Game performance on older PC's

[brankok]

I'm using an Athlon 700, 256 mb with SDL on Suse Linux 9.2
I'm playing a game on a 1024 x 1024 map and the game goes slower and slower the more vehicles and engines I build.
At the beginning the preformance was well. I've now about 20 trains, 60 lorries, 10 ships and 3 companies and a doubled tracked railroad network from north to south , with some branch connections to stations (nearly empty of trains at the moment .
Yesterday I stopped the game because it stuttered to much.

I now read that the new pathfinding could affort those problem. (Can't check this at the moment)

So I have the general question if anyone is playing a game with such an old or older PC and bigmaps and have experiences with the performance by having big networks and a lot of enignes.

Which hardware is recommended at the moment?

[fizze]

i got a 300MHz machine up and running.
i can try and test openTTD on it.

well, i have found my 1500Mhz athlon doesnt really like the 2048 maps with lots of vehicles as well.
also, many open vehicle (alas, viewport) windows slow down the game a lot.
i do not use ANY AI however.

[stewis]

tried removing ths ships?

[brankok]

I love the ships
Do they cause any trouble ?

Ther performance run low after building some trains and road vehicles.
I also have the same massive problems with an old 256 x256 game, so I will check first if it's just the new pathfinding.

[Observer]

Its very strange.. it seems that it runs better using windows.

I have an athlon 700 here and it did stutter a bit like you say. (linux)

But I have a much slower less ram pentium based laptop which can run ottd without stuttering (win and linux).. Im not sure what that means actually. Ive never had problems on windows. only on linux and only on my 700 athlon. But perhaps this is due to my minimal X and SDL configuration...

Maybe enable agp support ?

[brankok]

Removing ships doesn't help anything
I've tried to set the resolution from 1024 to 640, no effect.
If I increase the game speed it goes more then twice faster, but about every 0,5 second it stutters, like a car that gets not enough fuel.
Normally if cpu ist on its limit because of a full world with many networks and vehicles the faster button have no effect ...

Will try on Windows and look if it goes faster

[jacke]

Typing this in a console before starting the game speeds up the game a lot for me, I think your video card (or driver ?) have to support this though, and you need to play the game in fullscreen.

Code: Select all

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dga

[brankok]

I already play in this mode. Bevore big maps, I had no problem with the game speed. Testing on Win 98 the game seems to run quickly

[brankok]

Still unable to play bigmaps smoothly ...

Using Windows the same problem appears. After a few trains (about 20) the game slows down. It seems that this happens after sending some trains over the hole map (1024 x 1024) from south to north.
The new pathfinidng is deactivated(If I activate the game freezes immediately).

[StarLite]

Did you turn on the new global pathfinding by any chance?
NPF takes a lot of CPU power and is bugged anyways, don't use it yet, it still needs a lot of work

[brankok]

No,
no chance to use NPF
Activating it, crashes the game. ( I think it's a problem with the ships)

[Celestar]

Please provide the savegame which causes the problems

Celestar

[brankok]

Here it is.(Windows, tempsetw.grf,cargosetw.grf,newshipsw.grf)

Ship 2 will soon be full loaded and if it starts the game will freeze if NPF is activated.
The game performance on my computer is already poor. The game stutters a bit.This effect is better to realize after pressing the faster bottom .
A similar Linux game with the same scenarioruns even slower

[tecxx]

i don't know if this will help you but when we play with NPF enabled (the global one, not the train one :=) our game becomes unplayable slow on the client machine after some time. turning it off immediately removes the problem.

[Darkvater]

Yes, NPF is buggy. Mostly ships are the cause of the 100% CPU bug, but also trains with a destination far far away cause this. Best to turn it off for now until blathijs finally (*hint*) fixes it.

[sobo]

dont play openttd but if you set up a couple of waypoints on the way the single parts are not as long and maybe much easier to track down for the pathfinding routine..

[Sionide]

try turning the animation and high detail off? i dunno why no one has said this yet, perhaps it won't change much... *shrug*