What is Dominions II?

[Gandalf Parker]

Sheap said:

No one is complaining that the window borders look funny. None of the UI issues that are being brought up have anything to do with what platform the game is running on. I could give a list but I don't want to turn this thread into a rant session

Well he mentioned keypresses. I think that the keypresses used originally were the ones that would work standard across windows, mac, linux and solaris. As it is they are already sliding into ones which dont carry over well into all of the platforms which slows down getting patches and new demos done.

Whatever is going on to make Dom2 more resource intensive than usual doesn't have anything to do with module loading overhead. But whatever the reason, it hardly matters. Do I really need my fire darts to run at 60 FPS?

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.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Gandalf Parker said:As to things like graphics and interface its not too different than any game which runs on so many platforms.

Have you seen Unreal Tournament 2004? (Linux, Mac, and windows). Also thing Worldforge puts out. Anyway, in these openGL days, cross platform and cool graphics are no longer impossible. However, cool graphics takes lots, lots and lots of time, which a 2 x 0.5 man team does not have. And anyways, I would rather have more game play than graphics for something like this. E.g, one obvious thing that is missing is terrain, instead of the X x Y battlefield.

Don't get me wrong --- Dominions is one of the best closed-source games out there. A tremendous effort for two people --- I am very impressed

[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)).

[Chazar]

Pickles said:
...why is the thing so resource intensive?

I dont think it is: I am running it on a 600Mhz Athlon machine with a GeForce2MX under Windows, which is considered pretty old and unusable for contemporary games by most of my friends, yet I am comfortably running Dom2 with high-quality graphic settings (not highest, but high)...

I guess the problem lies that most systems are not equipped with sensible OpenGL drivers. The game was unplayable-slow on my 1,8GHz Intel Laptop with ATI Radeon graphics, until I installed some freeware-third-party-drivers which were mentioned in this forum somewhere. Now it runs smoothly under the highest settings under windows! I really just changed the driver...

Unfortunately, I didnt manage to install any suitable drivers under Linux to play Dom2, so I need to reboot all the time: I am doing my work with Linux and only use Windows on the Laptop for games, not that I am currently playing anything else than Dom2...this is really odd considering that the game was written under/for Linux!!!

[Alneyan]

I can concur with you Chazar: my old computer worked very well with Dominions II (I had virtually the same configuration, although it was a Duron 700mhz rather than a 600 mhz Athlon; your CPU was likely a tad bit quicker, but not by much), and my newer computer hated Dominions II with a passion until the drivers were seriously updated. My graphic card was also an ATI Radeon, so the problem seems to be here.

Now with adequate drivers the game runs very well, but there was no real problem with my previous configuration either (even with other programmes running in the background). So I would be more willing to put the blame on drivers and a lack of optimisation in this field rather than on Illwinter.

[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...