Dungeon Master Forum

Simon finds that CSBWin is very slow on his 400MHz machine.
Anyone else have this problem? Many have complained that
it is too fast....never too slow before now.

Simon,
What are your video settings? For example, mine are
1024x768 High Color (16 bits per pixel).
What operating system are you using?
Are 'Normal' and 'Extra Ticks' checked in the 'Speed' menu?

Can you do some experiments for me? In 1x screen size?
When you are standing still and nothing is changing (like no
flashing teleporters), how fast do the first four counters
(vblint, chkvbl, STblt, and Time)
increment? Time it for a minute or more to get a reasonably
accurate count. Then do the same when you are running around
or doing something that seems too slow.

The only thing I can think of is that my method of drawing the
screen is somehow incompatable with your video driver.

I'm running a PIII at 700MHz under Windows XP and it's OK.
But in 4x size mode, it's just OK but a slower computer could not handle it correctly. (No no no I'm definitely NOT complainign about the 4x size mode ;-))

Thanks for the information. It is strange. I can get by quite well on a
166 MHz Pentium running Win95. Even when I slow it down to about
40 MHz. So it is either the operating system or the video driver. The
video is definitely the bottleneck on my machine and that makes sense
from my understanding of how the program works. It will be interesting
to see if anyone else has problems with Win95 or Win98.

I gather that your machine does not go very fast when you play
back one of the movies in QuickPlay mode. Is that right? It goes about
ten times as fast for me on a 166MHz Pentium.

I am using 16 bits per pixel in the program. Perhaps you have a
video card that cannot handle that and the system has to do a
manual translate to 24- or 32-bit mode. Are you using 24 or 32?
If so, I might try making a test version that uses the native mode
of your machine just to see if it helps.

In general, I am rather unhappy to hear that CSBWin uses that much
computer time. I would like to fix it. I have worked hard to make it
as efficient as is reasonably possible.

About the video, I've got a GeForce4 Ti4400 with up to date Detonators so I hope this top-notch card is not a bottleneck. :)

I hope not, too. But hope is going to come up short of fixing the
problem. Unless I can find someone with the problem who is
willing to spend some effort helping me debug it, I can do nothing.
Because it works for me and I am not going to buy several operating
systems and a dozen video cards in order to try all possibilities.
It seems to work for most people so it must be some rather special
combination.