Video Problem
by Mike Wright · in Torque Game Builder · 05/19/2007 (8:13 am) · 5 replies
I have some beta testers playing our game and a few of them are saying the video playback is having problems. The game seems to stutter for some testers, and for others, the mouse doesn't react in a timely manner. I believe it is because they have older video cards in their system but I may be wrong. I need to be able to cater to people with older video cards because I am aiming for the casual game market.
The game we are creating is a simple "Seek and Find" game. We have a background image loaded as a static sprite and about 100 smaller static sprites loaded as the objects that need to be found in the scene. There are also some map screens that remain loaded into memory. I am wondering if this is too much for older video cards to handle? Also, I have read some old posts about chunked images being used to help older video cards handle the load and I was wondering if anyone had any insight on whether this might help out with our game?
Thanks
The game we are creating is a simple "Seek and Find" game. We have a background image loaded as a static sprite and about 100 smaller static sprites loaded as the objects that need to be found in the scene. There are also some map screens that remain loaded into memory. I am wondering if this is too much for older video cards to handle? Also, I have read some old posts about chunked images being used to help older video cards handle the load and I was wondering if anyone had any insight on whether this might help out with our game?
Thanks
#2
Is there anyone that had success publishing a casual game on the major portals with TGB as the engine? If so, is there a way to overcome the video card limitation?
Thanks
05/19/2007 (4:27 pm)
Thanks for the info Marc. Unfortunately this doesn't bode well for our situation. When we started production on our game, I choose TGB for our engine. It is a casual game and I thought since TGB was a 2D engine, it would work well for the casual gamer. I think many casual gamers probably have low to mid end graphics cards in their systems. I guess I needed to reseach it more before I made the decision. Is there anyone that had success publishing a casual game on the major portals with TGB as the engine? If so, is there a way to overcome the video card limitation?
Thanks
#3
The main things you can do are:
0.5: tell the user to update their drivers. Especially on Intel this is vital and makes a ground breaking difference
1. Small textures (<= 512x512 at max)
2. Square, power of two textures, will already help. Try to avoid the auto splitting feature for cells as it will create overhead
3. don't use more sprites than you need just because you don't want to design it using less :)
4. check the actual RAM / VRAM usage. you might need to implement some manual clean up routines to make it more "stone age compatible" (might sound harsh but there are people dreaming that 256 or 512 MB RAM + WinXP + gaming is an acceptable combination and I fear this is the main reason it gets slow as TGB can eat up to 300-500MB RAM if you don't enforce cleanups)
That are the general ones.
Worst case is: use the DX one for those systems and see if it helps in cases the driver is totally OpenGL incompatible. (S3, SiS)
Worst case cause it is already significantly slower on its own without the bad graphic chipsets.
If casuals had any graphic cards at all this wouldn't be a problem. But SiS onboard for example are no graphic cards out of any real users view. They are an interface that maps the desktop buffer onto some ports to connect to a display at best ...
Because the cards used in regular
05/19/2007 (4:59 pm)
There have been a few published games some even here on GG.The main things you can do are:
0.5: tell the user to update their drivers. Especially on Intel this is vital and makes a ground breaking difference
1. Small textures (<= 512x512 at max)
2. Square, power of two textures, will already help. Try to avoid the auto splitting feature for cells as it will create overhead
3. don't use more sprites than you need just because you don't want to design it using less :)
4. check the actual RAM / VRAM usage. you might need to implement some manual clean up routines to make it more "stone age compatible" (might sound harsh but there are people dreaming that 256 or 512 MB RAM + WinXP + gaming is an acceptable combination and I fear this is the main reason it gets slow as TGB can eat up to 300-500MB RAM if you don't enforce cleanups)
That are the general ones.
Worst case is: use the DX one for those systems and see if it helps in cases the driver is totally OpenGL incompatible. (S3, SiS)
Worst case cause it is already significantly slower on its own without the bad graphic chipsets.
If casuals had any graphic cards at all this wouldn't be a problem. But SiS onboard for example are no graphic cards out of any real users view. They are an interface that maps the desktop buffer onto some ports to connect to a display at best ...
Because the cards used in regular
#4
05/21/2007 (5:01 am)
I have a Radeon 9800 XT with 256Mb VRAM, and TGB stutters even when running the fish demo or the shooter tutorial games. It only stutters in windowed mode though, when I run fullscreen it is smooth. 
#5
05/21/2007 (10:27 am)
@Conor, that sounds like a VSYNC issue. IIRC in fullscreen VSYNC is on by default. I'm not sure about windowed mode... it may depend on the video card driver settings. 
Torque 3D Owner Marc Dreamora Schaerer
Gayasoft
If they have no 3D card and need to use software fallback / DirectX (both is similar slow), they need to have a fairly fast cpu to handle the 2D through 3D of TGB as TGB is not 2D but fully 3D accelerated.