Krafen wrote:Debates over the movement speed can be confusing due to the graphic slowdown some people experience. I never experienced any slowdown, so the movement speed was not bad. Walking speed is somewhat slow, but unless I have to retrace my steps a few times, it is not bad. The quick travel and portal spell address most of the retracing, although a few more quick travel spots would probably be good.
If the game slowed down to half speed in towns, I would certainly find it frustrating. In giving feedback, I think we need to be very clear about exactly what it is we are having difficulty with.
I think it's also necessary to quote your computer specs if you're complaining about the game being slow. I remember a little while back we had someone complaining about the way the game ran on his system; it turned out he had a machine that was way under spec.
Edit: that comment wasn't aimed at you, Krafen: it was just continuing from your remark about feedback. However, the post immediately before yours, posted by Frunk, could do with some description of his system.
I highly recommend any Windows users who see the "slow motion" movement in towns or heavily forested areas switch to OpenGL, and definitely try 16-bit color. I personally tested Book I on (approximately) 20 different computers and I was able to get the game running at an "enjoyable" speed on even the oldest of the bunch (a five-year old HP with shitty Intel on-board graphics) by updating the drivers, trying different rendering settings, and putting the game in low detail mode.
Book II is definitely more graphically optimized and runs smoother, but the increased resolution is still going to be a workout for old graphic cards.
I'm using a 64 mb geforce 2 mx with a p4 2.6 ghz. Graphics card sucks, but the processor, ram, everything else far exceeds system reqs.
System Reqs in the help file (These are not listed anywhere that I can find on the webpage...) are as follows for reference:
Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, or Vista
1.8 GHz processor or faster
256MB RAM (512 Recommended)
DirectX 7.0 or later
3D Accelerated Video Card
So technically I meet the requirements.
Switching to opengl / 16 bit in any combination did not help. I also tried messing with the screen refresh rate in the .cfg file.
Lowering it to 30 or 15 just made things even worse, raising it to 90, 120, 180 had no effect.
Most of the complex terrain is static, it doesn't change visually at all except day/night changes which is just another layer. It feels like the game is trying to add all these objects each and every time a turn passes when it really doesn't need to.
GeForce2? I had to look that up...according to Wikipedia that card is 8 years old! It's a true relic in a world of computer peripherals, and it's much older than anything I was able to dig up to test on.
That is definitely a problem, and it is our fault for not recommending something a bit faster, probably a GeForce4 series or better as the minimum. I've discussed some of the technical specs of our engine in other threads so I won't recap it here again, but we are painting a lot of dynamically lit sprites to the screen every frame and that just takes a lot of pixel-pushing. You gotta have a bit stronger graphics card to get the most out of it.
[edit] I just recalled that during development 2 years ago, the video card on one of my test machines pooped out. I went to Wal-Mart and bought a GeForce4 card for $39.95. It worked fine for Eschalon. My point is: why don't you find a cheap replacement for your GeForce2...you can probably find a Geforce5/6 for less than the cost of a new game.
That makes sense- the trees are larger sprites, which means in a dense forest a lot more pixels are being painted on the screen than just a few walls & NPCs in town.
You are correct about WarCraft III: not only does Blizzard have some of the best programmers in the world, they are rendering true 3D scenes which most video cards are optimized for. A 2D sprite-based game has different needs than a 3D game, and optimizations for a 3D rendering don't help 2D games. For example- z-buffer hidden polygon removal, anti-aliasing, mip-mapping, LOD balancing, and texture filtering are just a few of the 3D hardware optimizations that have no effect on our game.
We are doing everything we can to optimize the rendering speed and VRAM usage for the next game, but as we warned, there are a lot more pixels being drawn to the screen in Book II and that's going to probably limit people with video cards older than GeForce4-level tech.
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