The airstrikes are good, except for the fact that the bombers always come in at the same angle---thus making it very hard to hit certain targets.

If the angle of the incoming bombers were randomized, they'd be much more useful.

Just registered this game, and I have a lot of problems with the Yard level as well.
I do not think this is an OpenGL problem since setting the graphics lower or higher doesn't effect the framerate at all (an yes, I hit "apply"). Also, many Mac optimized games run at blazing speed. It seems Darwinia drains the CPU.

Anyway, I'm using v1.1.0, and except for the terrible slowdowns when destroying an ant hill (it is impossible to do anything until the 'souls' disappeared) I also have problems with controlling the 'battle cannons'. The view shakes when shooting, and eventually shakes so much I do not see anything and am forced to hit space. With a low framerate the shocking is so intense immediately that it is simply impossible to control a cannon.
I do not like this at all, especially because my G4 1.25 GHz with a Radeon 9000 should handle this game with ease even when not optimized.

If this is skipped in beta testing I guess they'll need to recruit new testers or give the testers more time. These are not bugs you can possibly ignore :p.

Leen, on May 3 2005, 01:48 AM, said:

...Anyway, I'm using v1.1.0, and except for the terrible slowdowns when destroying an ant hill (it is impossible to do anything until the 'souls' disappeared) I also have problems with controlling the 'battle cannons'. The view shakes when shooting, and eventually shakes so much I do not see anything and am forced to hit space. With a low framerate the shocking is so intense immediately that it is simply impossible to control a cannon...
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This is a known bug and appears to be tied to low framerates. It should be fixed with the patch. Until then, you should be able to get by with the debug camera. To put the camera into debug mode, hit (F2) twice (possibly only once, depending on what mode your camera was in to begin). This will lock the camera into position -- i.e. it will not track to mouse. WASD all work about like normal, and using a right-click will allow you to rotate the camera. If you do not have a right mouse button, set up the camera before you put it into debug mode (I think that there is a way to emulate the right-click, but I do not know what it is, right off). With the camera locked, you should be able to fire the cannons without the shaking.

xander

Leen, on May 2 2005, 06:48 PM, said:

Just registered this game, and I have a lot of problems with the Yard level as well.
I do not think this is an OpenGL problem since setting the graphics lower or higher doesn't effect the framerate at all (an yes, I hit "apply"). Also, many Mac optimized games run at blazing speed. It seems Darwinia drains the CPU.

Actually, there are quite a few problems with the OpenGL implementation on the Mac. Just look at the major fuss made over Doom 3 recently. Even with a giant TEAM of optimizers and people from Apple helping, they still got crap performance. I'm not exactly sure why the graphics settings aren't having much effect. They usually have at least 2-3fps change for me.

If you aren't already using Tiger, I'd recommend upgrading since people have reported much better framerates on it. The reason Darwinia is so CPU bound is because there's quite a lot of AI going on behind the scenes. This sort of thing is incredibly hard to optimize. Especially for a small team of 3 developers who don't work for a major company.

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Anyway, I'm using v1.1.0, and except for the terrible slowdowns when destroying an ant hill (it is impossible to do anything until the 'souls' disappeared) I also have problems with controlling the 'battle cannons'. The view shakes when shooting, and eventually shakes so much I do not see anything and am forced to hit space. With a low framerate the shocking is so intense immediately that it is simply impossible to control a cannon.
I do not like this at all, especially because my G4 1.25 GHz with a Radeon 9000 should handle this game with ease even when not optimized.

Some of these issues should be fixed in the upcoming patch, and the improved OpenGL implementation in Tiger should help as well, if you get a chance to install that.

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If this is skipped in beta testing I guess they'll need to recruit new testers or give the testers more time. These are not bugs you can possibly ignore :p.
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I'm really getting annoyed with people blaming the beta testers for this. You think we could miss something like that? Of course not.

The problem is that there was only one person working on the Mac port, instead a large team of people like you get in commercial games. It's a completely different situation (not to mention a completely different type of game then most) so it's not really very fair to compare it to commercial games, or to just throw around blame without understanding the full situation.

