SEV question
 

Hi all!

There seems to be a few new posts, is this still the place to post or have people moved over to the other forum?

Its been a while! I have had a lot of work and have not been playing games for a while.

I fancied a game of SEV and installed it on my new laptop, and am a bit worried.

My old pc (that I was using when SEV came out) had a Geforce4 mx 440 64mb... old, but worked! I can not remember having any problems with SEV, I remember having to wait about 5 mins between turns deep in to the game.. but I do not rembmer anything else.

My new laptop has a Geforce 8600MGS 512Mb, it is far better in every way to my older desktop (I can render about 3x the speed in 3DSMAX), however SEV runs so slow. I turned on FPS, and I get about 60 at the menu, but it drops to about 8 in game.... when I first get in to game it is around 20, but then after I click on any dialog (research, construction e.t.c.) it drops to the 8-10 and stays like that even if I come out of the menu.

I just downloaded a demo and I can run Supreme Commander with decent frame rate, so something must be wrong here.

I am using Vista ultimate x64 edition. Is there any compatibility issues?

Thanks

Re: SEV question
 

Vista is not so nice to SE5. it really kills its performance.

---

Spaceempires5.com is the most active community at this time. Spaceempires.net is probably a bit busier with on topic SE posts as well.

Re: SEV question
 

This doesn't mean there is anything wrong with still posting here, of course...

Vista does not have true DX8 support, and essentially emulates the function calls, through the DX9 emulation layer. Most games written with DX8 do not run that well in Vista, including SE5.

Re: SEV question
 

Ok,

Next question, is there anything I can do?

SEIV works fine on this laptop, I love that so I will play that in the mean time, it is just annoying not to have SEV as I have not played a game from start to finish due to work!

Re: SEV question
 

One item that helps Vista SE5 performance is disabling "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts", which can usually be found under the appearance tab (in effects) of the Display Properties dialog.

Re: SEV question
 

I have Vista Premium 64 bit, but fortunately for me I don't have problems. The only thing that's a bit uncomfortable is that I can't run any other program in the background, it makes SE V blink in rapid succession. Like a strobe-light.

Re: SEV question
 

Heh - Wilhil currently has 256 posts.

Re: SEV question
 

apart from timstone, I recognise all your names above! I guess you forgot me!

I didn't think I was gone for that long http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: SEV question
 

*throws wilhil a welcome home party* ?

Re: SEV question
 

Nah, I remember you.

/me brings cake! [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cake.gif[/img]

Re: SEV question
 

Hi

Don't need a welcome home party http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif Just didn't know why it was a suprise I had 256 posts!

Anyway, thanks for the help. Captain Kwok, thanks a lot! I just disabled everything in properties and the performance went from around 10fps to 120 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif... Honestly, I can not tell the diffrence between the 120 here and whatever I got on my old pc (I think it was around 30), but it really makes a diffrence to 10!

Thanks everyone

Edit - Just realised... high frame rates are nice, but... it will not go out of windowed mode at any resolution :S the only thing that is diffrent is that in last game, I alt tabed and closed it without closing in game... did I do something wrong? no matter what I try, it will not return to full screen.

Re: SEV question
 

Not a suprise...A byte!

Re: SEV question
 

The human eye (+brain) can only process so many frame buffer refreshes in a second; video is typically formatted as ~24 fps, and games running over about 30 fps don't become smoother in very obvious ways. The only reason to care about higher frame rates in games is that there is lag associated with rapidly changing the scene, thus requiring swapping in different rendering elements. This peters off around 50-60 fps, though. Anything higher than that will be unnoticeable.

Re: SEV question
 

Technically, a byte runs from 0 to 255.

...just sayin'.

Re: SEV question
 

Well, been playing for the last couple of hours.

everything seems to run fine, but I get a access violation when I click on comparissons in the empires screen http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: SEV question
 

That's a current bug only affecting a small percentage of users - not sure what is causing it.

Re: SEV question
 

Ok, well, as long as it isn't just me!

I still have a lot of work to do http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif trying to limit myself to a few turns per night!... if there is any help I can provide to fix the bug such as logs, just ask!

Re: SEV question
 

If you want to be technical... A byte is contiguous sequence of a fixed number of binary digits. The exact size depends on the system in question (generally the smallest addressable word size). Even in C, where a byte is 8 bits, what those bits mean is arbitrary. It might represent integer values from 0 to 255, or it might be values from -128 to 127. Or it might just be a set of 8 boolean values.

