ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I have two fully working computers right now - a laptop and a netbook, both with Intel 945 graphics chipsets and a gigabyte or more of RAM. ToME 4 does not work on either of them - not on Linux, not on Windows XP, and not on Windows 7. Generally, as I've described, it will still be in the process of starting a new game after more than 15 minutes; during which it will eat up huge amounts of RAM, forcing everything else into swap space.

I have yet to find a computer on which ToME 4 works properly, but my pool of available computers is kind of limited. Due to the hardware similarities I suspect this is a configuration, driver, or hardware issue. So I guess I might as well ask everyone here:

- Does ToME 4 work for you?

- Does it work without hogging huge amounts of RAM?

- If yes for both of the above, what sort of video card are you using? What operating system?

- If you are using an Intel 9xx video card and Linux, what does your Xorg configuration look like?

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Hmm, guess what? I didn't think to try starting ToME with DRI disabled on Linux. That prevents the RAM hogging. Given that, and that the hogging occurs on Linux and two versions of Windows, I wonder if the RAM hogging problem reflects design problems with the 945 GPU.

Unfortunately, ToME still hangs forever when trying to generate a level, even with DRI disabled... So my original question still applies.

Lord Estraven wrote:- Does ToME 4 work for you?

ASCII with basically everything possible turned off, yes; it's been so long since I've tried better graphics I can't vouch for that. Iirc, last time I did it ate my CPU to hell. Functioned smoothly, but CPU would max out.

- Does it work without hogging huge amounts of RAM?

Define huge, heh. T4 usually eats a min in the 100-150 meg range, scaling up to 2-3 hundred or more later in the game. There's been times when memory leaks or whatever would chew up gig+, but those tend to be locked down on and fixed pretty quickly.

- If yes for both of the above, what sort of video card are you using? What operating system?

Integrated video card, specifically ATI Mobility Radeon XPRESS 200. Which is utter and complete crap, to be honest. Running windows XP 32x.

Hope some of that helps, ha.

How much free HD space do you have on the Windows machine? I can't imagine RAM being that much of an issue when running XP as long as you have enough space for a page file. There's no way it would run on Win7 though.

And have you tried turning off all advanced graphical effects?

Also, can you get modules working? Try Broken Bottle and Run from the Shadow:

http://gruesomegames.com/brokenbottle1.2-win.zip
http://gruesomegames.com/games/shadow-win-1.0.zip

Both of these require a *lot* less resources than ToME, though Run from the Shadow still uses some fancy shader stuff.

HD space: 80 and 160 GB hard drives, almost empty.

Graphical effects: tried turning off the ones I can (on the start screen, one I start a game I don't get any time to change settings before either the game or the OS freezes). No effect at all.

OTOH... Windows 7, sitting idle, has a combined RAM and swap usage of ~500 MB. If ToME 4 is the kind of game that is not designed to run on such a setup, with a gig of RAM and a gig and a half of swap available... Then unfortunately it's not my kind of game, and I apologize for wasting your time.

(I suppose I should have figured it was designed with such hardware requirements... Oh well.)

Heh, my Win7 regularly hits 2 GB RAM with not much running, but that could be abnormal...

Do you even get to the character creation screen?

Estra, are you running 64 bit or 32 bit? There's some known issues with the former (Though I'm not sure what, exactly, or how close they are to being fixed, etc., so forth., which might be what you're running into. With ~500 megs of ram free, you shouldn't even be topping off your 1 gig. T4 doesn't normally have that much of a memory imprint, at least on my system, but it has spiked before when it ran into something buggy. DG's usually pretty good about fixing that sort of thing, when he's either got access to the system or access someone who does.

I'd hope for a comment from DG or one of the more capable coders, really, they'll be more likely to be able help you out. Alternately, try hopping on IRC until you run into someone that can at least give a heads up as to what's happening. Don't give up hope, heh. The game should definitely be able to run on the sort of hardware you're toting.

Windows XP 32 bit

2 GHz AMD Athalon 2400+ processor
1.25 gigs of RAM (no idea how I ended up with an odd pairing)
Radeon 9200 series Graphics Card

I run ToME with full particle effects and the only thing I disable is the mouse cursor (though ToME auto-disables a bunch of stuff for me like frame buffers).

It uses a lot of RAM when it loads the module but after that it drops down to 50% or less.

Is your XP box 32 or 64 bit?

If you're running 64 bit there's an alternate windows exe here you can try. No promises that it will work, I use it and I know some people on 64 bit OSs have had some success with it (but others have not).

On Windows it's always 32-bit. Thanks for trying to help, though.

Late 2008 Macbook with OS X 10.6.8, 2 GB RAM, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and an Intel GMA X3100 graphics card running a 1280 x 800 display. Also have Windows XP on dualboot. ToME works well for me (ASCII mode, shaders and some other effects turned off), I play in windowed mode to avoid some behaviour (not letting me switch to other applications easily etc...)

...

AMD Phenom II 3.2 Ghz
4 GB system ram
Windows 7 64 Bit
NVidia GeForce 250, 2 GB Video memory

And yes, I have no problems running Tome.
I can tell you exactly the problem you have. You are using a video card that uses an integrated chipset. This means that video memory and system memory is shared, instead of being discrete. So, you go to the start up a game, and the video card and the system are pretty much fighting over the same resources, which ends badly. Your system specs would be fine otherwise.

Intel graphics chipsets are simply not designed with gaming in mind, and there isn't much to be done that you haven't done.

That sounds like it might be the case... Only more GPU-intensive games like Nexuiz and Vega Strike work fine on both computers. What might ToME 4 be doing that more resource intensive games don't?

- Does ToME 4 work for you?
Yes.

- Does it work without hogging huge amounts of RAM?
With high settings on and a custom tileset, it's using 260 MB of RAM at the moment. This isn't much at all for a modern game, but is a fair amount if you compare it to games of a similar nature/genre. For me it isn't any big deal, I have more than enough RAM for my purposes.
e: The game occasionally locks up, when it does it uses around 1,700 MB of RAM. (1.7 GB)


- If yes for both of the above, what sort of video card are you using? What operating system?
I'm running it on a Lenovo E420 Thinkpad, Intel Core i3-2350M Processor @ 2.3GHz and Intel HD 3000 graphics card (integrated, obviously). Not a very beefy computer, but you shouldn't need one for a turn based roguelike with next to no intensive graphics. Windows 7 Professional.

Lord Estraven wrote:On Windows it's always 32-bit. Thanks for trying to help, though.

This isn't true, Windows is offered in both 32 and 64 bit. Unless you simply meant for you it's always 32 bit, in which case my mistake.

Yeah, I meant that my copy of Windows is 32-bit. I can't really justify buying the 64-bit version, since I have only one 64-bit computer.

Linux, Intel i5, Nvidia graphics card, 8G ram.

Full graphics, generally fine unless there are a lot of monsters on a level, in which case it gets slow. Never crashes.

I locked the game to one core as it has a habbit of dragging the whole machine down otherwise, and doesn't run much faster on four cores - just seems to waste more CPU doing nothing obviously useful.

Pete