Nintendo DS port (Alpha 6)

[KillerMapper]

I'm happy to see that the coder is back

Well I think you may do this if you want to improve the game:

-free memory by cutting what you can, like you said
-fix the windows dimensions, most windows are too big (finance window for ex.) Just put a max size for all windows, if possible (I don't know how is the code)
-fix the editor menu, which isn't on the touch screen. I saw that there were a tip for switching the screens, but it doesn't works for me.
-adding ctrl option, especially for shared orders (or just find a way for getting shared orders working )
-fix that damn bug when deleting rail road cross (the games crashes when I delete a cross)

For an alpha 7, that should be just great

What you can do more after:

-about the zooms, it's really necessary to keep the low zooms (when you can see a big part of the map)? Seeing the whole map will have a great percentage of crashing the game... Keeping the 2 first levels is enough I think, and could free a few memory...
-add support of using extra memory from linkers which have internal memory (ex: Supercards) or memory extensions like the one used by the web browser (you may need this hardware for that, for tests...)
-maybe create a system to choose what we want to be displayed on the top screen. If I display the map for example, I always can see that the DS continues to calculate the main screen behind (we can see trains passing behind with a little glitch). So if we choose to display the map, the DS will just calculate the map. Since we can't use the stylus on the top screen, I don't use it for viewing the main screen, but the minimap. (but it's my choice). Of course, keep the feature of swapping screens.
-redesign the windows, for being more adapted to the DS screen (new disposition...)

And to finish my post, a question: do you think it's necessary to keep the real-time view when opening a window about a city, a factory, a vehicle...? That slows down the game, and sometimes crashes it, especially when there is a lot of things around the viewed object...

Like you see, there is a lot of thing you can do for enhancing this great game

Good luck for this project

[Sarvesh50]

Ram from slot 2 would be the answer to the memory problem
And it isnt that slow like dominik mentioned

[RedPandaFox]

I know its a long way off but I really cant wait till we can get the music back in the game!!

Seriously, best sound track EVER!

I concider the close up zoom more useful than the wide one, but as killer said, its all personal preference. I never even use the side one. and I find the real time being constant big plus, except for the random crashing.

If there is an update put in place to utilize the external ram I would be happy to go out and get myself some to test it. Any help I can provide for this project I'm more than happy to.

[RedPandaFox]

Ok, technical question time.

Is there a proper debugging mode or console you can view?
I'm having a really big lag issue and I need to pin point it. I use the screen where you hit B twice but it runs past it to quick and you cant pause while in it to locate the problem. I think it mentions something about trying to clear a slot for vehicle 9 at a station? But it unfreezes to quick to work it out and having the transparent background is really annoying on the console.


Thanks,

RedPandaFox

*Edit* Ok, well I found the solution to my lag issue, it seems I had deleted a road that linked two of my industry's and the two trucks that were meant to be travelling between them were stuck (road vehicle 6 and 8 or vehicle 7 and 9 as the game knew them) I corrected the road and all is good again.

Something so simple caused so much lag!

[Fencer1978m]

Is it possible to use newgrf's for vehicle, because the standart vehicle set is boring ? I tried it with openttd grf's but without a result, same with TTD grf's... Any idea how or even if it works ?

[madkat]

First off - great work! I love it

However, I was a-pondering.

Surely there are some runtime resources that could be committed to a slower memory store, i.e. a file on flash, and loaded when required, a bit like a swapfile? It shouldn't be *too* sluggish - there's very little latency so you don't really need to worry about fragmentation unless you're talking about very large amounts of small pieces of data. Sounds and music could probably stream very comfortably off a flash disk - even 32Khz stereo should be alright. As a proof of concept it could be a pretty decent alternative to RAM paks - if you could create a library, it would give homebrew apps the ability to address several Gb of swap space. I'd do it myself but I don't have the time on my hands at the moment.

As an aside, if you're working with waves and want to halve your audio footprint, you can always use the square root of the amplitude (+ a sign bit) to retain accuracy in the lower amplitudes. The only problem is that it harms quiet high frequencies in otherwise loud sections - but you often can't hear such subtleties anyway, and we're talking about DS speakers, not expensive hi-fi equipment.

[iviv]

Is it possible to use newgrf's for vehicle, because the standart vehicle set is boring ? I tried it with openttd grf's but without a result, same with TTD grf's... Any idea how or even if it works ?