The camera debug works! Seems I can give it another try...

I already use Tiger. I don't think it has a better OpenGL implementation; I didn't see framerate improvements in any game. Why I think this issue isn't solely the blame of OpenGL is that a lot of Mac optimized games run faster on a mac than they could ever on an x86 machine.

Ancarne said:

I'm really getting annoyed with people blaming the beta testers for this. You think we could miss something like that? Of course not.

Then why isn't this issue addressed properly? I mean, people could register the game and get very pissed. It is not about 'understanding the full situation', it is like 'why releasing something that doesn't work as advertised in the demo' (yet)? You'd better notice it beforehand, or include something like that in the demo.

The AI isn't that heavy here. If I make 1000 darwinians or kill all virii without making darwinians I do not get a noticable speed change. Destroying an ant hill, causing 'dumb', non AI 'souls' to overwhelm did decrease the framerate to a crawl. This is NOT related to OpenGL since the framerate is equal if the souls are not in view; 2-3 fps.
This is not to piss you off but stating what I see here to hopefully speed up solving this problem :).

Apparently the code to handle the spirits has been re-written to be significantly more efficient. This should stop the annoyances when killing ant nests. Seems mad it was so inefficient beforehand but what the hey, it's fixed in the (unreleased as yet) patch.

Leen, on May 5 2005, 02:33 AM, said:

This is not to piss you off but stating what I see here to hopefully speed up solving this problem :).
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I don't mind constructive discussion like this. It was just the comment about needing better beta testers that annoyed me. I really want to try and solve the framerate issues as much as you do, and any ideas anyone has are welcome.

Andcarne, on May 5 2005, 02:10 PM, said:

It was just the comment about needing better beta testers that annoyed me.

My meaning when posting that was merely that the purpose of beta-testing is to fix precisely this sort of issue before the release, and it seems to have failed in that regard. It wasn't a slam on any particular beta-testers.

Andcarne, on May 5 2005, 04:10 PM, said:

I don't mind constructive discussion like this. It was just the comment about needing better beta testers that annoyed me. I really want to try and solve the framerate issues as much as you do, and any ideas anyone has are welcome.
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I'm glad to hear that. The thing that actually came into my mind is what I described before, about this slowdown being known (or not?) and not stated in the readme or so; which let me to a remark about beta testers. Sorry for that!

That the souls code has been optimized is very nice! I can't input more ideas as that OpenGL isn't the issue at my machine appearantly, and the AI isn't as well (so it seems). I'll put my observations in a list and hope people can add to that, sorry for the repeat:

• On low fps levels; decreasing or increasing graphic quality has no noticable effect on the framerate with my ATI Radeon 9000. Zooming in also doesn't increase it, even if I zoom in to a single ground 'triangle'. If I zoom far out my framerate gets worse, but then the graphics settings DO have effect.
  My conclusion: the low fps in levels is not caused by the graphic settings. I reach the limits of the graphic card when I zoom out though.

• On low fps levels destroying viruses doesn't have a noticable effect on the framerate as well. Creating thousands of 'darwinians' also doesn't. Leaves me with the conclusion that the AI isn't the bottleneck I'm experiencing on my machine.

• High fps levels are smaller worlds, often without too much moving things. This is strange, since graphic settings and the AI doesn't seem to have an effect (or I must miss some things), what else is the bottleneck?

• SOLVED * Destroying an Ant hill will kill the framerate due to the many souls that come free. The framerate still stays terrible even if you have the souls far out of view or zoom in to a single terrain triangle.

• SOLVED * Low framerates + controlling a 'Battle Cannon' causes the camera to go out of controll almost instantly. On higher framerates this takes longer, the shocks only slowly get worse. Probably a shooting effect that needs to be rewritten?

