Windows test on 0.4.0

[Joram]

First : cheers ! ta3d is a great project ! It fills a gap between TA and TA:Spring,
And I hope will go beyond what TA:Spring can propose (it's already the case playing Original TA maps in true 3d !! )

I tested ta3d on windows, AMD Athlon 1,4 Ghz (old but ok) ATI Radeon 9800.

It's all 0.4.0 and I know some stuff are already corrected in 0.4.1 (I promise I'll try to compile it soon)
I played 1152x768 (maybe over what my computer can do, but still...)
I get normal fps (40 - 50) until I produce several units and enemies arrive... then it drops to below 20 (down to 9)

So I can't really say if the game feels good, because it's not really playable for a long time.

Camera steps are a bit big, and when going to superzoom, it looses the "centering" :
it should zoom out until covering the full map, but not moving the mouse position on the map,
this way the player can zoom in and out to check strategical view without losing his center of interest.

Overall, the menu interface would need a lift, it has too low definition images and menu items.

I can't seem to modify the game speed while in game, and it was really an essential feature in TA.

Right-shift should give the same result as left-shift !
Option to switch to the right-mouse button mode is lacking.

Ok, now I stop with "bug report". I'll try 0.4.1 soon and add some suggestions in the correct forum.

(BTW : I'm french but I post in english for being understood )

[Balthazar]

Thanks for you reply! Yes, there are french people in development team, but others are not, and people who visit our forum mostly from all over the world, so inglish is more preferable language to post

There are already keys to speed up and slow down game till 10x. Maybe you was using not the right ones +/- keys, but numeric ones?

About similarity of left and right shift - yes, this is what really should be

About framerate... Well, I suppose there are a huge gap between ta3d linux speed and ta3d windows speed. I suppose it varies up to 5 times or so, but we have what we have. Try to set lesser quality for shadows, water and resolution to 800x600. And see what happens. The most fps fall appears when several units are built. Later in game fps drops very slow.

We should do several tests to compare fps on different systems and OS`es.

Also - try 0.4.1. version. There was MANY bug fixed since

[Joram]

Thanks for the quick reply.
I think I'll switch to my Ubuntu for compilation and further testing.
I just needed Windows to reinstall my original TA.

I think something should be done for performance under windows, but I don't know anything about those problems, though.

I have an Azerty, so the +/- are probably not correctly mapped.
A keymapper in the config file would probably be the best solution...

[zuzuf]

Hi,

Thanks for reporting!!

I am French too !! The performance issue you had on windows is linked to the pathfinder poor performance in 0.4.0, now in 0.4.1 I eliminated most of useless calculations and I optimized it a bit, so it's much faster now. Even with this improvement, performance on windows will be less impressive at the beginning of a game because of memory management : TA3D allocates memory for map geometry when it's needed the first time, so if it's slow, it will slow down the game when moving the cam around, but once you've looked somewhere at least once, it won't slow down any more because of this. Performance are can change a lot from a Linux system to a windows system (because TA3D is developed on Linux) but it won't be more than a 10% performance loss, except if you run it on a 64bits Linux, because it will run almost twice as fast as on a 32bits Linux !! (you can also play with CXXFLAGS on 32bits system, for example to add SSE support which will increase performance).

I am also using Ubuntu (well Kubuntu which is Ubuntu with KDE instead of GNOME), so if you have any problem I can help you. The +/- that are used in TA3D are on the numpad ( it's not said any where ... ). Key mapping is something difficult here because most of shortcuts are set in TA's *.gui files !

Also you don't need to install TA on windows to play TA3D:
_TA3D has its own installer for TA files
_you can install and play TA on Linux with Wine (http://www.winehq.org)

On 0.4.1 RC1, well we've fixed lots of bugs, and a few things have completely changed (ie. in game GUI, camera management, left/right shifts are both working.

[AF]

Why would moving to 64bits cause a 50% performance hit?

[Balthazar]

Because CPU can calculate two 32 bit instructions per cycle (in case you CPU supports 64 bit instructions of course )

[zuzuf]

yes, it's because of SIMD instructions, that are faster with 64bits CPUs. It's much faster with float data, because a float is 32bits, and TA3D uses lots of floats (all geometric data), mainly in the VECTOR class which is used for all the geometry stuffs. Also, there are more registers in a 64bits CPU, so the program needs less calls to the memory to compute a complex operation. 64bits mode is much faster for massive calculations, floating point operations, operation on doubles (which can be done in one cycle only instead of two !!), ... Also part of 32bits modern CPUs are 64bits, so switching to full 64bits enable more optimizations at CPU level. All this makes TA3D faster in 64bits mode because it uses lots of operations that are accelerated by 64bits mode (floating point operations or function calls for example).

[AF]

you've both contradicted eachother.

Balthazar: 32bit is faster than 64bit because you can do two instructions per cycle

zuzuf: 64bit is faster because....

Although now I reread your original post zuzuf I realize you said 64bit is up to 50% faster not half as slow than 32bit.

64bit cpus give servers a big boost, but most 32bit speed ups are caused by the removal of a lot of baggage the 16bit->32bit transfer added on.

[Balthazar]

AF- it seems like you don`t get the point.

Most of TA3D data is 32 bit. So on 32 bit OS - CPU`s 64 bit register work as half as should - 1 register get`s max 32 bit instructions (or data) per cycle.

On 64 bit os - CPU`s 64 bit register works at full strenght and 1 register get`s max - 2 32 bit instructions or 64 bit data. So CPU gets almost twice of register memory over than ib 32 bit`s compartable mode.

That`s why you get almost 100% increase of perfomance when you switch OS to 64bit version.

Hope I`ve manage to answer your question.

[zuzuf]

switching to a 64bits OS won't be enough, you'll need a 64bits binary too!! It's why it faster on a 64bits Linux, because it's built on the platform that will run it. If you try the win32 binaries on win64 don't expect a performance improvement since it will still run as 32bits.

[Balthazar]

yep yep