The DS has 4Mb of ram. As mentioned earlier in the thread, the newgrf's use around 1Mb of ram, that's 25% of it. And considering this is already mega limited by the lack of RAM, features are being removed to free it up so the game plays better, adding new things is the last thing that needs to be done.

[Alseimik]

You guys do a lot of talk about more RAM for the DS. And it should be possible to add it through the slot-2.

As far as i remembered, the DSLinux team developed a DLDI (I'm still not 100% sure what this is) which could handle almost any ram module in slot-2 device's, also old GBA games with extra RAM.

dominik81, Have you any interrest in this? could it be possible to combine their future into OpenTTD and thereby make RAM enough for the game? As far as i know, their exist modules in 32mb of RAM.

Here's a direct link to the DSlinux wiki page, the section of more RAM:
http://dslinux.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/Run ... _Extra_RAM

I really hope this can be used!

[mrMann]

AFAIK, RAM through slot 2 is a hell of a lot slower than the built-in stuff.

[RedPandaFox]

it may be slower but its better than nothing? If there is any benefit from the slot2 im up for it

[mrMann]

Not necessarily - RAM runs at the speed of the slowest part, and therefore you'd essentially slow the entire thing down. I'm sure that was discussed earlier in the thread.

[Alseimik]

Hm, i didn't find this topic discussed earlier.

But are you sure the they work like one channel of RAM in a computer, that it runs on the slowest ones max? I believe that it must run like 2 channels, that they can have each their speed. I don't know anything about the DS hardware, but i expect it to be like this... Doesn't anyone know anything about this? or do we need to call in underground hackers?

[madkat]

I too would expect that the RAM is addressed separately. Even if it wasn't, it should easily be possible to keep in mind that the first 4Mb are fast and write code to address it appropriately. All we're really talking about is cache layering, where the 4Mb RAM is the lowest level and the filesystem ("swapfile") is the highest level. It should be possible to work on that basis alone, with an option to include Slot-2 RAM as an optional mid-level cache. Windows Vista / 7 roughly speaking do this with ReadyBoost, where a mid-level cache is introduced in the form of a USB flash disk.

Edit: If supporting Slot-2 RAM is difficult, implementing a RAM/Filesystem model would be a good first step.

Edit: I meant Slot-2, not Slot-1 - sorry for the confusion

[Alseimik]

with an option to include Slot-1 RAM as an optional mid-level cache.

Slot-1 RAM, as far as I know, Slot-1 doesn't support RAM of anykind. You will have to use the flash-card, which will be slow as hell. Or, implant a RAM, with a controller which make's it look like a ROM or flash of some kind... That would be difficult! and maybe really slow too, due to the fact that there's maybe a slower data transfer speed in Slot-1 than Slot-2 because no RAM extensions was planned.

[madkat]

with an option to include Slot-1 RAM as an optional mid-level cache.

Slot-1 RAM, as far as I know, Slot-1 doesn't support RAM of anykind. You will have to use the flash-card, which will be slow as hell. Or, implant a RAM, with a controller which make's it look like a ROM or flash of some kind... That would be difficult! and maybe really slow too, due to the fact that there's maybe a slower data transfer speed in Slot-1 than Slot-2 because no RAM extensions was planned.

Sorry, I meant Slot-2

Regarding flash-card, that's what I meant by filesystem - and we're not talking about using it as constant RAM, but as swap space. OSes such as Linux, OS/2, Windows, BSD, etc, don't use swap partitions as RAM for the exact same reason - but they do have swap partitions*. Bear in mind, the biggest killer of random access from a hard disk is seek time: with a flash-card, that's virtually a null issue.

* and have had since before PCs even had 4Mb RAM.

[jky]

Before doing any talk I think it´s better to find out what happened with the coder, it´s been a hell of a lot of time since he´s last post here

[Alseimik]

i was wonderring about that too... but what can we do? Put 4chan up for an egosearch?

[RedPandaFox]

i was wonderring about that too... but what can we do? Put 4chan up for an egosearch?

And you would willingly let anon have access to your DS? I could see it now, every 15 minutes you get a warning "THE GAME"

[Alseimik]

ego-search as in getting 300K+ kids to try out google, and maybe with luck something better. I was just trying to say "how the hell is we going to get our beloved developer back?:("

btw, in your plan, we would at least only loose every second time! My little brother just heard it from somewhere random, and he's killing me with it every 30 min.

[AlexFili]

Not sure about anyone else, but 64x64 and 64x128 are pretty fun to play in. After all, this is only a little taster. This isn't meant to replace the PC version.