Battery warning suppressed by D2 under XP?

[Chazar]

Yesterday evening I was doing my turn for an MP-Game (offline) and suddenly my laptop shut down due to an empty battery. Looking at my watch verified that this was an all-normal behaviour (about 160min), however, I am surprised that I did not get a battery-level warning as I usually do? Does the Fullscreen mode of Dom2 under WindowsXPsp2 suppress these warnings? The eMail notification of Mozilla/Thunderbird works normal, i.e. a little box is superimposed on Dom2-Fullscreen, without interrupting gameplay...

I know, laptops are a real pain since they are all different, but did someone else notice a similar behaviour? Is it Dom2 that is suppressing the battery warning somehow, which otherwise functions as expected with other programs (I do not have anything else to run in Fullscreen-mode to try, however.) or is this my own private problem?

Oh,btw: Feature-Request: Dom2 should have an option for 5min-Autosaving to a <gamename>.trn.autosave file for manual recovery of powerloss! I just hate to spend my gaming hours for the same turn again!

[alexti]

I've noticed that if Dom2 crashes once, after the restart switching between apps (through Alt-tab) isn't working properly anymore, meaning that the switching is working, but the screen is not redrawn, so Dom2 picture always stay on top unless I minimize Dom2 window (I play it in window mode). I suppose in those circumstances, your battery warning wouldn't get through the Dom2 screen either. eMail notification would probably fail as well, but you could have seen it working before the problematic situation occured (before the original crash).

I'm not sure what causes the problem. Presumably OS should clean up screen resources after crashed application, but apparently it doesn't (or maybe it's the problem in video driver).

[alexti]

Chazar said:
Oh,btw: Feature-Request: Dom2 should have an option for 5min-Autosaving to a <gamename>.trn.autosave file for manual recovery of powerloss! I just hate to spend my gaming hours for the same turn again!

Yeah, that would be a good idea. You can always lose the power due to power failures, lightning strikes or cats playing with cables.

[Cainehill]

Instead of using full-screen mode, you might consider windowed but with dominions maximized. This gives you almost as much screen real estate as full-screen, but with the benefit of being able to bring up other programs - text editors, email, web browser, whatever. And it should also help ensure that you can see the battery warning.

That said - Dom2's graphic mechanism isn't necessarily Windows-friendly - often the graphics bleed through even when another program is brought to the front, forcing me to minimize dom2 temporarily. (This is with Win98SE, latest NVidia drivers, and I think the latest SDL libraries.)

[Chazar]

Hmm, yes a maximized windows is a good idea!

Actually I would rather prefer to run the game on my laptop only with linux (the battery warnings works perfectly well with linux) - if only the replays would be shown with an acceptable rate under linux (ATI-Card and I couldnt get those ATI Linux drivers working)...

It is so annoying that I am forced to run a game on windows, that was designed on Linux! Something is wrong with that, isnt it?

[Chazar]

Stupid me: Installing the new OpenGL Linux drivers from ATI could not work, since they do not support my older but widespread Radeon7500 Mobility...

...on the other hands, the newest OpenSource XFree Drivers are not that bad, provided one enables 3D Acceleration, which is turned off by default in the configuration files of my Linux distribution!

Now Dom2 runs pretty fine with my Linux-Laptop... ...hence hopefully no more Battery-Problems!

(Although textures are much more coarse, which I understand is due to the different drivers, but also the battle grounds have an entirely different color...much darker and greenisher...more menacing somehow...why?)

Chazar,

You seem to have solved your problem (though the solution does seem a bit drastic), but I thought I'd chip in anyway.

I run Dom2 on a Windows based tablet PC when away from home, and when Dom2 is running I do notice that none of the power-management options work (screen blanking, auto-suspend, as well as low-battery warnings). This seems to be the case even when running in Windowed mode.

It is slightly bizarre.

[Chazar]

[in reply to Mark the Merciful:]
...so your observation confirms that Dom2 interferes with the WinXP Power-Management...