New graphic engine and system requiqments.

[Horse]

When new graphics engine is done how is it with the system requiqments.
Is it for some people not longer possible to play.
Or will the game no longer work fluence like Sims 2.

[peter1138]

How long is a piece of string?

[toholio]

How long is a piece of string?

It is exactly twice the distance from the middle to one end.

[MeusH]

Excuse me? What's going on!

@Horse, we will see when it's donem at least in half - I just can say bigger sprites take longer to load and may eat more memory, but much more memory will be used to feed new map array.

[}T{Reme [Q_G]]

Ah... he's worried that the 32-bit graphics version of OTTD will require you to have 2 gigs of ram, a 3.5GHz cpu and a video card with atleast 512 mb of ram. Highly doubt it... there are still a bunch of things still available to be optimized. (One for example being that widgets are constantly being redrawn every frame, instead of when a change occurs. Some good old window buffering should fix that)

[chairface]

That and we're still talking simple *sprites*, aren't we? I mean, it's not gonna be on-the-fly 3d rendered trains, is it? Cuz, uh, while that would be frickin' awesome and all, it seems to me like it'd both hurt the feel of TT a lot, and potentially be hard to do without unreasonable system requirements (given that TTD originally ran fine on my 486.)

[bobingabout]

still sprites, if you can call these sprites. they are a little more complex than your average sprite.

[Alltaken]

(given that TTD originally ran fine on my 486.)

well i dobt it would run on a 486. nor should we expect it to.

i would say a 1Ghz with 800x600 screen would be good (proabbly less power with that screen size owuld run fine)

it effects the speed of Fast Forward mode. and it is largely determined by how large the window/screen is. i.e. my 1600x1200 screen needs way more power to run it than a 800x600 screen (naturally 4 times i would think)

so who knows.

Alltaken

[oboka]

Anyway we should expect to spend a lot more memory and a lot more CPU to draw the screen. At this moment all sprites are stored in RAM with no problem, because all sprites don't waste too much memory. 32bit sprites are much more memory consuming, and I think not all of them could be stored in RAM.

[Horse]

I mean it becomes harder than the biggest maps must smaller.

I like he large size of the maps now.

And when your transport company becomes huge how difficult is it than to make the make works fluence.

when a games makes every second a pause the playablity will get down a lot.

[Alltaken]

nobody knows till we have made it.

you will always be able to play on the old version of OTTD without new GFX, or possibly play the new version with old GFX.

Alltaken

[}T{Reme [Q_G]]

i would say a 1Ghz with 800x600 screen would be good (proabbly less power with that screen size owuld run fine)
Alltaken

Not everyone has 1Ghz *shrug*.... for dual cpu / dual core / HT users... why not place the pathfinder in a seperate thread?

[Alltaken]

Not everyone has 1Ghz *shrug*.... for dual cpu / dual core / HT users... why not place the pathfinder in a seperate thread?

not everyone has a computer.... should we make a boardgame too

not to sound harsh, but i think 1Ghz is a perfectly reasonable "design goal" i.e. if we aim to hit that speed we will probably still have it working for lower ones, but we should have more than 99% of all the players included.

700-800 Mhz are currently over 7 years old and can be picked up for free or very cheap at scrap shops, i don't think its unreasonable to expect people to be on better computers than that.

BTW i have no idea what system requirements it will meet, but basicly i would hope it would work on a 1Ghz computer. if its better than that is even better.

Alltaken

[Yoeri]

and how will the game handle when more and more trains, trucks and boats
get in? i had a game on a 1024*1024 with 600 vehicles , and it did't go that
smoothly, wich i didn't like because i like large complex games (and who doens't?)

[Alltaken]

and how will the game handle when more and more trains, trucks and boats
get in? i had a game on a 1024*1024 with 600 vehicles , and it did't go that
smoothly, wich i didn't like because i like large complex games (and who doens't?)

well i have never in my life played above 256x256, so i wouldn't know either way.....

AFAIK the code can be made a lot more efficient in lots of places (i am not a coder).

but basicly the answer is.... the 32bpp engine "will not preform on slow machines as the 8bpp version does" and it will most likely slow down large games to a certain degree.

nothing we can really do about that.

Alltaken

[}T{Reme [Q_G]]

Not everyone has 1Ghz *shrug*.... for dual cpu / dual core / HT users... why not place the pathfinder in a seperate thread?

not to sound harsh, but i think 1Ghz is a perfectly reasonable "design goal" i.e. if we aim to hit that speed we will probably still have it working for lower ones, but we should have more than 99% of all the players included.

700-800 Mhz are currently over 7 years old and can be picked up for free or very cheap at scrap shops, i don't think its unreasonable to expect people to be on better computers than that.

Alltaken

Lol well.. mine's a dual 733 *shrug*.. can run doom3 fine tho... which has a requirement of 1.2 gigs or so... however I did notice the game slowing down when reaching some 400+ trains in a game... since drawing is done using software (x / gdi / ddraw / etc, depending on sdl and such)... I would really like to see the pathfinder to be multithreaded... now I havent even touched the pathfinder... so.. for any pathfinding gurus out there... would it be possible? Would it be possible to make it thread-safe?

AFAIK the code can be made a lot more efficient in lots of places (i am not a coder)

You are right about that.. made some minor optimizations myself.. but a LOT could be improved.

but basicly the answer is.... the 32bpp engine "will not preform on slow machines as the 8bpp version does" and it will most likely slow down large games to a certain degree.

True...

[lucaspiller]

Making more stuff multithreaded is planned, but at the moment there are quite a few bugs in the system.

Also please people, no more saying 'my system can run Doom 3 / Half Life 2 / <insert your favourite FPS here> in best quality settings but OpenTTD runs really slowly' stuff. FPS games are just graphically intensive, they need to do hardly any calculations. OpenTTD is far more CPU intensive than these, as it has to do calculations for all sorts of stuff that FPS games couldn't even dream of.

[Kong Basse]

I remember in the erly 90's when a friend of mine bought a 3D accelerator with 2MB graphic ram, that realy changed the gameplay to the better on his 386 running at 33MHz. After that one year of gameplay took about one hour.
I think its a bit dumb to critisize the devs about how its will work on old machines long before its finish. When Ottd is in version 1.0 then it could be that the majority of the players has a dual core CPU, with an 64 bit OS running. -Remember, even how slow youre machine you got (that includes "machines" with Palm OS, i486, playstation(1) any many more) you can always go back and play a older version of Transport Tycoon.

So let the devs continue with whatever they are doing

[jvassie]

The good old 8mb Hard Drives come to mind!

James

[bobingabout]

I've still got my 386 33MHz computer. not used it in while though. it had 4Mb RAM and a 20Mb hard drive. i upgraded it to a 400Mb hard drive and 8M RAM...
t'was awsome.