[Solved] Downtime

[scrawl]

Okay, so today is turning out to be an interesting day. The machine that I have been using to code OpenMW for the past 3 1/2 years just died. Artifacts started showing and then the screen froze. Needless to say, I was doing some intense OpenMW testing at the time it broke. When I reboot, the same thing happens in a matter of minutes. The fans are working and temperatures read OK.

I'm not that mad. The computer was about 5 years old, and I was looking for an excuse to get a new one anyway. I plan on getting an SSD with it and a few other upgrades.

In the meantime, I'm stuck with this old laptop, which is just about fast enough to run OpenMW. Compile times are a bit annoying though, so don't expect too much coding from me in the near future. Anyway, now seems to be the perfect time to review how well the OSG port is running on lower-end hardware. I'm getting decent FPS in interiors, but only about 7 fps in exteriors. I plan on working on a more efficient terrain renderer in the next few days, and restoring distant land functionality in the process.

[ElderTroll]

More efficient terrain sounds good. Let us know if you could use any support constructing a new desktop out of pizzas.

[DanielCoffey]

What country are you in, scrawl? We may have components from past builds that you could use. For example I have a couple of 2x140mm radiators if you are watercooling. I am in the UK.

EDIT : I will have a white Nanoxia DS6 full tower case within a week too, still with its original box but it would be a beast to ship.

[psi29a]

Don't get too frustrated.

Anything that we can do to help? Any particular areas to test/stress?

[lysol]

Let us know if you could use any support constructing a new desktop out of pizzas.

+1

[jvoisin]

Hurray for low-end hardware support \o/

[Chris]

Hurray for low-end hardware support \o/

That's an interesting thing about development. When I've had low-end-for-the-time hardware (not that my current machine is terribly good, but it's passable for most things I do), I was really grateful to be able to test my projects out on it to ensure it runs well on non-new hardware. But at the same time, it makes actual development a pain with long compile-times, non-featured tools (IDEs in particular being memory guzzlers), and having to close down many non-essential processes.

It would be really neat if there were tools to simulate the actual speed of specific old systems (most VMs either don't throttle, or throttle without respect to how the target system would actually perform, e.g. DOSBox, where it's nearly impossible to make it perform as old DOS systems actually did).

[Ace (SWE)]

I should really be set for low-end testing, but it seems like my old 9600GT I've used for that has finally decided to throw in the towel. So now it just occupies a part of shelving in the corner of my room.
As it turns out, my i5-4200U laptop is not all that low-end either. It can even run Dwarf Fortress better than my desktop can. Though what remains to test is if it's due to Linux vs Windows, or actual hardware improvements.

A suggestion for you Scrawl would be to boot up a headless Linux system and run distcc on your old computer, should help some with the compile times at least.

[raevol]

Anyway, now seems to be the perfect time to review how well the OSG port is running on lower-end hardware.

[scrawl]

I got my new system on monday. Very happy with performance, but unfortunately the water pump is making a little too much noise. It's silent enough to shrug it off for now, but loud enough to slowly drive me crazy if I don't get this fixed. I am in contact with their support now, who told me to install a (windows-only) tuning software. Let's see where this goes...