Introversion

I don't know if it's my computer or not, but Darwinia operates at 2 to 4 frames per second, and the mouse is incredibly unusable because of this.

Also, I'm sot sure if there's supposed to be an interface at all, because at the bottom of the screen there is a sort of scratchy band that goes from the left to center of the screen, it's about half an inch thick.

Also also, text doesn't display well, it's just white dots.

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SysInfoGenVersion: 2
CpuVendor: PowerPC 750
CpuModel: ppc750
Num Processors: 1
Country: Any
Language: en_US
Num sound devices: 1
Primary sound device: Built-in Audio
Graphics Card: ATY,RageM3
Operating System: Darwin 7.5.0

Using the p button to snap a picture would probably help out a lot. You can also display the frames by hitting F5 (With the fn key if you're on a laptop) so you can verify the slow FPS count.

Hi Mantaray

Please can you give some info about your machine - what model of macintosh, how old, graphics card, speed of processor. You should be able to get most of this info from the system profiler (About this mac).

Thanks

John

Mkay, here is a picture of that weird band thingy at the bottom of the screen, which disappears when I pause the game.

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It's a midrange white iBook from 2001:

Hardware Overview:
Machine Model: iBook
CPU Type: PowerPC 750 (22.14)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 500 MHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
Memory: 640 MB
Bus Speed: 67 MHz

Graphics card is an ATI Rage Mobility 128 with 8 MB VRAM.

Alrighty, I fiddled with preferences.txt, and set it to open at 800x600, as opposed to 1024x768. The band disappeared and text displays fine, in fact there are no graphical glitches so far as I've played.

Hi Mantaray

Can you try setting the RenderPixelShader option to 0 and see if that affects your frame rate at all.

Thanks

John

No, it's still going at 1 to 2 fps.

I am seeing the same problem on two of my machines. One is a beige G3 upgraded to 500Mhz using a Rage128Pro. The other is a bronze keyboard laptop running at 500Mhz.

Both are showing the odd banding and uselessly slow frame rate - so slow the game is unusable.

Using the f5 key, I can verify that both my G3 bronze keyboard laptop and my beige G3 (both running at 500Mhz) are only getting 1-2 fps regardless of the setting of RenderPixelShader.

Using the f5 key, I can verify that both my G3 bronze keyboard laptop and my beige G3 (both running at 500Mhz) are only getting 1-2 fps regardless of the setting of RenderPixelShader.

With b4, still have unplayabe frame rate. The odd banding will disappear by either - changing the window size to 800x600 or change the color depth to 16. I'm not sure what the minimum expected system requirements are.

I have a 17" G4 Al PowerBook - 1.5 GHz, 512 MB, Mobility 9700

I am currently getting about 5 fps (barely) on receiver.

Settings are 800x500 resolution and details all on medium. Sound channels down to 8, 22 kHz sample rate, real time effects off.

I don't know how, but the low framerate causes the input system to function extremely poorly. For example keyup events are clearly not being handled properly all the time - sometimes keys get 'stuck' down and it requires another key press (and a new keyup I'm assuming) to realise this. It'll do the same with mouse events too. The game often mistakes my left clicks for a click-hold, which on the Mac version has been mapped to right click. Which is slightly annoying sometimes.

Changing graphical settings has little or no effect upon performance which leads me to believe that whatever system is being used to model the creatures' behaviour is not especially efficient. Either that or there's a great big memory leak. Although the fact that this slowdown is not visible at all on my PC confuses me.

The same problem at my Mac. I have a PB 15" with 1.33GHz and 1GB RAM.

The game runs with 5-10 fps and it's unplayable when there are many souls or enemies. The mouse gestures are not recognized, so the only thing I can do is: Quit

I hope they will fix it.

Well as far as I'm aware they're finishing up a Windows patch that will address lots of issues. Hopefully we'll see it ported over to the Mac code-base before too long.

I noted that the Spirit code had been re-written to be significantly more efficient. This should help fighting those evil ants.

Also they have moved from using display lists to vertex buffer objects for rendering the landscape. It was claimed that dispay lists did not function on OS X, which would explain the terrible graphical performance. I'm not sure why they wouldn't work (Apple recommends using them http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimag ... gdata.html), but then I've never programmed a game of commercial scale.

SadMac wrote:Well as far as I'm aware they're finishing up a Windows patch that will address lots of issues. Hopefully we'll see it ported over to the Mac code-base before too long...

The Windows and Linux patches are being tested by the beta testers. The Mac patch should be in beta soon (hopefully in the next week or two).

xander