The /newstuff Chronicles #208

[Graf Zahl]

Nick Perrin said:

It's been at WIP for a while, but no one's really talking about it now because for most people(including me) it lags like crazy, and it has nothing to do with how good your computer is.

Definitely not. It is incredibly choppy even on my 3.2 GHz P4. I'd really like to take a look at the scripts this thing is running but unfortunately the source isn't in there so it is all left to guesswork what is responsible for it. The snow is definitely one big issue but it's not the only one.

[Udderdude]

For some reason CAH runs fine on my Athlon XP 2500+. I guess I'm just lucky. Unfortunately, I don't even like the thing much. Too boring .. give me stuff to kill plz :p

[NiGHTMARE]

Sounds like you played the wad for two minutes and gave up on it. Do yourself a favour and play it again. Shortly after you get inside the recieving centre, you'll find CAH has far more monsters than the average wad :). Trust me, until a level is cleared out you'll never go more than about 10 seconds without coming under attack.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

My Athlon 2000+, 512 RAm, ATI radeon 8500 can't even handle it. It's unbearable to play. It's just too choppy. Heck, Doom 3 runs better than this. It was so abd it took me ages to get off the plane with the exit just behind me.:(

[june gloom]

NiGHTMARE said:

Sounds like you played the wad for two minutes and gave up on it. Do yourself a favour and play it again. Shortly after you get inside the recieving centre, you'll find CAH has far more monsters than the average wad :). Trust me, until a level is cleared out you'll never go more than about 10 seconds without coming under attack.

fuck, you can't even really clear out the recieving area. that's why it's closed off once you leave it.

[mystery8]

Blazing Fury was nice. Kmega1 was very nice. I probably would have enjoyed Cold As Hell if I could get it working. After the crash the screen goes dark and even on full brightness I can't see the UI. Tried with both zDoom 2.0.63a and 2.0.94. I have to use ALT-F4 to close zDoom because I can't even see the menu.

[Bastet Furry]

CaH is running way too choppy to call it playable on my AMD K7-3000, even with snow turned off.
But i dont think that its the authors fault, rather i think that Randy should improve his scripting language heavely or improve zdoomgl so that the CPU gets less to do, as even all doomers should have a OpenGL capable GFX-Card.
(GF4MX aprox. 30 Euro)

So Long, The Werelion!
(Macht die Tür besser zu ansonsten fliegt euch ne Geforce ins Kreuz)

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Yeah, what's the deal with the whole damn thing being dark right down tho being unable to see the menu? I turned the gamma right up and still couldn't see shit.

[NiGHTMARE]

The screen goes dark when it's displaying certain text. The extremely slow frame rate means the text can take a long time to appear.

[Enjay]

It's dark at the start - to represent that you start the mission at night - but after that most of the mod is no darker than usual.

[Chopkinsca]

I found that in ZDoom when you have repeating scripts at a small interval (delay 1) it will slow things down slightly. Even more if you have more than one repeating script.

It sounds like the reloading script in CaH would be a delay(1) script, otherwise it wouldn't be able to keep up with ammo depletion as accurate.

[Graf Zahl]

chopkinsca said:

I found that in ZDoom when you have repeating scripts at a small interval (delay 1) it will slow things down slightly. Even more if you have more than one repeating script.

It sounds like the reloading script in CaH would be a delay(1) script, otherwise it wouldn't be able to keep up with ammo depletion as accurate.

One more reason to release the scripts. I really want to play this WAD but I can't due to the extreme choppiness. It looks like a really awful combination of too many things and too many active scripts at once but I can't verify the second point.

[Xenaero]

Furry: Randy does not code zdoomgl. And I don't think the problem lies in the zdoom coding, if anyone opens the maps in a map editor there's tons upon tons of snow objects. No engine can properly handle billions of objects seen at once, think nuts.wad.


Edit: Oh and I fixed the link to blazing fury's screenshot. Also, there wasn't supposed to be a screen for Blast Em, so I have no idea how that got in there. o_O

[Bastet Furry]

DD_133 said:

Furry: Randy does not code zdoomgl. And I don't think the problem lies in the zdoom coding, if anyone opens the maps in a map editor there's tons upon tons of snow objects. No engine can properly handle billions of objects seen at once, think nuts.wad.

Oh, ok, then i suppose a rerelease without the snowflake things should do the trick. ;)
But this would be a nice idea for zdoom... Set a sector with weather effects like snow, rain, heavy wind(conveur belt without moving texture perhaps?) and/or thunderbolts that can damage the player.
.oO(Next stept towards Party-RPG like Wiz8 with doom engine ^.^ )

So Long, The Werelion!

[Martin Howe]

I have found it to be more like GROVE.WAD in that the lagging gets worse when you see the forest of trees and/or are anywere near it. I have a 2.6GHz P4 with a GB of RAM and that lags like hell playing this WAD - even with snow turned off. Sorry, but CAH is going to the trashcan until it is fixed :)

@Werelion - the sooner DW forums have custom avatars, the better :) :)

[darknation]

Scuba Steve said:

Cold as Hell would be amazing if it didn't run at 5fps on my computer. I am glad the author included the ability to turn the snow off, but it makes little difference on many levels, it still runs extremely poor. I shouldn't have to deal with this in a mod for a 10+ year old game.

heh.

