nightly edition slow, bugs

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello.

I was testing new nightly edition (rd8e70c79b9) and for some reason it is slow. I could tell that there is monsters nearby by the fact that game got slower, which is something entirely new for a long time considering that older versions run smoothly on much much older machines. What happened?

Also couple of bugs, probably windows-specific (maybe even XP specific):

Entire overhead view extra term window flickers if you have monster flicker on and there is one monster with flicker visible in it.

Map view extra term window doesn't update correctly: it "leaves behind" old parts of the dungeon that is not active. Might have something to do with resized map window.

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello.

I was testing new nightly edition (rd8e70c79b9) and for some reason it is slow. I could tell that there is monsters nearby by the fact that game got slower

Entire overhead view extra term window flickers if you have monster flicker on and there is one monster with flicker visible in it.

First maybe related to latter, because with map view slowdown is less obvious. I have a feeling that it still happens. Can anyone confirm what I'm feeling? (maybe I should find some flickering breeder and see if they are related).

Also last night when I was playing upon entering new level before I did anything I saw monsters that were outside of my LoS for couple of milliseconds, just long enough that I managed to notice a monster in screen. I have seen this before when I used USB-stick to save game, there it was more obvious (apparently there is some routine that makes save every time you leave a level, and because writing in USB-stick is a lot slower than hard drive it took longer for game to recover).

These all seem to be related to screen updates, so maybe there is something broken in screen update process.

[d_m]

Timo, it would be great if we could figure out which nightly first introduced this. Can you try some of the older builds at http://rephial.org/nightlies and see which one(s) exhibit this problem?

If they all seem to have the problem then I will build some even earlier ones and you can try those.

Thanks!

[Timo Pietilä]

Timo, it would be great if we could figure out which nightly first introduced this. Can you try some of the older builds at http://rephial.org/nightlies and see which one(s) exhibit this problem?

If they all seem to have the problem then I will build some even earlier ones and you can try those.

Thanks!

I think I have seen that flicker problem as long as I have used real-time flicker. However I didn't use real-time flicker as soon as it was introduced so I can't be sure when it was introduced. If you could build first of those I'll try it out. For some version between 3.1.2v2 and current version window refresh routine has been rewritten, because I don't have either map or overhead view problems in 3.1.2v2, but have now. I'm guessing that it has been done same time with flicker.

For others, slowdown was first noticeable in rd8e70c79b9, before that I played r8ceb01d9ea. However that was also first version I played at work (got bored, needed to do something). My work machine is in paper faster than my home computer, but in reality much slower, especially drawing any graphics. It doesn't have any dedicated video card, just integrated Intel something. I haven't seen that slowdown in my home computer.

I'm thinking that maybe that "overhead view" refresh is a reason for this slowdown. Based on what I saw it doing with real-time flicker, it seem to refresh entire screen for every monster move, and with flicker for each color change. Map view doesn't do that same.

That "seeing monsters just after entering level"-bug is a bit too evasive to be able to really trust any testing. It sometimes happens but 95% of time doesn't. However I think I have seen that too for a while now. I think I can reproduce that with USB-stick savefile with my home computer as well.

So in short: If you can find the one with flicker introduced I'll try that first, because it "feels" that it is the reason I'm seeing these bugs. If it works without problems, then I can start hunting with less educated guessing which is the one with bugs.

[d_m]

I know for a fact that the animate_flicker command does slow down the game, because it has to redraw the flickering monsters constantly. Are you saying that if you turn that feature off then you don't notice a problem? If so then the issue is best described as "Make animate_flicker less CPU intensive"

I will create that build soon but unfortunately I've been busy at work and am now trying to close out some 3.2 bugs so we can release (currently fighting with tiles).

[Timo Pietilä]

I know for a fact that the animate_flicker command does slow down the game, because it has to redraw the flickering monsters constantly. Are you saying that if you turn that feature off then you don't notice a problem? If so then the issue is best described as "Make animate_flicker less CPU intensive"

I will create that build soon but unfortunately I've been busy at work and am now trying to close out some 3.2 bugs so we can release (currently fighting with tiles).

No problem. Those bugs are not earth-shattering crashes or annoying enough to cause severe lack of gaming.