severe performance problem

[mausie]

sorry for my bold reply, i know that every one is trying to help and i am thankful for this.
i am a huge ttd fan and it was the first game i ever played on my 486 back in the day.

my current save is just to see what i can do with openttd before i really start the game.

when i play the game on my laptop the now famous celeron mobile 1400 the game does not feel sluggish or slow.
it play's super good, the save provided is the game from my celeron.

auto save is disabled i did this from day one since it was a performance killer.
so this is not it.

i have attached some screenshot and my openttd config file
feel free to look at them and i am looking forward to your feedback.

i will do some test with HT enabled and disabled
also i will disable the windows 7 theme and use the standard windows look, just to rule out some options.

[mausie]

openttd config file attached

[mausie]

sorry for my bold reply, i know that every one is trying to help and i am thankful for this.
i am a huge ttd fan and it was the first game i ever played on my 486 back in the day.

my current save is just to see what i can do with openttd before i really start the game.

when i play the game on my laptop the now famous celeron mobile 1400 the game does not feel sluggish or slow.
it play's super good, the save provided is the game from my celeron.

auto save is disabled i did this from day one since it was a performance killer.
so this is not it.

i have attached some screenshot and my openttd config file
feel free to look at them and i am looking forward to your feedback.

i will do some test with HT enabled and disabled
also i will disable the windows 7 theme and use the standard windows look, just to rule out some options.

EDIT:Problem seems to be fixed with using the standard/old windows look.
i will do some more testing and come back

[Alberth]

Clockspeed of a processor is far from the entire story, it is also about how much it can do in a single tick. As a very old example, my ARM2 processor running at 8MHz at the time could keep up with a 40MHz 386 quite easily.
Reason was that the ARM2 was a RISC processor, doing close to 1 instruction every tick. The 386 processor was a CISC processor, needing several ticks for each instruction.

In other words, the internal structure of the CPU and its interfaces / buses (eg access to memory, speed of memory) are of influence. Imagine a fast processor and slow memory, your processor is then just constantly waiting for memory, wasting precious CPU cycles.

Don't try to compare different CPU architectures with each other on clock-speed alone, it doesn't mean anything.


Last but not least, the application also has influence. For example, if you have a bloody fast floating point processing unit, but the application does not do floating point arithmetic, your expensive floating point processor is just idling.

Different games have (possibly hugely) different usage patterns on the CPU, ability to play one game does not say much about ability to run another game, unless you can show that the CPU usage patterns are comparable.

[Transportman]

I don't know how many other processes you have running, but maybe your CPU is already running at full power because of (hidden) processes.

[mausie]

after some testing with the standard windows 7 theme disabled and using the old windows theme ( look ) i can confirm that the game is back..

everything seems fine, the trains go without lag, the planes are flying/moving as they should.

will play some more today and post back, so far so good.
thanks for the info.

question. what cpu's are you guy's using?
i might do a little upgrade soon. some input would be appreciated.

I don't know how many other processes you have running, but maybe your CPU is already running at full power because of (hidden) processes.

i just noticed that i did not show all processes, i am sorry.
it uses quite a lot actually.

so far the issue seems to be resolved.

[ChillCore]

- AMD Athlon 64 3400+, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce FX5200, linux Mint 64bit, WINXP 32 bit. (used for checking your game)
- AMD Athlon X2, 2GB RAM, have not checked the rest as I bought the thing but did not set it up (/ take it apart) properly yet; it has two FX???? cards in SLI. Linux Mint 64bit exclusively.
- PII, 233Mhz (runs at 266 via jumpers), 128MB RAM, win 98 ... handles up to about a hundred trains before it becomes unplayable but runs Half Life like a dream.
- I used to have a p4, 2800Mhz, 1GB RAM which handled pretty well too, and before that a 2400MHz, 1GB RAM which did its job fine too.

so far the issue seems to be resolved.

Great.
OS's eyecandy crap eh ... nothing new.

[planetmaker]

OpenTTD likes cpus which have a fast single-core clock speed. Thus rather less cores and faster clock speed than many cores and slower. Some modern cpus have a feature which allows them to automatically overclock one core when all others are idle - that's handy as well for this case.

[Eddi]

if "OS eyecandy" is really the cause of the trouble, OpenTTD's 8bit colour mode might not be properly supported by your drivers/graphics card (lots of newer devices remove this feature/put it into software emulation). in that case, setting 32bpp-anim blitter in openttd.cfg may improve the situation

Some modern cpus have a feature which allows them to automatically overclock one core when all others are idle - that's handy as well for this case.

in that case, it may help to explicitly limit OpenTTD to one specific core

[planetmaker]

if "OS eyecandy" is really the cause of the trouble, OpenTTD's 8bit colour mode might not be properly supported by your drivers/graphics card (lots of newer devices remove this feature/put it into software emulation). in that case, setting 32bpp-anim blitter in openttd.cfg may improve the situation

Some modern cpus have a feature which allows them to automatically overclock one core when all others are idle - that's handy as well for this case.

in that case, it may help to explicitly limit OpenTTD to one specific core

From my experiments on Debian wheezy that's not needed. Other OS might need manual tuning.

