Speed vs graphics preferences

[macdude22]

Also, it appears that more mac users are having more speed hold-ups, possibly due to the aforementioned inefficiency of the blitz-max (if that is right) language.

I think it's more Mac users (myself included) tend to keep our computers for longer periods of time before upgrading (what with the they keep going and going and going instead of getting riddled with spyware and malware and garbage and corrupt registries). A curse and a blessing I suppose. We get far more use out of our machines than the average Windows user but in the same regard want games games games.

[Randomizer]

Mac computers are meant to run for years with operating system upgrades whereas Windows computers need to be upgraded with new operating systems to cope with their inefficiencies.

My system:

System: Apple iBook G4 PowerPC G4 (1.2), 1.33 GHz, 14" screen, 1.25 GB DDR SDRAM, Boot ROM version 4.8.7f1 Software OS X 10.3.5, Graphics ATI card with 32MB RAM

is marginal for this game. As soon as I hit a village it slows to a crawl keeping up with the graphics overload. The problem is the high level language uses an inefficient way of dealing with graphics.

[Rune_74]

The problem with your system would be your video card...32 mb is a very low amount of ram for a video card. Do other games work well with that?

[Randomizer]

Haven't had any trouble up until now. Of course swapping video cards for a laptop is a pain so I'm stuck until I upgrade to an Intel based Mac. I would have waited if I thought Apple would ever go Intel.

[Rune_74]

The speed of rthe system is a little slow but yeah I think the 32 mb is really causing you alot of grief for instance I have 512mb on my vid card, and the game never slows down for me at all. Alot of times video cards can be sort of backed up by your system to make up for it, however in this case you don't really have the backup to that card.

I think one of the major areas that macs and windows based machines face is the fact that their is alot more machine intensive games out for the windows based machines then for the mac, face it the thing that pushes upgrading machines forward is not the spreadsheets and words its the games.

[realmzmaster]

Rune_74 is quite right. Games push computer technology. Let's face it word processors, spreadsheets and even databases do not push the envelope the way games do. Any one remember Alternate Reality an early CRPG by DataSoft. It was orginally written on the Atari 800. The Atari had the Antic graphic chip. Phillp Price used that chip to put an unheard of 256 colors on the screen at one time. When the game was converted no other computer except for the Amiga ( whose graphic chip was created by the same person ) could match that number of colors. If you compared different versions side by side you could easily pick out the Amiga and Atari versions. Take for instance Madden 08 NFL for the Macintosh, the required video card is a Nvidia Geforce 7300 with at least 128MB and a 1.83 GHz dual core Intel processor with OSX 10.4.9 1GB of ram and 6GB disk space. Forget about playing it on anything less. Eventually even Macintosh users must upgrade their equipment especially to play graphically intensive games or games that use some of the newer graphic techniques. Unfortunately if it were not for BlitzMax there is no telling if Eschalon would be available for all three operating systems, since the development time would be longer.

[macdude22]

I doubt with out a high level language like blitz would they have been able to afford to develop for 3 platforms. I'll take cross platform with higher system requirements and eat ramen for a few days to upgrade my puter.

[realmzmaster]

If you want to see more games from independents for the Macintosh and Linux or even more old school crpg's and games for Windows then cross platform languages are essential. BW was able to use BlitzMax to released the game for all three platforms within weeks of each other. No small accomplishment. Let's face Eschalon is a labor of love that BW hopes will return a decent profit so Basilisk games can continue doing what they want to do.

[Hathorian]

Since it seems Eschalon's very cool, detailed graphics are at least partly responsible for the relatively slow movement speed, perhaps this is a fairer question to ask.

Detailed graphics??? Dude, it is 800x600. It doesn't get any less detailed than that these days. I'd love to see the game in 1920 x 1200.

The game was designed to have slow walking speed and it has nothing to do with how powerful your computer is. You would have to have a really old computer not to be able to run this game at full speed.

[GSV3MiaC]

I agree; The game is (or should be) barely troubling the CPU or graphics card on a modern PC (e.g. one that can run Oblivion, Witcher, whatever) unless it is coded in interpreted Cobol or something.

If the walking speed is limited by CPU/graphics speed then some optimising is needed, but I bet it's probably being limited deliberately with a timer someplace (at full speed you should probably be able to cross a whole region before you could get your finger off the button).

[Mithter Thibbs]

64MB ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card, 512 MB RAM, and a *cough* 300MHz Pentium 2 processor (cobbled the system together out of spare parts for fun; I wouldn't actually pay for a computer like this )

I still like the graphics as they are. It's a bit slow at times, but I still get a pretty good framerate/walking speed in largely empty areas (the wastes of northern Crakamir, in the corners of the maps in dungeons, etc), and I still like the graphical detail, so even the default walking speed on a normal computer, such as I imagine it to be anyway, is something that I'd have to say I'd be fine with, too.