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Wolfgange

Member
I can't get Terasology to work. If someone responds I can give more information. I got a recent Terasology and ran it. I could generate a world, but the screen would be black and after about 5 min. the sky would come and eventually like three blocks in front of me. Then I can't move with any keys at all. I can't even press escape to close it. I can play minecraft with low settings at up to 60 fps, but at 100% high setings at about 8 fps. Specs:
AMD Anthlon dual core processor, 1gb RAM, Windows XP, running Windows XP with optimal settings (no themes, using game booster), JRE7, nvidea graphics card, 2 displays. If requested, I might be able to get other information.

Thanks in advanced.
 

Cervator

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Hi Wolfgange :)

The best thing to help us figure out what your problem is should live in the /logs subdir in the directory you ran Terasology from. Usually your video card (what is the exact model?) doesn't get along with some of the fancy shaders. Although in recent versions the game should start on low settings. What is the exact build you downloaded? Try the latest at http://www.movingblocks.net:8080/jenkin ... erasology/ and see if it works any better :)

My initial suspicion is that your system specs sound somewhat aged, to where your video card might be too old / be an integrated chipset with poor OpenGL support. The logs will help confirm that - paste the whole file contents to http://pastebin.com or so and put the link here please
 

Wolfgange

Member
Link: http://pastebin.com/eeEFVHQZ
Thanks for replying so quickly :) !I know on Minecraft I can play with advanced OpenGL on and it works (because I can see it not rendering other parts when I turn around quickly). More Specs:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional, AMD Anthlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+, 1022MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6200.

I tried it with a later build and it worked.... sorta. I got about 1 frame per minute. Unless somethings conflicting with one of my video cards or something, I think its just my specs. I wonder why it seems like Terasology has such bad performance versus Minecraft (because a comment on youtube said they got 40 fps on Minecraft and 4 fps on here). I think it would be a good Idea to either have a setting for resolution so I could make it like 800x600 or less, or allow the change of window sizee with or without keeping the same ratio. Maybe either me in the future or someone will be able to do some rewrite to make more effecient shaders and rendering settings. Also, OpenGL might be a future option to help performance.
 

Cervator

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... so I shot myself in the foot on that one, forgetting that pastebin is blocked here at work :D

Yeah we have quite a few tweaks to pull before arriving at consistent performance across many different machines. I wonder if your memory might also be a bottleneck? Especially if the video card is the 256 MB type. If you press F3 while you have the game up some debug text should show up at the top including memory usage. That might give you a clue.

Easy support for lower res might be a good idea. I think we might actually have a setting for that, but still buried in internal config and not in the UI yet :)

On the default settings you should be running on low, not sure how many of the fancy shaders are still enabled there. We're already using OpenGL, so not sure what you mean as that being a future option for performance? :D

I can look at the log when I get home tonight, or somebody else may be able to spot something sooner :)
 

Wolfgange

Member
Oh, I didn't see that in the options so I assumed advanced OpenGL support wasn't there. I'm sorry, I just couldn't tell while playing my "interactive slideshow" as I call it on my computer lol :laugh: . I printed the screen in-game with the debug info and tried to attached it, but it doesn't allow uploading a bmp. Also, I'm pretty sure like you said there's still many shaders in the "ugly" settings. I saw the water reflecting the sun (I think it's called bumpmapping) and I think I saw smooth shading even!! I never heard of a Minecraft clone having to program rough shading!Lol.
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
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Hehe, no worries! I can now look at the pastebin log and it doesn't look like you had any shaders misbehave. It might just be that your machine is at the bottom end of what the current not-super-optimized code can support :)

I don't really need the F3 debug info, but thought if you had it up and waited a few "slides" you might be able to spot the memory usage and get a clue to whether that might relate - which it probably does with only 1 GB system memory and a quarter of that on the video card

On the plus side I hear from Kai and Begla that a new chunk caching technique might be going in sometime tomorrow that may help memory usage by compressing some of the not-immidiately-needed data in memory. Stuff like that will likely hit now and then over time, so it may be that the game works much better if you check back later. In the meantime you might be somewhat out of luck - but we'll try to make the performance tweaks when able + more config to start at lower resolutions etc :)
 

Kai Kratz

Witch Doctor
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Cervator said:
Hehe, no worries! I can now look at the pastebin log and it doesn't look like you had any shaders misbehave. It might just be that your machine is at the bottom end of what the current not-super-optimized code can support :)

I don't really need the F3 debug info, but thought if you had it up and waited a few "slides" you might be able to spot the memory usage and get a clue to whether that might relate - which it probably does with only 1 GB system memory and a quarter of that on the video card

On the plus side I hear from Kai and Begla that a new chunk caching technique might be going in sometime tomorrow that may help memory usage by compressing some of the not-immidiately-needed data in memory. Stuff like that will likely hit now and then over time, so it may be that the game works much better if you check back later. In the meantime you might be somewhat out of luck - but we'll try to make the performance tweaks when able + more config to start at lower resolutions etc :)
Sorry to burst your bubble there, caching change wont affect this. Currently we do not cover the low end of machines very well. Even on ugly there are quite some shaders running. Getting Terasology to run on low end hardware is definitely important to us but to start working on this topic we need to work on other things first. Sorry I don't think there will be an immediate fix :(
 

Wolfgange

Member
Yeah I understand, I'll keep track of the development though and check every now and then for improvements in performance. This is sort of off topic, but I just wanted to say I think the Terrain generation is SO much better than real Minecraft's. I also hate how there's 99.99% no trees in mountain Biomes, but in Terasology there is I think. Plus, the Mountains in Terasology are much better generated than Minecraft. I'm not sure who to compliment on that, but they did a really nice job on the generation :) .
 

Kai Kratz

Witch Doctor
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Wolfgange said:
Yeah I understand, I'll keep track of the development though and check every now and then for improvements in performance. This is sort of off topic, but I just wanted to say I think the Terrain generation is SO much better than real Minecraft's. I also hate how there's 99.99% no trees in mountain Biomes, but in Terasology there is I think. Plus, the Mountains in Terasology are much better generated than Minecraft. I'm not sure who to compliment on that, but they did a really nice job on the generation :) .
Hi Wolfgange,

your praises for the terrain generation should go to Begla :)

It would be very nice if you check the Terrasology project from time to time, every feedback is welcome! And besides I feel with you. I have a low end machine at home myself, cant get it to run at more than 4fps. So its in my personal interest to improve support for low end machines. :)
 

Wolfgange

Member
Yeah, I probably will go out soon and spend like a hundred dollars or more to get new computer parts. What do you reccomend would get the best performance increase in general? (Minecraft, Terasology, or anything like that) No one has to answer because its sort of off topic again, but I already posted my specs so it would be nice for someones opinion for weather I should get a new graphics card, more cpu, or more RAM. Thanks everyone!
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
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Honestly, you're not going to get a lot more performance out of your existing machine. Your two main options (that may help):

1) More ram - 1 more GB may help a good amount. Depends on how many more ram sticks you can fit on your motherboard, and what type they are. Old enough ram may be tricky to find :)
2) New (old) video card - you've probably still got an AGP slot for video card, limiting your options to old video cards that may also be hard to find.

You probably don't want to pay more than $50 for either of those options, but honestly it probably would be better to get a whole new case for $300-500 with modern hardware, waste of money to do minor upgrades you can't reuse :)
 
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