• Not at all experienced by me * I haven't seen a single crash of the game on Tiger. I never had the problem with corrupt savegames as well. I play one or two levels (sometimes with a reset level) a time, and I can't let a level unfinished before quitting the game. I only did this twice with the Yard level because of the slowdowns and it started where I left off like usual.

My specs:
G4 MDD 1.25 GHz (single) with 1024 MB of RAM
ATI Radeon 9000 PRO video card, 64 MB
15 GB free harddrive space on the boot volume. Darwinia is like my other games in the /Games folder.
Operating system: Tiger 10.4, backup and an erase and install. No stuff from 10.3 can possibly haunt my drive. I started playing Darwinia on Tiger 10.4 at version 1.1.0 because of a InsideMacGames review a few days ago.

Please add, confirm or deny any statement! If only one man is developing, we should provide a clear oversight of what happens so this one man can develop instead of go out hunting for bugs. I hope I'm not opting an irritating idea :unsure: ...

The reason the large worlds cause great slowdowns is because in the current release of Darwinia they aren't using display lists. This means the CPU has to do large amounts of unnecessary work.

This is somewhat fixed in the patch. They've moved to using buffered vertex objects, which while not quite as good actually work on the Mac version.

Apple's OpenGL is significantly improved on Tiger too. It seems possible they have fixed whatever caused the display list bug. I notice quite a speed up in my performance on it myself. (and that's still with version 1.1)

The way the framerate doesn't increase when only looking at a small portion of the map indicates that the hidden surface removal they do in the game is not particularly good.

Leen, on May 5 2005, 04:38 PM, said:

...
...
...
Please add, confirm or deny any statement! If only one man is developing, we should provide a clear oversight of what happens so this one man can develop instead of go out hunting for bugs. I hope I'm not opting an irritating idea :unsure: ...
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Also, remember that this is an Introversion game, not ASW. It might be a good idea to post these bugs on the Mac issues forum on IV's boards -- http://forums.introv...ewforum.php?f=8

I do not know if any of the developers are reading these boards, but I know that they are reading the other.

xander

Lindley, on May 5 2005, 08:39 AM, said:

My meaning when posting that was merely that the purpose of beta-testing is to fix precisely this sort of issue before the release, and it seems to have failed in that regard. It wasn't a slam on any particular beta-testers.
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It was caught, and they spent a while trying to fix it. There was just so much pressure to get the mac version out the door, since it was supposed to be out the same time as the PC release. It was already more then a week late, and they were having troubles finding a solution. People were getting more and more irritated, so it just shipped.

Leen, on May 5 2005, 09:38 AM, said:

Please add, confirm or deny any statement! If only one man is developing, we should provide a clear oversight of what happens so this one man can develop instead of go out hunting for bugs. I hope I'm not opting an irritating idea :unsure: ...
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It's quite a good idea to make up a list. Much easier for the developer to then solve things. And you're right that it makes very little sense in the way the slowdowns are experienced. I'm sure the developers are banging their heads about this as much as we are.

SadMac, on May 5 2005, 11:02 AM, said:

The reason the large worlds cause great slowdowns is because in the current release of Darwinia they aren't using display lists. This means the CPU has to do large amounts of unnecessary work.

Yeah, there were problems with some machines showing all black with display lists, and others working fine. I did get about a 4-5fps speedup on mine by enabling them in an earlier beta, but now I can't seem to get them to work. I suspect they may have been disabled fully in the shipping version.

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This is somewhat fixed in the patch. They've moved to using buffered vertex objects, which while not quite as good actually work on the Mac version.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to have as much of a speed improvement as we'd hope for, but that may just be a result of my horrible machine to start with. I'll give the new version a try on a G5 at school in the next few days.

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The way the framerate doesn't increase when only looking at a small portion of the map indicates that the hidden surface removal they do in the game is not particularly good.
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It appears they aren't doing any culling whatsoever. It may be rather difficult to implement, but I think it's getting necessary. I'll pass that on to the list.

darwinian, on May 5 2005, 03:23 PM, said:

I do not know if any of the developers are reading these boards, but I know that they are reading the other.
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I filter things here and pass them on to the developers over the beta mailing list. If anything it's probably just as good a channel to post it here, if not a better one.