[Bastet Furry]

Martin Howe said:

@Werelion - the sooner DW forums have custom avatars, the better :) :)

Sadly thats something that the Webmasters reserve for themself.
If one of the Board Admin read this, please put this one as my Ava:
http://www.nachtkatzen.de/01.jpg
(80x79 8,8 KB)

[Bloodshedder]

Maximum avatar size is 36x36 or whereabouts. You also need to have 250 or more posts.

[SYS]

Given all the fuzz about cold as hell running like molasses, I won't even humor the idea of trying it on my archaic machinery.

[Schneelocke]

Bloodshedder said:

Maximum avatar size is 36x36 or whereabouts. You also need to have 250 or more posts.

Mmm. Are you sure about the size constraints? Linguica at least's got bigger avatars (that is, his current one is bigger, and I recall past ones that were, too).

[Schneelocke]

POTGIESSER said:

Given all the fuzz about cold as hell running like molasses, I won't even humor the idea of trying it on my archaic machinery.

It really depends on the area you're in. The worst I've seen (for the Generator Complex and Weapons R&D) is about 2 frames per second (even without snow and without any demons left - I guess it's all the trees), while other parts run at more than 100 frames per second.

That's on a P4 2.66. I only have 256 MB RAM, but ZDoom only used a maximum of 68 MB so far while playing CAH, so I guess that's not the biggest problem.

[Bloodshedder]

Schneelocke said:

Mmm. Are you sure about the size constraints? Linguica at least's got bigger avatars (that is, his current one is bigger, and I recall past ones that were, too).

I'm sure. Admins have to add avatars manually, and they're not likely to give a normal user one much over 36x36.

[Bastet Furry]

Bloodshedder said:

Maximum avatar size is 36x36 or whereabouts. You also need to have 250 or more posts.

Nor problems with the 250 posts, but why these small avas?
The vB have options for managin external hosted avas, options for small bandwith users so that they can disable avas and sigs...
And WTF do i have to press that fscking checkbox so that my sig is being postet >.<

Ok, back to topic:
When does the author of CaH gives us bloody leechers something that at least the übercomputers of some people can play at decent FPS? ;)

[TheDarkArchon]

Schneelocke said:

Mmm. Are you sure about the size constraints? Linguica at least's got bigger avatars (that is, his current one is bigger, and I recall past ones that were, too).

Not too far back Cyb had TWO images much larger than 36x36 as his avatar (The "Zombie Fever" ones.)

[NiGHTMARE]

Have you tried both the patches which have already been released?

[Schneelocke]

Bloodshedder said:

I'm sure. Admins have to add avatars manually, and they're not likely to give a normal user one much over 36x36.

Ah, I see. I'll have to get back to an admin some time then when I have a suitable 36x36 picture that still allows others to make out what it displays. ^_~

[Schneelocke]

OK, here's a question regarding CAH, and it's not about fps problems. ^_~

I've completed a number of objectives, and just called for help on the radio at the old base (and drove back to the main base); my objectives are now: 1) search for survivors and intel; 2) find and read Dr Jurgen's notes; and 3) find a way to contact forces and escape.

The problem I'm having now is that I'm not sure what's left for me to do. I did collect four notes by Dr Jurgensen (I assume that this is a thinko and that he's the same as Dr Jurgen); so unless there's a fifth one (which I haven't been able to find despite looking for an hour), I have them all, yet the objective is not fulfilled.

I'm not really sure where to go and what to do now. I've gone through all the accessible areas (weapons R&D, isolation complex, staff housing, central transit, power station, barracks) several times, but there seems to be nothing left for me to do.

That being said, one thing I don't have is the access code for some of the weapons R&D and main R&D facilities, either.

I'm not sure - am I just missing something, or did I hit a problem with the WAD? Any help would be nice. ^^

[Hirogen2]

This is another one that basically sucks. Poor architecture, bad texturing, poor monster placement, short on ammo, and very poor gameplay. Download it for laughs.

A true and authentic review. No nicecomings, I LIKE THAT.
I like that someone finally spews out "this wad sucks" (not related to THAT wad, but any map in general) rather than just saying "mmhkay, looks a bit weird, mmh, better skip this one if you're..."

BTW, Nice to see someone different donig Newstuff ;-)

[Juras_Avis]

So, does anyone know how exactly to get CAS to run at a playable framerate - or what exactly is causing these slowdowns? I've turned off the snow and it made a difference but if I were to load a saved game, I wrangle one frame per second. My system is more than able to hand this stuff.
Cheers.

[Schneelocke]

Juras_Avis said:

So, does anyone know how exactly to get CAS to run at a playable framerate - or what exactly is causing these slowdowns? I've turned off the snow and it made a difference but if I were to load a saved game, I wrangle one frame per second. My system is more than able to hand this stuff.
Cheers.

Download the two patches (cah_p1.zip and cah_p2.zip) and then run cah_notrees.bat. I never got below about 20 fps that way, and had at least 40 most of the time.