All Fallout 1 owners: the FIFE team needs your help!

M

mvBarracuda

Vault Dweller
If you always wanted to support a Fallout-related project, here is your chance!

We encountered a serious but hard to find issue with the latest FIFE builds. We would need some volunteers who test the latest build for us and give us some feedback about performance with Fallout 1 maps. If you own Fallout 1 & 2 that's even better because you could give us feedback if the problem occurs with Fallout 2 on your PC too.

How to participate in the test:
1. Download: (it's an sfx 7zip archive, just in case you don't feel comfortable opening 3rd party .exe files from the internet, simply get 7zip and unpack it manually)
http://members.fifengine.de/mvbarracuda/FIFE_LZSS_test.exe

2. Search for your Fallout 1 CD (if you know where the Fallout 2 CD lies, even better!)

3. Copy the MASTER.DAT & the CRITTER.DAT files from your Fallout 1 CD to UNPACK_DIR\FIFE_mingw\

4. Launch UNPACK_DIR\FIFE_mingw\Fallout1.bat

5. Please write down:
* How long does it approx. take to load the map (from starting the .bat file till you see the first tiles in seconds)
* What are the peak FPS values you get
* Does it slow down when you scroll and if so: what's the smallest FPS value you got while scrolling the map

6. Copy MASTER.DAT & CRITTER.DAT from UNPACK_DIR\FIFE_mingw\ to UNPACK_dir\FIFE_MSVC\

7. Launch UNPACK_DIR\FIFE_MSVC\Fallout1.bat

8. Repeat step 5 and write down the 3 mentioned values

For people who even got a copy of Fallout 2 lying around somewhere: you can repeat all these above mentioned steps but copy the Fallout 2 DAT files into the directories and use the Fallout2.bat!

Somehow our DAT reading code seems to be seriously screwed :-/ the problem is that it does not happen on all PCs. You would do us a great favour by doing these performance tests as they should help us to track down the bugs.

Besides the information mentioned above we would need to know the following information about your PC:
- Operating system (please state which service pack you use)
- CPU type
- GFX card type
- Amount / type of RAM

Thanks for your help :-)
 
Good to see you're getting ahead, but post in the right part of the forum next time.

Moved.
 
FIFE_Mingw:
I've gaved up after approx 2 minutes - only cursor show up, but background wasn't cleared so i was seeing my desktop only.
FIFE_MSVC:
41.3 seconds to load black background and fps counter without any numbers showing
34.5 seconds later - fps counter starts to show fps count, map is scrolling to enter of junktown - fps is raising from 0.1fps to 2fps during scroll
2 minutes 20 seconds later - enter of junktown reached, scrolling stopped - fps immediately jumped to 60, but it's still sometimes (about every 5 seconds) hitching down to 4 fps (hitches are about 1.5 s long). On hitches i can see that characters are 'teleporting' for about 15 hexes.

System specs:
P4 530 3.0GHz
2x512 MB DDR400
GF6600
Windows XP Prof w SP2
 
Ahh thx ShaXbee :-) It's really strange because I get decent performance with mingw but absolutely crappy one with MSVC.

Please test with your Fallout 2 files so we can get a better impression if this is a general problem.
 
I repeated tests after rebooting machine (it has been online for 3 weeks). Tests under MSVC build gaves same results, but this time MinGW build runs fine.

Results for MinGW:
19.5s to load 'FPS counter' without any number
16.2s later - fps counter started to show fps - it started from 0.06 and was raising to about 6 fps
1m 33s later - junktown entrance reched, fps again immediately reached 60 fps, but same 'hitches' are occouring - sudden drop of fps, and 'teleporting' of critters.

Fallout2 tests:
Everything loads in 2-5 seconds, and works flawless at about 60fps.

PS. Try using profiler on your team code - simple profiling system is described in Game Programming Gems I - chapter 1.12 & 1.13
 
ShaXbee said:
PS. Try using profiler on your team code - simple profiling system is described in Game Programming Gems I - chapter 1.12 & 1.13
Click to expand...
We're already profiling the code but a major problem is that the issue does not show up with the linux builds. So it must be really something strange :-/

As linux is not affected by the bug, one of our MSVC coders will prolly have to take a look into it. We think that the problem lies within our LZSS code but we're not absolutely sure :-/ It's really screwed and we hope to be able to fix it somehow.

Thanks for the tests ShaXbee :-) your help is really appreciated.
 
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