Spring RTS Engine

I have an AMD 1.7 (no jokes please) /w 512 and a GeForce MX400 (el-cheepo). Even though my setup may seem dated to most, I find it fills all my needs and then some, able to run UT2004 with no problems and even HL2 with little trouble, just the occasional framerate dip.

I am, however, quite dissapointed to hear about all the great visual features of Spring... for those with the hardware! Is there any way we could get software rendering of the Shadowmaps and the reflective water? Even if the water's not reflective, shadowmaps and just animated water would be great.

Please keep in mind that I am in no way saying that Spring as-is isn't INCREDIBLE, the screenshots from those with the proper setup is absolutely WET DREAM MATERAIL and with FPS tweaks, improved GUIs, and AI this will be the only game I ever play; I'm just venting that I can't see Spring in it's total spectacularity.

Hi Slamoid.
I have almost identical hardware and the same graphics card as you have. I also have a new Dell laptop and an IBM laptop with a Radeon 9000 and a FireGL graphics card and none of these PCs can handle shadows and reflection

-Jacob

Hello everyone.

What we can do to try to help with these details is use our contacts to find a coder who could write a code path for the older cards. I know this is an opengl project, but the best example I can think of is Half-Life 2 and how it had DX 7 8 and 9 paths.

Spring went public to look for resources and help, and I think we may be giving them more requests than help. If anyone knows someone who can help this project out, hit the phone and IM clients.

If any of you have ever wanted to be on the team of your own RTS game, this is your shot. If the right contributions are made we could have many interesting RTS games rise from this code.

Tsumari

The reflective water works fine for me but the problem i'm having is with the shadows, seems my hardware doesn't like them...

shadow and reflective water are unbelievably processor intensive, which is why they need to be offloaded to the GPU in order to get decent framerates. it is possible to get software rendering for these if we code the algorithms manually (or if the drivers offer software rendering for those extensions), but your framerate wouldnt be too happy

Just for the record... I have a Geforce 6600GT (not exactly the highest-end card ever), and it renders shadows and reflections without any noticeable framerate issues :)

<brag>
My rig is a 3.2 Ghz with 1 gig ram
6800 GT video card with a 20" LCD monitor
and 5.1 sound ^_^
</brag>

I play at 1600x1200 and the game is just...wow... soooooooo nice. The only lag I ever see is when a new builder unit is about to be built and it seems the game loads their buildset.

.

..

.... I just got TA Spring working on my Windows XP Pro 64 Bit
with alittle from the forum and MS ... .NET beta drivers

AMD processors kick butt ....


Can't wait to get my hands on the dual core AMD 64 X2
processor .... That will make Windows XP64 run like
a race horse .....

Two more months to wait ... and the new ATI 520 ....graphics
cards ...
.
.

I have an impression that the SY have unknowingly over-restricted the shadows, forcing certain opengl extensions to be used, where they can sometimes be substituted by other, less obvious ones. Can a replacement exe be made, with the check for extensions removed? It will crash if shadows are indeed not possible to display, but if they are, it will run. I, for example, have been able to get shadows (distorted due to some miscalculations) working on my machine by removing the check for extensions in the exe. I'll have to recompile that now that the new source is out, so I can't provide the exe yet.

Geforce MX440 is quite lame model (geforce2 in fact) ... and that's no wonder you have problems ...

to get usable visuals You need Geforce 3 and higher or ATI 8500 and higher ...

NVIDIA Geforce2 and Geforce 4MX and such crippled models will be SLOW

ATI Radeon 7xxx ones prolly too ...

It seems to me that TA Spring is more demanding, or less tolerant, to the GC than the average game. Although my overclocked settings work with Doom3 and LockOn Air Combat, they don't work with Spring as soon as there are more than a dozen units. When I go back to the BIOS settings, then it works.

After a lot of tweaking in the Bios, I finally succeeded in making the game run correctly without black screen. This involved upvolting CPU by 10% (I have a Zalman rad, so there is no risk), modifying the RAM CAS latency from 3T to 2.5T, changing AGP from x4 to x8, overclocking my CG a bit (for the fun) and other esoteric stuff like that. I am not sure which setting did the trick, although I suspect the CPU voltage was for something.
At least, the game showed me that my config wasn't completely optimized. Nevertheless, I can still easily bring my computer to its knees after building 150-200 units, around 30 brawlers, 30 fast bombers, and 20 heavy tanks make them attack a few pieces of rock. Granted, this is a test situation that may arise only once in a while, but it's not completely unrealistic.

Then the Sim time goes up rapidly, eating 65% of the CPU time, as well as the collision calculations. In the end, it seems that lack of memory prevails, as the game starts to write heavily on the hard disk (I didn't check the memory consumption though, I should have). Because of that, the game started to lag behind, and the sim time eventually raised to > 300%, after which I stopped.

BTW, my system is a T'bred 2700+, 2.3GHz, 512 Mb DDR 266 (it sucks, i know), ATI 9600 Pro.