ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi there,

I bought ToME at Gamersgate and it runs so slow it is literally unplayable. While the mouse cursor runs normal, the rest is just horribly laggy. Even the options menu is unresponsive and almost unusable. It's running with 1-2 FPS, I would guess. Already tried every option in the graphics menu.

My System:

Windows 8.1 Pro
AMD Phenom II x4 965
4 GB RAM
Radeon HD 4890

Not the newest machine but it should well be enough for ToME.

I hope you can help me, I really want to play this

That is almost certainly a video driver problem. Your video card is not being sent work so your CPU has to do it, and a CPU is very very very very bad at doing that.

Check that your video driver/opengl is working correctly

If all else fails, disable shaders.

It's how this computer, which has a seven or so year old video card only capable of Shader 2.0, runs ToME.

I'm having slowness problems too and I just wanted to mention that as a long time player of 1.04 and earlier it was fine then with the shaders off. Like others I had slowdowns with the larger vaults but otherwise still playable. Something changed between 1.04 and 1.05 now even the main menu takes 3 seconds to highlight any selection the cursor is over. What is so graphically demanding at the main menu? Well, anyway, everythings updated on my end, I just can't play new versions any more.

In the main menu if you disable the animated background, is it still slow ? aka it maxes one core of your CPU ?
If so then it *is* a video driver problem, more precisely an opengl problem.

I'm not very windows savvy but there must be some opengl tests existing I imagine, can you try one please ?

I updated my drivers again just in case some rogue dll was to blame but like SLupo and SageAcrin I'm on very old hardware here so the "latest" was dated from 2007
I found johnnyzero's nightly builds and working backwards I replaced the 1.0.5 exe with each of them and ran the game. Doing this I was able to find the first instance of the slowdown occurring in the following build: The one posted immediately before it, commit 946f0b9acf2772dd5c7a34a3274523e598481e71, works good for me!
So to SLupo, you might try what I did, get the win32 build by johnnyzero here: Link
and copy it over your 1.0.5 version. I can't guarantee it will validate the online profile, but mine seems to pass.
And to DarkGod, I hope this helps isolate it. Something with the text outlines no doubt, though I'm sure it is more to do with hanging onto old hardware we have no business using.

You mean just replacing the *exe* (not the lua code) works ????
That's rather weird, this exe change doesnt really affect display speed. Also if you use it you should be *overrun* by errors, yet you are not ??
Ca you show me the te4_log.txt file when running with it please ?

I am watching this thread with great interest, because it somewhat mirrors my own subjective experiences:

• 1.04 final me: "Hey, this game is pretty cool! Save, load, and generate level are kinda slow and remind me of PS2 games, but it's not horrible.
• 1.05g beta me: "Oh my god, this game runs so smooth and fast now! Great changes!"
• 1.05 final me: "Uhh... urrr... arrr... help! It is slower now? I will take outdoor breaks every time I finish a dungeon."

Please try this rebuild and let us know how it works. You should only need to extract the new t-engine.exe, but you're safe if you extract the whole zip to your t-engine folder. Your game should still validate fine with the new exe.

edit: renamed file, fixed link

The rebuild you posted is still slow for me.
Here is a log from the release version (slow): http://pastebin.com/LAB4MX4u
Here is a log from the 946f0b9... version (fast): http://pastebin.com/Neyn5BfS
The only difference I spot is a few lines about "Upgrading black texture to size ..."
I know the part about JIT being disabled is probably bad but I've always had that.
Today I played a new character up to level 18 with the old exe without any serious hitches.

Can you please hop in #tome on irc.rizon.net ? I wanna do some live tests

Do you have Catalyst installed? I had the same problem with the drivers from Windows Update with Windows 8.1

hollower wrote:Something with the text outlines no doubt,

Interesting, that might explain why it's slow even on the menu, with background turned off?
I have to report the same experience, using the earlier .exe suggested by hollower runs ok (at a short test), as fast as it used to with 1.0.4; but johnnyzero's suggested .exe makes no improvement in speed compared to 1.0.5.

Doubt it, the main menu doesnt use outlines IIRC.

Also just disable shaders, if it's the issue it'd go away

My tests were with all video options disabled.