What is Dominions II?

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Gandalf Parker said:Its that Dominions does not load modules. They do everything themselves rather than use things already loaded such as screen-write API's or optimized for windows such as DirectX. Most FPS problems are graphic card problems. I think from not making best use of drivers for the cards.

Eh.. Last I check dom used openGL (and maybe SDL, though I don't know), which is sortof DirectX, made right this time. There should be no performance hit for this. Probably, the code just needs a bit of optimization, that's all. And lots of small objects has always been the death of 3D rendering system (such as openGL (and Direct3D)).

[Arralen]

There is an issue with DOM2, SDL, OpenGL and ATI cards:

No matter what system you have, what screen resolution you're running, you'll get either 8,15 or 32(?) fpm.
But it is NOT over-use of ressources, it's a programming glitch in one of the sub-systems (not necessarily even in DOM itself).
E.g. it runs with 25+fpm on my P3/400 (G2Ti) and only with 15 fpm at work (D1800/Rad7000).

Sadly, it looks like the problem is just to "sophisticated" for the developer(s) to figure out - remember, we're talking a part-time hobby programmer here.

And, at Last, I really like the interface.

[reverend]

Arralen said:
There is an issue with DOM2, SDL, OpenGL and ATI cards:

No matter what system you have, what screen resolution you're running, you'll get either 8,15 or 32(?) fpm.
But it is NOT over-use of ressources, it's a programming glitch in one of the sub-systems (not necessarily even in DOM itself).
E.g. it runs with 25+fpm on my P3/400 (G2Ti) and only with 15 fpm at work (D1800/Rad7000).

And, at Last, I really like the interface.

fpm? Frames per minute? Now THAT would be a "glitch"

The problem is unlikely to be addressed by ATI though. The majority of other games do not have that problem, and the Dom2 community is too small to have an impact on their driver development. Although, I heard they almost rewrote their OpenGL implementation for the 4.9 Cats. Maybe THEN my X800 will give me more than 16 fps during battles.

The interface is ok. Right click or left click doesn't matter you get used to it. The messaging system IMO is the part of the GUI that needs fixing. I'd even propose collecting money from the community to "sponsor" their programming time to rewrite it.

[magnate]

reverend said:
The interface is ok. Right click or left click doesn't matter you get used to it. The messaging system IMO is the part of the GUI that needs fixing. I'd even propose collecting money from the community to "sponsor" their programming time to rewrite it.

Do we even need to do that? Can't they just refer to an EDITOR environment variable, and fire it up for writing Messages? Then you can use whatever you want - Notepad, vi, whatever. Then the only recoding is to let you see Messages you've written this turn, re-edit them etc.

CC

[reverend]

Of course, the ability to just copy'n'paste from an external editor would be enough for the editign part.

Re-Editing sent Messages isn't even necessary. The messenger is on its way, can't call him back. That is something I can live with.

What really is needed in the system is instead of choosing ALL nation or ONE nation as the recipient, place a checkbox in front of the nations name, so you can select multiple nations as the recipients.

[Chazar]

reverend said:
Re-Editing sent Messages isn't even necessary. The messenger is on its way, can't call him back.

Sure, but what are seeking arrows for then?


Apart from that, I think that the GUI needs some improvement (Why cant I just change command number 3 for that commander? Why do I have do delete the whole production queue to change the first unit? Why cant I search for commanders by names? etc.) BUT I am sure that GUI designing is pretty hard anyway!

On the other hand especially that bloody messenging system needs improvement. I dont believe in the external messenging excuse: True, why should one reinvent something established like messenging? Because its kills athmosphere as I wrote in another thread: Writing in character is much easier inside the game...

[alexti]

Arralen said:
There is an issue with DOM2, SDL, OpenGL and ATI cards:

There is an issue with OpenGL and ATI cards, Dom2 is not the first and is not the Last game that works poorly on ATI, actually, is there any OpenGL game that works well on ATI? I believe there were some non-ATI OpenGL ATI drivers around, which were working better than original ones.