Dungeon Master Forum

anyone know what the 'system requirements' are for RTC?

I have a AMD athlon 64 X2 duel core 4200+ 2.21Ghz processor with 1Ghz of ram, and RTC seems to uses 50% of my CPU usage, which is 100% on a single core processor system!? which seems alot.

although i can still have the program running in the 'background' and get on with other things? can anyone else? (with single core processor systems)?

Any computer made in this millennium should do fine...

lol, yeah! but jst wondering the requirements

Aamo's is aparently too slow, Lunever's old one is on the edge...if you can find these two references somewhere then tweak them up a notch you have the minimum requirements I guess!

whts your system stats beo?

AMD Sempron 3000+ 1Gb RAM (forget the speed) and Radeon 9600...oh, and embarrassingly enough Win98SE

My laptop is less than that by a long shot yet also runs RTC fine (Win XP machine)

god, thats and old machine!!!!!

i thought mine was getting out dated.

The config.txt file in the RTC root directory, right at the end, has a FRAMERATE parameter. If set to YES it will tell you how fast RTC is running during play. On a modern machine you should get close to 60FPS most of the time. Lunever reported his machine going below 10 in some cases.

The DM / CSB dungeons on RTC run OKish on Win95 with 200 MHz processor. DM-II requires a bit more oompf (lots of graphics / background music) though, but it's not a whole lot more.

As Sophia said, anything from this millenium will be fine!

BTW; the reason why it runs up at 100% of a single processor is because it's running "as fast as possible" - it'll take anything you let it have; it only "needs" a small fraction of it to run at an acceptable rate though.

Adamos computer is coal powered, and it runs RTC OK...

lol, cheers george, so how do you make your (or my) pc scale down the "fast as possible" thing and only use wht it needs?

ps, mine runs at 75fps all the time

it runs ~ok, but only on fullscreen, not in windowed mode. But I cannot play it on fullscreen because of some reasons.

PII 300 Mhz, 96 Mb (or 64? sometimes I`m not sure if those additional 32 works!), 1 Gb Hd, XP

Adamo, have you switched off all that fancy stuff (transparent/fading menue, automatic update etc.. ) XP gives you by default? I don't know if this article still works, seems not to be the case sadly..
http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/123
but there were some things described how you save cpu power and memory in xp..

And old machine? Bah, it runs everything fine and is still powerful enough thank you...i don't plan on running any more bloatware than I have to, nor play the latest games that last for two seconds, so really it is fast enough thank you!

I certainly won't be getting windows vista after selling my kidnies for the proper machine specs...this lapto can run the latest linux perfectly happily, which, you know, pretty much has all the features of windows vista without being an evil bloated resource hogging pos

You really don't need much. 75 FPS is fine, but the game runs quite fine and fluently at 30 FPS too. The only config option that makes much of a difference in regard to ressources required is cloud rescale, which is off by default.

I have RTC runnung on 2 machines, my desktop and my laptop, both use WinXP Pro, which IS eating up a bit of the ressources available.

The desktop is an old Athlon AMD 1GHz with 768 MB RAM, the laptop is a very old pII with about 300 MHz and 256 MB RAM. I can play all dungeons I've tested so far on the desktop, I can play most of the default dungeons on the laptop, except DM2 which is lagging too much there.

I think he was wanting to downgrade the resources used more...when as said, if you aren't playing RTC infront then it releases them anyway...it probably boils down to how windows itself is managing all the direct X commands (wouldn't surprise me if it was hogging it's own resources)

btw, i've noticed that RTC, when it's launched on any machine i tested here, takes almost 100% CPU (50% for dual core machines) all the time, even when you pause game.

yeah, thats what i said on the 1st post of this thread!!!

interesting that its not just my machine tho.

What the engine is doing is irrelevant to the CPU usage.

The game itself (i.e. dungeon updates and drawing the view) only occur at 1/6th second intervals and take very little time or CPU. A tiny amount of extra time is then spent tracking the mouse and background music. The vast bulk of time however is spent paused in the Windows DirectX Flip function waiting for a vertical blank so that the screen doesn't flicker from frame to frame (as Beowuuf said, it's Windows that's hogging the CPU, not RTC).

Whether the game is paused or not doesn't therefore make any noticable difference to what the CPU is doing; it still spends virtually all its time paused in DirectX screen handling functions...

I.e. it's not "just" your machine, it's *everyones* machine - it is always doing something and will run at 100% even on the most powerful supercomputer in the universe...(assuming it's running Windows )

thankyou George

that explains everything. I did find it hard to believe that RTC was using all that CPU usage, hence why i opened this post to see how others were effected.

The vast bulk of time however is spent paused in the Windows DirectX Flip function waiting for a vertical blank

It certainly should not be using your valuable CPU time
looping around waiting for what should be interrupt-
driven. Something is wrong. Looping in the code
waiting for an event is something that DOS programs
did. But Windows programs are not supposed to have
to do such things. From the Microsoft documentation:

Our thinking at the time was that a program could use this period to scurry off and attend to other tasks, returning later to attempt another flip. Developers didn't seem to think this was a good idea, however, and we constantly saw small loops in code spinning on the Flip method until the flip could be set up. This offended our sense of tidiness, so we added the DDFLIP_WAIT flag to push the loop down into DirectDraw.

So the very worst that should happen is that when you
receive the DDERR_WASSTILLDRAWING status the
program should give control back to windows and try
again in a few milliseconds. It is not a matter of getting
back at a particular instant because more than one
entire frame is sitting there waiting to be displayed.

Interesting; I *am* using the DDFLIP_WAIT parameter and had, possibly naively, assumed that DirectX took care of threading issues without having to do anything else myself.

Looks like it just tight loops under the covers though!

Yes, that is what I gathered from the description.

Having had to 'invert' a DOS-Like program (ST CSB),
I know it is no fun. In a couple of places that are
reached very seldom (Like the end-game) I took the
shortcut of simply giving control back to Windows
within such a loop: It is not the right way to do things but everything
has a price and the price to make it right was too
high for the gain in beauty.

only needs low specks any pc laptop should do fine

Using a large portion of a processor that'd otherwise be idle is an irrelevant concern, as long as you're not wasting cycles. If you're not running anything else of significance at the same time, just about any game is going to take close to 100% CPU.

If I run DSB with nothing else going on, it takes 98% CPU. I then ran a bunch of cpu-intensive stuff at the same time, and its usage dropped to 75%, however, neither the performance of the applications nor DSB's performance was impacted.

If every single cycle isn't needed, it's very easy to bring the CPU usage down with a tiny sleep or a wait every frame. The framerate can also be capped. If you'd aim for 50 FPS you'd have 20 ms for every frame. Now, if the frame actually takes only 5 ms, you can sleep for 14-15.. Keeps the processor cooler if nothing else.. The minimum that should be done in my mind, is to put the app to sleep when it's minimized to system tray..

if your havein probs restart your pc laptop