Sparks off by default

[dlh]

And now for something off-topic: Jonathan, can you enter ü, ä and all those other characters in-game? Whenever I try (option-u, u for example), the game freezes.

And along the same lines (but to everyone), can you enter characters like ^? I can't :-\

[Jonathan]

And now for something off-topic: Jonathan, can you enter ü, ä and all those other characters in-game? Whenever I try (option-u, u for example), the game freezes.

Doesn't respond to option-u and enters a normal u after pressing just u.

And along the same lines (but to everyone), can you enter characters like ^? I can't :-\

I can.

Part of screenshot showing several things:

[dlh]

Ah, I meant not in chat. The default console key is ^, and that doesn't work for me. I can enter ^ in chat too

[Jonathan]

Indeed key bindings don't work...

[Phytotron]

Well, as I posted somewheres in Support, I get a rather awful framerate -- with all details turned all the way down or completely off (depending on what option the menu gives), including of course, sparks. The best I get hovers around 25-30 fps in Breakfast in Hell. Most other places I'm in the teens, and if there are 6 or more players I'll drop to single digits. I've talked to other Mac users, including those who have better hardware than I, and they get low fps as well. Meanwhile, people with old, crappy PC's will report 60-100+ fps -- with various details and the moviepack on. It seems, then, that this may be something unique to Macs. I'm not enough of a geek to speculate on what could be the cause, however.

And yeah, I think it turns away some Mac users. The game is nearly unplayable in the teens, especially if you want to throw down any kind of quick moves. A person can't even tell whether they might be or become any good at the game, because the framerate won't allow them to find out, you know?

It's just strange to me that such a graphically simple game should have framerate issues like this. I've got other games on here with equal or higher quality graphics, and they're fine. A lot of Macs are coming bundled with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 now, for instance, and that's usually smooth too.

It's just a shame.

[iceman]

thanks z-man but i'll stick with my old 0260 hybrid

i'll keep sparks disabled as they dont seem to serve any purpose anyway. do they ?

[dlh]

Well, as I posted somewheres in Support, I get a rather awful framerate -- with all details turned all the way down or completely off (depending on what option the menu gives), including of course, sparks. The best I get hovers around 25-30 fps in Breakfast in Hell. Most other places I'm in the teens, and if there are 6 or more players I'll drop to single digits. I've talked to other Mac users, including those who have better hardware than I, and they get low fps as well. Meanwhile, people with old, crappy PC's will report 60-100+ fps -- with various details and the moviepack on. It seems, then, that this may be something unique to Macs. I'm not enough of a geek to speculate on what could be the cause, however.

The problem is SDL. The Mac OS X version is very slow compared to other platforms.

[Z-Man]

Hmm. I did not know about the SDL speed issue. AA currently polls SDL for input really often, for example before every game object timestep. (The reason for this is that we get more accurate timing information for keypresses.) That makes these polls a lot more frequent when sparks are enabled and explains Jonathan's observation of the massive drop even when all seemingly relevant code is removed.
Nemo and Jonathan: could you open up src/ui/uInputQueue.cpp, uncomment the contents of su_FetchAndStoreSDLInput() and see if there is a performance increase with sparks enabled? It already does nothing on Windows, so chances the change will break anything are minimal.

Iceman: yes, they are pure eye candy, although they are full game objects by inheritance. A mildly terrible abuse

[Lucifer]

How much is SDL used right now? As in, how easy would it be to throw a few abstracting functions over the SDL calls? That would theoretically make it possible to make native OS calls for some platforms where SDL might be a problem....

[Z-Man]

Not too much. Littered across the project are only references to the SDL data structures for input, but they are just structs and could be faked. Of course, replacing screen initialization and sound and the input gathering itself would be tons of work; If the problem is only the input, it would be possible to let SDL do the initialization and grab the native window handle or whatever it is called from it and use that directly. That's how OpenGL worked in SDL 1.0.

[Jonathan]

Nemo and Jonathan: could you open up src/ui/uInputQueue.cpp, uncomment the contents of su_FetchAndStoreSDLInput() and see if there is a performance increase with sparks enabled? It already does nothing on Windows, so chances the change will break anything are minimal.

That fixed it! 120 fps after 4 seconds of close grinding!

[dlh]

Yes, much better, but still not that great for me. With sparks and 3 bots: ~25fps. With more bots, my fps went back into the ~10 range.

[juwb]

Well, purpose of sparks... they show that you're close to a wall and speeding up. This is especially helpful if you play a) without sound b) camera really far away.

I'd like to see a low-cost optical alternative to sparks, maybe as a static model (bike raising a flag, or spikes, or whatever).

I have no idea about programming, but the game already has markings similar to that (white arrow on the floor, yellow pyramid floating above), so hopefully this can be done?

I'll take anything that works with my 8 poly bike