ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hello! I am quite enjoying te4, and would like to play it on my laptop!

When I start it up, I get quickly to the intro screen, but then the menus lag noticeably, and it maxes out a CPU core. I tried ctrl-alt-shift-P to get a profiler log, as I saw in another thread, but it didn't seem to do anything -- possibly because it only works in-game?

I'm running at 800x600, on a brand-new Vaio Z with Intel Sandy Bridge graphics. CPU is at 2.7GHz, but clocks up to 3.2 under ToME's relentless assault. It is quite likely that the GL drivers suck with some ferocity on this machine, but even so...it's the intro screen at 800x600, so yeah.

How can I figure out more, to work around or help fix or whatever? I attached my te4_log, but I suspect it won't say anything interesting.

Does it continue to use all cpu while ingame ?

darkgod wrote:Does it continue to use all cpu while ingame ?

Yeah, if I make the resolution large enough to be playable (~1000x1000). UI lags badly and I sit between 90-100% of a core always. I've turned off antialiasing and particles, and tried 10/20/30 fps targets with no difference.

It's only 50% CPU when waiting for input if I crank the resolution back down to 800x600, but then the hotbar isn't visible, nor the bottom 2/3 of hover-info panels.

I'll have some time Wednesday to get a build going and profile, assuming that cygwin produces symbols that the usual Windows profilers can deal with...

Turns out the CPU time is basically all in the Intel OpenGL drivers. I'll do some GL profiling when I get a chance, and maybe there are some tweaks to the graphics code that can make it better, but mostly I think I need to wait for Intel to improve its drivers. Yay.

Or, hmm, maybe ANGLE would help here. What version of GL does ToME require?

Ah yes looks like you are rendering OpenGL on your CPU which is *bad bad bad*.

T4 can run on very old opengls (IIRC 1.2 is the bare minimun), it will disable features automatically if not available.

You can try lowering the FPS in the options too

Yeah, I've got shaders disabled, FPS set to 10. If ToME can run against GLES 2, then ANGLE could make it run a lot better on many Windows machines, I suspect. When I get back from my trip I'll take a wander around the code.