[mausie]

I want to use the 32bpp. If I do so can I still use my previous save game which is done in 8bpp and play in 8bpp?

Can someone tell me what I should do in order to obtain the 32bpp?
I'd like to test it and play around with it..

Thanks in advance.

so far the issue seems to be resolved.

Great.
OS's eyecandy crap eh ... nothing new. [/quote]


The P4 is going strong .. Troubleshooting 101, disable OS eye candy
The P4's in general are pretty good CPU's, they still impress me today.

[Eddi]

I want to use the 32bpp. If I do so can I still use my previous save game which is done in 8bpp and play in 8bpp?

you can switch the base graphics set in the game settings (on the main menu), savegame compatibility is not affected by this change.

Can someone tell me what I should do in order to obtain the 32bpp?
I'd like to test it and play around with it..

you need a recent nightly or 1.3.0-beta, and then download the "zbase" set.

[mausie]

I want to use the 32bpp. If I do so can I still use my previous save game which is done in 8bpp and play in 8bpp?

you can switch the base graphics set in the game settings (on the main menu), savegame compatibility is not affected by this change.

Can someone tell me what I should do in order to obtain the 32bpp?
I'd like to test it and play around with it..

you need a recent nightly or 1.3.0-beta, and then download the "zbase" set.

The 'zbase set'' can be downloaded in game?

If I downloaded a trainset in game will it be converted to 32bpp?

[ChillCore]

You set the blitter in the config and if the grf provides 32bbp sprites they will be used automatically.

The P4 is going strong .. Troubleshooting 101, disable OS eye candy

you mean ... TODO nr1 after installing any new OS, if you want it to be fast.

The P4's in general are pretty good CPU's, they still impress me today.

Yeah I already kinda regret having gotten rid of it but what do you do with 5 PCs ...
The 2400Mhz melted unfortunatlely compiling openttd twice at the same time and testing two binaries at the same time too; while having all the other tools needed to change the source too ofcource.
But this is getting a bit oftoppic perhaps ...

[Transportman]

I want to use the 32bpp. If I do so can I still use my previous save game which is done in 8bpp and play in 8bpp?

you can switch the base graphics set in the game settings (on the main menu), savegame compatibility is not affected by this change.

Can someone tell me what I should do in order to obtain the 32bpp?
I'd like to test it and play around with it..

you need a recent nightly or 1.3.0-beta, and then download the "zbase" set.

The 'zbase set'' can be downloaded in game?

If I downloaded a trainset in game will it be converted to 32bpp?

zbase can be downloaded through the ingame content, but it is a big download, so do it when you have some time.

[planetmaker]

I want to use the 32bpp. If I do so can I still use my previous save game which is done in 8bpp and play in 8bpp?

you can switch the base graphics set in the game settings (on the main menu), savegame compatibility is not affected by this change.

Can someone tell me what I should do in order to obtain the 32bpp?
I'd like to test it and play around with it..

you need a recent nightly or 1.3.0-beta, and then download the "zbase" set.

OpenTTD 1.2.0 should suffice to download and use zBase. At the time that OpenTTD version was released though, our content distribution service didn't yet allow files of the size of zBase - something Truebrain and Rubidium put a lot of work into during summer.

The 'zbase set'' can be downloaded in game?
If I downloaded a trainset in game will it be converted to 32bpp?

Yes, sure it can be downloaded ingame. It's not a NewGRF, so you'll need to go to the general content download and you'll find it in the base sets section. If you use any train NewGRF it won't be converted to 32bpp, though. A trainset would need to provide 32bpp sprites itself. You'll likely only have 32bpp trains, if you play vanilla OpenTTD without NewGRFs and use zBase as your base set.

[mausie]

When I check for zBase at the ''online content'' I can not find it.
Is it still there? Am I doing something wrong here?

[planetmaker]

When I check for zBase at the ''online content'' I can not find it.
Is it still there? Am I doing something wrong here?

I just checked... zBase indeed doesn't show available with OpenTTD 1.2.x in the online content, but does so with 1.3.0-beta and later. Much to my surprise as OpenTTD 1.2.x is able to use it, at least 1.2.3 satisfyingly. That must be due to it being marked as available for 1.3.x and later only on the content server itself. Not sure that I could easily change that... I'll talk to the owner of that entry.

For now, just grab the beta or a new nightly and download it. Then you should be able to use it afterwards also with OpenTTD 1.2.x. Or you just upgrade to the beta anyway

[krinn]

zbase is shown with openttd 1.2.3
but as you said, only from main menu / content download

[planetmaker]

zbase is shown with openttd 1.2.3
but as you said, only from main menu / content download

He, nice. I checked with 1.2.2 So its version setting is quite appropriate and as it should be