Shaking crosshair when selecting dish/canon target.

[mgleahy]

I'm using WinXP, with Darwinia released through steam. I've already finished it, but I thought I'd point out a problem that got pretty annoying near the end. Generally, my FPS would get really low (i.e., about 5) when lots of virii/darwinians started running around on a map. I'm somewhat accustomed to this in most new games, so I wasn't terribly bothered by it.

However, in the last three or four levels of the game, when it would get really bogged down, every time I selected a radar dish or armour canon to target it, the camera would start shaking. Sometimes it was just a little bit, other times it would just go completely wacky. Sometimes pressing z to zoom-in would help it stop, but that didn't always fix it, or sometimes only fixed it for a couple seconds. Sometimes waiting a while would allow it to stop, but more often it wouldn't, so it got pretty tough at the end, when I had a blob of virii on the last island so thick that it saturated the screen and just glowed white. After this crazy shakiness, I'd also have problems with the HUD, with the unit icons on the left expanding and contracting and flying of the right of the screen for no apparent reason.

I eventually beat the last island in the last level by endlessly dropping squads at the radar dish that I captured earlier with an engineer on that island. The squads sure didn't last long considering the non-stop virii and spiders, but I kept kamikaziing them and got the occasional grenade volley towards the virus cube until it was destroyed. As an aside, this strategy was further confounded by super long delays selecting the squads (or any unit) when the fps was really low. Often I would click on the unit, and nothing would happen and I'd just have to click one or two more times until I got a response. I lost many squads to nearby spiders this way.

At any rate, changing the screen resolution and graphics settings didn't seem to help my problems. I have a 1.6 GHz P4, 1 GB Ram, ATI Radeon 8500 128 MB video card. Also, I did look at the older list of known bugs, as well as other forum messages. I think some players had similar issues that were believed to be FPS related, but for me this only seemed to affect the one particular type of event.

Regards,
Mike

[xander]

Yeah, this is a really old bug from beta days. The situation was improved a bit in 1.2, but apearantly is still a problem, even in the most recent version. There is really not much you can do about it, except to try and get your framerates up. You might try dropping your graphics quality a bit. Also, if things get really hairy, sometimes it helps to exit the level and reenter it (this will clear the level of any souls that are floating around, which, if there are a lot of them, will speed things up a bit.

xander

[sbeaman2]

I have the same exact problem. My system:

1.7 GHz P4
784 MB RAM
Radeon 9600 Pro 128 MB (latest driver)
Puchased through Steam.

The differance for me is the radar is impossible to use on the Temple level. You try to aim it at the temple complex and it starts shaking up down. All you see is sky, ground, sky, ground, etc. If I let it sit it calms down but is point at the sky. When I turn it toward the temple comple it start jumping wildly again.

I also have the issue with the program icons in the upper left disapearing. The only fix I have found for that is exiting the program and restarting.

Any hope of addressing these issues? I love the game and can deal with low fps but the insanity control issues are a bit much.

[xander]

Any hope of addressing these issues? I love the game and can deal with low fps but the insanity control issues are a bit much.

At this point, the only real solution would be to upgrade your computer. However, you can sort of make things work by using the debug camera (this is the camera mode that you switch into when a menu is on the screen). I don't think you can actually manually engage the debug mode, but you can fake it by hitting [ESC] to bring a menu up. Move that menu out of the way, and you can still control the camera. The controls are as follows:

WASDQE - forward, backward, strafe left, strafe right, strafe down, strafe up (all relative to the camera, as opposed to the terrain, as with the normal camera -- if you are facing the ground, and hit W, you will move down towards the ground)
right-click - move fast
right-click and drag - rotate the camera
shift - move slow

The rest of your controls will be the same. You can bring up a menu, then position the camera, select the radar dish, and aim it. Dismiss the menu after deselecting the radar dish to return things to normal.

Oh, you could also play with the "RenderLandscapeMode" in preferences.txt. Add a line to preferences.txt (if it is not already there) that looks like this:

Code: Select all

RenderLandscapeMode = 0

The value for RenderLandscapeMode can varry between 0, 1, and 2. These settings affect how the landscape is drawn. The default is 1 (I think) and 0 or 2 might help a bit. Also, if you haven't done this already, you should probably turn down the detail settings in Darwinia. From the main menu (in level), go to graphics options, and turn everything down to "Low" or "I need to upgrade." That, also, might help.

xander

[Chibi]

I have the same exact problem. Add to this that the Radar shakes uncontrollably whenever you try to aim it too far UP or DOWN. My system:

XP Professional
2.49 GHz Celeron
376 MB RAM
Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Controller 64MB (latest driver)
DirectX 9.0C
Puchased Retail.

[xander]

I have the same exact problem. Add to this that the Radar shakes uncontrollably whenever you try to aim it too far UP or DOWN. My system:

XP Professional
2.49 GHz Celeron
376 MB RAM
Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Controller 64MB (latest driver)
DirectX 9.0C
Puchased Retail.

At a guess, I would suggest that your video card is really not beefy enough for Darwinia, and that is causing your framerates to drop, which is causing this problem. As I said 10 months ago, your only real option is, likely, to upgrade your computer. Aside from that, have you tried the things in this thread? Reduce your graphics quality, change the RenderLandscapeMode, &c.?

xander

[Chibi]

It's a laptop. =\
The only way to upgrade the video card would be to buy a new laptop.

The game runs fine enough, however. I've gotten to the Pattern Buffer/Receiver stages without the dishes being too much of an issue (though on 'escort', an optional level?, one of the dishes really tried to give me a problem)

I'm more worried about my desktop computer at home. It has a better videocard, and more RAM, but the processor is only a 1ghz. Think it'll work?

[xander]

It's a laptop. =\
The only way to upgrade the video card would be to buy a new laptop.

The game runs fine enough, however. I've gotten to the Pattern Buffer/Receiver stages without the dishes being too much of an issue (though on 'escort', an optional level?, one of the dishes really tried to give me a problem)

I'm more worried about my desktop computer at home. It has a better videocard, and more RAM, but the processor is only a 1ghz. Think it'll work?

Only way to find out is to try. However, I think that much of the game is graphics card bound, rather than processor bound. 1 GHz may be a bit slow if there are a lot of enemies running around, but it should be okay.

xander