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It was caught, and they spent a while trying to fix it. There was just so much pressure to get the mac version out the door, since it was supposed to be out the same time as the PC release. It was already more then a week late, and they were having troubles finding a solution. People were getting more and more irritated, so it just shipped.

Ah. I don't blame the programmers or testers, then; just the management.

If something has a bug this big, it shouldn't be shipped, deadline or no deadline.....

I agree with that, but it doesn't always work that way. Hopefully it can get patched up soon.

OK, now I've finished the game I have something to add to the list. The AI seems to be a slowdown cause after all, but only under certain circumstances, for example: when your darwinians fire, a lot of them, the game slows down terribly. This is very easily seen in the "Pattern Buffer" level. Using "Battle Cannons" is a nice workaround. Having thousands of darwinians running around the map isn't a problem though. The Ants also slow down the game terribly when attacking or collecting souls. When the ants are just running around they do not slow anything down though.

A very irritating thing is if the framerate drops, grenades and rocket timers stay the same.
The result is that the game tries to sync everything, so when going slower all units are slowed down (they sometimes appear at the place where they should be when walking/traveling at full speed an are warped back in the next frame) grenades and rockets are unusable. You shoot them, they travel a very short distance due to the slowdown but still explode at the time as if the game was running full speed, thus killing your squad.

Leen, on May 18 2005, 07:00 PM, said:

A very irritating thing is if the framerate drops, grenades and rocket timers stay the same.
The result is that the game tries to sync everything, so when going slower all units are slowed down (they sometimes appear at the place where they should be when walking/traveling at full speed an are warped back in the next frame) grenades and rockets are unusable. You shoot them, they travel a very short distance due to the slowdown but still explode at the time as if the game was running full speed, thus killing your squad.
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Agreed, I noted this elsewhere a little while back. It is annoying. Mind you, rockets are no good anyway until they've been upgraded a couple of times - their range is just too short!

Hey All,

Am new to list; was searching out possible solutions to dead standstill frame rate in Pattern Buffer. I do have thousands of darwinians running around, especially on the easier of the two islands at this level - after about 15 seconds of playing Pattern Buffer at this point, the fps averages at less than 1 indefinitely. It does seem to start happening once darwinians start firing. I just registered the game last week; were this a hard copy purchase from a store, I would probably return it due to the total frustration of having to sit and wait minutes at a time for progression of action. I had no frame rate problems on any other level including the Yard. I did notice the mentioned effect of uncontrollable shaking that some of you had experienced w/ the armor/cannon; especially w/ attempting to control the radar dish on some of the levels (perhaps the Mine and Generator levels?).

I do love this game and appreciate the every detail that has been given attention. It is a shame that I cannot continue to play beyond Pattern Buffer. Is it possible to somehow ration out the CPU time spent on multiple tasks and events ocurring simultaneously so as to give preference and majority of CPU effort to that which is happening directly in front of the camera? (mind you, I am not a developer/programmer...)

I sincerely hope there is a solution that is forthcoming, if not already available?; Darwinia has been the only game I play!

Specs: Silver G4, dual 867, 512 RAM, OS 10.2.8

also, I've noticed that turning off the "help" in the options speeds things up, relatively speaking. That is to say, w/ help on, the frame rate would virtually freeze for 10 minutes at a time while Dr. Sepulveda slowly said whatever advice he had to say and then ever so slowly disappeared. W/o the help and constant reminders as to how to draw the symbol for a squad, the frame rate wouldn't freeze up as quickly as before.

Welcome to the club. I think twice before registering a shareware game now not developed, but just distributed by Ambrosia, although I love the game.

Anyway, an update was scheduled for 'early may' so I assume it can arrive at any moment and finally fix those bugs making us very happy after all :).

The update is coming soon, but a couple last minute issues are cropping up. All I can say is to hold on, and we're sorry it's taking this long.