there, that's what I didn't like much about the game. It would be nice if the game could work with other video cards as well.

Apart from all this: awesome game, and I love it, and I love Introversion.

[Darksun]

You can get a half decent Gforce for about £15, not brilliant but should be able to play Darwinia. The fact is, while it doesn't have photorealistic graphics, it is graphically intensive, and a lot of onboard graphics hardware just can't handle the strain.

Darwinia is *compatible* with any OpenGL compatible graphics card, it's just a question of a particular graphics card being able to run it (I have some old GForces that arn't powerful enough to get a decent framerate).

[xander]

To what Darksun stated, I would add that even though Darwinia is a small package in the day of DVDs, it is still a modern game. It is graphically intensive, and a CPU hog (wait 'til you get to Temple, if you haven't already). Most, if not all, 3D games require a graphics card of some power (not necessarily HUGE power, but some). IV said that Darwinia required a certain video card. Yeah, it sucks if you don't have that, and it will run a bit slowly, but do you complain that UT2004 or HL2 or whatever runs poorly if you try to play it on a system that does not meet the minimum specs? Darwinia should be no different.

xander

[Radiobuzz]

No, I don't complain to those games because I don't play them. I see them mostly like shallow games, that are more interested in showing pretty graphics, but they keep being the same games to eachother.

And yeah, I know that I could get a Gforce for €15 (BTW, my motherboard doesn't have AGP, and PCI cards are more expensive, unfortunately), but in my country not everyone can buy it, and certanly not me.

So that was what I meant, I think that it could of being great if the game could support other cards. I hope they keep that in mind for the next game.

PD: Sorry again for the crappy english.

[Stewsburntmonkey]

The problem is IV don't have the resources to do any real tuning on their games. Uplink required far too much graphic processing give that is was just a very simple 2D interface. The problem is magnified for Darwinia with the 3D aspect. The coding is simply far less efficient than more highly produced games. It is one of the challenges of playing independant games.

[Radiobuzz]

Update: Tomorrow I will have a brand new GeForce FX5500 so I will be able to play Darwinia at more than 15 fps. I can't wait.

[Stewsburntmonkey]

Just reading over this again. . . I think it should also be pointed out that the reason many modern games are huge (as far as installation size goes) is that they pre-render as much of the content as possible. Darwinia takes the opposite approach, trying to minimize the program size. By not pre-rendering things you put all the burden on the CPU and GPU as they have to render things on the fly. For Darwinia this is not as bad as other games since there isn't fancy texturing, bump-mapping, and the like. However it is one thing to keep in mind.

*random note: as I write this I am waiting for a program I wrote to generate all possible segmentations of a string. This string is only about 4 lines long, but the file generated for all possible segmentations is 34 MB. Somehow that is related to pre-rendering, but . . .

[Tortanick]

so if disk space isn't a problem could we improve performence by pre-rendering darwinia?

[Stewsburntmonkey]

I'm sure some pre-rendering could be done, though as I said there isn't a whole lot to render in Darwinia. The real thing to do would be to optimize the graphics calls.

[Radiobuzz]

WOW, I've just installed the card. With every effect turned on and playing at 1024x768 the game is going at 30 fps. This is absolutely amazing, I'm going to start the game from scratch.

[Stewsburntmonkey]

It really is amazing how bad onboard graphics are.

[NeoThermic]

It really is amazing how bad onboard graphics are.

Saying that though, I've managed to get Darwinia running on two systems where it really shouldn't of run. Both had onboard graphics too

The first was a P3 1GHz, with a 16MB TNT2 onboard chipset. The second was my laptop, a P3 Celeron 1.2GHz with a 32MB SMA S3 Twister. On both machines you;re able to run darwinia at 18-20fps average depending on your settings. The 1.2 patch (and onwards) really did wonders

NeoThermic