EeePC issues ...

GAlex · Post by **GAlex** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:11 pm

maybe the wong forum, if so forgive me and move this post in the right one.

tryed to compile and run svn 11947 on my EeePc 4G (701), just to see if it could handle somethin' bulky as Vegastrike, and ...

IT WORKS GREAT!!!

compiling was straightforward, no warning, no errors.

about 15mins to have everything working.

since the small 7" wide LCD of the li'l asus, i had to hack a little the vegastrike.conf to get a fullscreen res of 800x480 (aspect ratio 1.6).

so tried ./vegastrike ...

... it loads ...

... it starts ...

... BUT

...

the default mission loaded was "misions/mission1" instead of "missions/main_menu.mission" (or what the hell is named)

so i passed the mission as an argument and it loands the main menu screen.

the fonts are messed a bit, but quite readable;

it cannot find units data, so there are bases and planets, but no hud, no cross, no ship meshes's, and the nav-comp is REALLY messed up.

any suggestion?

Post by **loki1950** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:35 pm

Looks like your data4x may be corrupted

Enjoy the Choice

GAlex · Post by **GAlex** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:44 pm

loki1950 wrote:Looks like your data4x may be corrupted

Enjoy the Choice

so it was.

deleted data4.x (was messed) and done a new svn checkout.

it works. game starts. slowly, but starts!

with full shader support and extreme details framerate drops down to 8fps.

with no shader support and high details it runs quite smooth at 24-30fps.

i think we can add a new platform on which vegastrike can be compiled and run on.

Post by **loki1950** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:02 pm

Yeah it is a nice new toy been following the experiences of a couple of the regulars on the Linux Format forum replacing Xandros with Ubuntu or MInt or even an other flavour

Enjoy the Choice

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 6:06 pm

cool glad you could get it to work. but doesn't the svn co take up like 1/2 of your drive?

Post by **loki1950** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:10 pm

Of course that really depends on whether he has the 4G or 8G version of the wee beastie

Enjoy the Choice

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:16 pm

Does the aspect show correctly? I found on a full size widescreen, all the planets and ships are stretched unless you update the line in vegastrike.config that sets "aspect=1.33", as the individual resolution aspects did nothing for me. Config may have been overhauled since then though...

Post by **loki1950** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:26 pm

That was noticed by safemode and corrected when he did his rework of the low-res options.

Enjoy the Choice

Post by **ace123** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 11:45 pm

What Video chip does the EEE have? You can find this by running "lspci" and pasting the output, or look for the VGA adapter line, e.g.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GTS (rev a1)

Can you try running with a "low/average" shader. Running without shaders should not be needed on very many graphics chips.

GAlex · Post by **GAlex** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:04 pm

sorry for late reply, but here it's 9p.m. and i'm just back home from work!

my EeePC 701 has 4GB ssd but uses an external h.d. auto-alimented by usb (it's a simple western digital storagemaster 160GB) for everything that is not OS-related since in my first intentions the li'l beast should have been my 4yo daughter PC (i'm teaching her the basic of programming and she can already write some kinky code in python and some good segfault code in c).

so everything it's mine stays on that h.d. which is the size of 2 credit cards and 1 cm tall.

i've also fitted a 8GB High Speed SD card in the appropriate slot, for my documents (videos, mp3s, photos, drawings made with tuxpaint, etc.)

the gfx card of EeePC is an intel gma900, so it only have shader 2 support. the memory has been upgraded to 1GB, but since the eeePc doesn't use any swap partition, I cannot use it so much.
moreover, the gfx card shares it's 64Mb memory. no much to spare!.

well, at least it works.

this night i'll sync with svn 11953, recompile, and try with simple shader support and extreme details.

supposed framerate 2-4 fps. i'll let you know.

maybe i'm using all the gfx memory by specifying the 1024Mb Ram?

should i switch to 512 or better 256 to speed-up the loading and reduce the memory usage?

Post by **safemode** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:18 pm

if your card doesn't do hardware S3TC compression, you'll have bad performance as you'll be using a crazy amount of memory for graphics. You can check via glxinfo

Also, you can drop almost a hundred MB by removing /data4.x/bin

You could also try loopback mounting data4.x on a cramFS filesystem. DDS files compress extremely well with normal gzip/bzip2 methods, and you can really decrease the filesystem footprint at the expense of read latency

GAlex · Post by **GAlex** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:36 pm

it's not a matter of space, as of resources.

load times improves incredibly by setting 256RAM (startup in 2 mins), but low graphic performance are the point.

there is quite no framerate difference between full-shader and no-shader and there is only a little difference from extreme-details to medium-details.

tested this night with full-shader and extreme-details, and got 12-14fps that drops to 2-4 in combat or approach to a station or planet.

i think the eeepc resources are overwhelmed by dds texture compression and texture size.

i've had an idea: i'll try to modify my data-dir as to have a "light" version (i.e. smaller texture size and no dds compression), but my question is: can i alter the texture and save them in another format? and which formats are supported? can I save them to pngs? and can I do this via batch using a tool to de-DDScompress?

Post by **safemode** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:39 pm

there is no lighter weight than dds.

if you dont make the textures dds, then i hope you have > 256MB of video ram, because you'll need that to hold the textures that get loaded for a single system. Forget it in SOL system, you'll need more than 512MB of video ram.

Decompressing DDS in software is quite fast, and you dont need to generate mipmaps. I assume your machine cant to DDS if loading is taking so long (would indicate software dds), so you still wont load faster with jpg / png than with dds. As your system would have to decompress png/jpg (more complicated than dds, and slower) and then generate mipmaps.

I also hope you have at least 512MB of ram (not counting at least 128MB olf video ram), for VS. Otherwise there is no helping you as far as loading speed and video ram use.

The only way to really help things would be to run retro mode. Textures are all quite small.

edit:
The only thing I would say you'd benefit from is the much smaller filesize of a jpg in place of the dds files. Your file transferrate would have to be so slow that a much longer decompression and generation of mipmaps is faster than reading in the difference in filesize. That would be quite amazingly slow. You'd have to have a drive stuck in pio mode with a relatively fast processor for this to be true.

In any case, this will only speed up load time. I suggest trying retro mode, if that helps significantly, perhaps you could set the max texture size down to 512 for your higher quality levels.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:00 am

If thats the problem, changing the max texture size may help. However, I think that the video hardware doesn't have enough power to render the frames and falls behind. It may just be a matter of insufficient resources, as vegastrike is a 3d game with all the baggage that entails. You may not see much better than that without using retro mode, which has been recently fixed to help alot. That post was kinda redundant.