simple game with poor performance...

[KingAl]

The great thing about vector graphics is that they can endlessly scale. An image background would generally either be too high a resolution to run the game efficiently while allowing sufficient zoom or too low and appear pixelated - and the width of the lines would remain the same, destroying the vector appearance. Now, you may argue this vector appearance is unnecessary, which is a moot point: having high graphical quality is arguably always 'unnecessary' regardless of the game, but that doesn't necessarily mean a game would be better without it.

[bert_the_turtle]

A texture is all that is required for the background, high resolution texture that is.

Not quite. Borders (land/sea and the territory borders) will look noticeably blurrier if they're on a texture, they will be invisible when zoomed far out or thick as your thumb when zoomed in. The maximum zoom level is about 10 times the minimal zoom level; to look good at maximum zoom at 1600x1200 screen resolution, the whole texture would need to be 16000x12000 pixels, which takes 384 Mb even at 16 bits color depth.

You're right about the other stuff and NeoThermic already pointed out specific improvement suggestions in the other thread he linked to.

[KingAl]

Observe my brilliant bluffing of technically correct information.

[bert_the_turtle]

Observed.

[NeoThermic]

I agree with the OP. A texture is all that is required for the background, high resolution texture that is. That'd scale fine. Whilst yes, the reason for the slowness is because of the vectoring etc, different ways are possible to achieve the same thing at a much less overhead.

There's an option in the configuration for a "low detail world". This option actually doesn't do anything (it's been crippled in the code). If it did, it would look like:



Incidentally that uses a texture!

Suffice to say that the image should end any ideas of using a texture for the vector lines.

NeoThermic

[Podge]

On the topic of poor performance, I have a dual core P4 with hyper-threading (so 4 virtual CPUs). I found that with the game running, even with time at the slowest it was really jerky, yet was only using around 10%ish (4 cores, so 25% would be one thread fully CPU bound). This was weird, I thought surely the processor should be busier then that. I noticed that when I switched off BOINC (distributed processing client that was running in the background), CPU usage jumped to 30%ish (good to see some threading ).

Now I find this strange, as while the defcon process had normal priority and BOINC idle, it would seem to indicate there is some important thread in defcon that is getting set to the lowest priority class, therefore being left competing with BOINC for CPU and slowing the game down.

In case you are wondering, this is a Windows XP 64bit machine.

[xander]

Well, there are two possible problems. First, I don't know how well Defcon works on 64-bit machines. Second, I am fairly sure that Defcon hates running on multiple procs. My first suggestion would be to assign Defcon affinity to only one proc, and see how that works for you.

xander

[Podge]

Yeah, it could be something to do with the 64-bit OS, defcon runs as a 32-bit process, but there's probably much more happening at the lower levels I'm not aware of.

I'll have a play to see if affinity makes a difference. However, and not trying to be rude to the coders, but not liking multi-processor sounds to me like poor coding. Either it is written as a single process, it which case it may be dispatched to different processors, depending which one is free, but will be all transparent anyway and the same as running on a single processor. If it's written to be multi-threaded, then everything should be handled in thread-safe ways, so if two threads run at the same time, they shouldn't butt heads anyway. Maybe there's something different with windows and in C, since I'm fairly weak in C, I only have a really good grasp on Java, so I stand to be corrected on this.

[Elreddo]

My machine is now about 10 years old and I am very confused as to the problems you guys seem to be experiencing.

After installing, initially my Defcon ran at around 0.5 fps - Dismal
I took the advice in the faq of installing new Video card drivers and - OMFG

The performance increased from 0.5 fps (had to Ctrl-alt-delete to exit as it was unuseable) with messed up colours (all blue)
too....
A perfect 30 fps in 32bit with most graphical options on or maxed (at 800x600)
and achieved on a (lol) 10 year old Dell XPST600 with
NVidia Riva TNT\TNT2 32mb Graphics card (from 1999 I believe)
Soundblaster compatible sound card
389mb RAM
570Mhz P3 (ouch, i know)

But it runs like butter now on my machine UNDER the minimum sys reqs, so (if you havnt allready) install new card drivers and managers. It solved all my problems.