Re: SEV question
 

There are, however, 256 possible variations on an 8-bit byte, where a bit has two possible values. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: SEV question
 

And bytes are based on bits. That's where the 0 to 255 "standard byte" crap comes from.

00000000 translates to 0. 11111111 translates to 255. How a program interprets that is up to the programmer.

Of course, most programs use much, much larger slices of memory for...well, everything anyway so yeah.

Those of you that know what XOR means know what I'm talking about. :V

Re: SEV question
 

I believe I posted a sufficient understanding of that...Fyron. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: SEV question
 

11111111 just translates into 8 latches set high, not "255".

Re: SEV question
 

And some of the old computers had very different byte sizes. Anywhere from 4 to 11 bits. For that matter, various current IBM hardware might also have different byte sizes. It's the Intel choice of 8 bits that we are living with in the PC world now.

Re: SEV question
 

I was going to make a snooty comment about 8 bits per byte naturally going with octal, but quickly realized that made no sense whatsoever. However, 8 bits goes well with hexadecimal. (Hex has digits 0 through 9 and then A through F, for a total of 16. That's probably as many digits as humans can comfortably handle.) So 8 bits per byte is 2 hex digits. A standard old-style keyboard had 26 lowercase, 26 uppercase, 10 numbers, 10 special characters, a space, a tab, and a return. That's 75 different characters, so ASCII code needed at least 2 hex digits. I'm guessing that was the driving force to have 8 bits per byte for PCs.

They could have used 3, 6, or 9 bits per byte, and then only used octal. But 3 is clearly too small to be useful, and 6 can't cover ASCII. (2^6 is only 64.) 9 bit bytes are overkill for ASCII.

Re: SEV question
 

OK, maybe I am remembering WORD size rather than byte size...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_science)

In computing, "word" is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design. A word is simply a fixed-sized group of bits that are handled together by the machine. The number of bits in a word (the word size or word length) is an important characteristic of a computer architecture.

The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation. The majority of the registers in the computer are usually word-sized. The typical numeric value manipulated by the computer is probably word sized. The amount of data transferred between the processing part of the computer and the memory system is most often a word. An address used to designate a location in memory often fits in a word.

Modern computers usually have a word size of 16, 32, or 64 bits. Many other sizes have been used in the past, including 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 39, 40, 48, and 60 bits; the slab is an example of an early word size. Some of the earliest computers were decimal rather than binary, typically having a word size of 10 or 12 decimal digits, and some early computers had no fixed word length at all.

Re: SEV question
 

Plus, transistors.

2->4->8

Or, that's my guess, although I know very little about hardware architecture.

Re: SEV question
 

Ultimately, it grew out of using electrical current to fuel memory. Magnetism could be used as well, but we'll stick with the electricity. A "bit" represents the smallest form of memory available, which is 0 (zero current) and 1 (non-zero current). If there was any measurable current, the value was ON or 1 or TRUE, depending on what you wanted to call it.

Things just got more complex from there. Because bits have 2 possible values, things just double in size as they progress. This is why if you look at the amount of actual bytes in a memory stick is never exactly what they advertise. If you measure things in binary terms, a kilobit is actually 1024 bits (2^10).

With a little math, one will find that a 512 megabit stick of RAM contains 536,870,912 bits of storage (actually, I stole the number from Wikipedia so there. :p ) That IS a power of 2.

At this point, I'm going to quit because delving into how memory works and all that funny computer architecture crap is weird and sort of makes your brain snap in half. I hate thinking about it so I'm not going to type about it. That gets into memory addresses and, as a silly little human organic brain owner, I have trouble thinking about ways to organize half a billion bits. Computers do it nicely, though.

Re: SEV question
 

Well, a word is simply one or more whole bytes (a byte is the smallest possible word).

Re: SEV question
 

Thanks, Toxin, but I knew most of that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I'm not as empty-headed as I act. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: SEV question
 

Ah, word. Than, chances are, you know more about computer architecture then you think, that's what it's all based on. :V

Re: SEV question
 

Well, I was talking about the actual organization of all those transistors. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Although I was shown the circuitry for a memory bit once. Don't remember it, though.

Re: SEV question
 

Re: SEV question
 

Good 'ole xkcd.

Re: SEV question
 

That's beautiful.

Re: SEV question
 

...It doesn't explain Kilobits.

Re: SEV question
 

Why would it need to? A kilobit is just 1/(byte size)th of a kilobyte. The same nomenclature and arithmetic apply to bits and bytes.

Re: SEV question
 

...Because it said it would? 'Kbyte vs. kbit'?