StuartK
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File: drodb42dats.rar (402 KB)
Downloaded 51 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

These ones were slightly different (for me) DROD was extremely slow starting (maybe a minute or two) and I was tempted to just kill the task, but I left it instead, and eventually the main menu came up. Once again, I forgot to set up my batch file (OK, everybody promise not to hire me as a beta tester ) after getting rid of my previous build 42, so there's no before-and-after snapshot. What I did do though, was copy the .dats while DROD was on the main screen, before I did anything else, after which I quit straight away and made another copy. After starting again, the hold list appeared blank, so maybe it's text.dat corruption this time.

In the task list, one of the running tasks, I noticed, was using nearly 100% CPU - the AOL client I had running at the time (not my choice of ISP, but I try not to be a snob, and since I get it for free I'm not complaining) Quitting and restarting fixed it, but I don't know if it was a cause or effect of the DROD crash. Anyway, how well does DROD handle having only limited CPU, with other tasks running in the background?

I then quit, and made another copy, so there's two sets of dats this time, though they'll probably both be equally unrevealing.

ErikH2000
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StuartK wrote:
Anyway, how well does DROD handle having only limited CPU, with other tasks running in the background?

It gets slow or makes CPU-competing apps slow. I admit the game is a CPU hog, and not well-suited to multi-tasking. Earlier we had DROD giving up more time to other apps, but at the expense of responsiveness. Although technically DROD is a very simple game, it does do a few intensive things like respond to commands and update the screen at 60 fps.

Some of our problem is probably that we have abstracted access to the operating system by using the SDL library. When we receive user input, it must come through SDL instead of directly from Windows, which means message polling combined with extra translation work performed by SDL. So I'm not sure how much we can do about the big CPU usage of DROD.

I'll do some tests under low CPU conditions to see if I can recreate corruption. Please also upgrade to build 43, since Mike had a pretty good hunch about fixing the text-loss bug.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

agaricus5
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ErikH2000 wrote:

StuartK wrote:
Anyway, how well does DROD handle having only limited CPU, with other tasks running in the background?

It gets slow or makes CPU-competing apps slow. I admit the game is a CPU hog, and not well-suited to multi-tasking. Earlier we had DROD giving up more time to other apps, but at the expense of responsiveness. Although technically DROD is a very simple game, it does do a few intensive things like respond to commands and update the screen at 60 fps.

I agree - even on my computer, with a 2.0GHz processor, it does use up around 30 - 40% of the processing power on average, and even sometimes uses up to 80% when I'm playing it. Since this is so on my computer, how do people with slower processors play DROD?

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ErikH2000
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agaricus5 wrote:
I agree - even on my computer, with a 2.0GHz processor, it does use up around 30 - 40% of the processing power on average, and even sometimes uses up to 80% when I'm playing it. Since this is so on my computer, how do people with slower processors play DROD?

Okay, I spoke too soon. DROD doesn't really need 30% of your CPU. It is just rendering extra frames because the algorithm is to collect input/draw to the screen as many times as it can. So maybe you were getting 90fps when you only really needed 60fps.

I changed it. There is still a problem, particularly in windowed mode, that DROD needs to make frequent updates for the game to be responsive. On my 800mhz machine, windowed mode DROD takes up 80% of CPU. However, with the fix that appears in the next build, it should partially alleviate CPU usage in two ways:

1. DROD won't try to draw more frames than it needs to, effectively yielding more time to other applications.
2. DROD will take up less CPU if you reduce your key repeat rate setting. Putting the slider in the middle will make DROD less respond to only 30 commands per second and draw at 30fps, which also yields more time to other applications.

There are performance problems with windowed mode that we know about. It is probable they will be fixed in the release after DROD:AE.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

ErikH2000
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Also if anyone is running slow in windowed mode, try setting video mode to 24-bit. Trick pointed out that we aren't converting our surfaces to the same format as the video display, and this is slowing performance. So changing your video mode to 24-bit should cause less conversion work.

We'll fix it later. This is just a workaround.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

agaricus5
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1838
Registered: 02-04-2003
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I'm still getting window flickering and the problem where part of the window pastes itself somewhere else for a short period though.

____________________________
Resident Medic/Mycologist