🚀 go-pugleaf

Craig Lemas (cle...@creaf.com) wrote:

: Animesh Karna <ka...@pobox.upenn.edu> wrote....

: > Games like Ultima 8, however, had me wondering.  It was horribly slow, 
: > but I didn't see ANYTHING that warranted that.  It looked nice, had nice 
: > sound effects, and good animation, but I've seen other games with all 
: > this that ran much faster.  This one had me feeling like the processor 
: > power was being wasted, and that "Oh, we're just trying to push the 
: > limits" was a cop-out for not optimizing their code.

: Trust me, ULTIMA 8 even ran slow on my 486dx2/50 and dx2/66.  And I also 
: have a Diamond VIPER VLB as well as a 4 meg IDE VLB controller.  The game 
: is just slow and was not written very well.

: Craig Lemas
: QA Technician, CLI
: <cle...@creaf.com>

I just wanted to throw in a little Origin gripe of my own to this 
thread.  I also believe that Origin's code is less than optimal.  One 
thing I would note is how long it takes to save games in Ultima 7, 7 part 
II and 8.  If you look out in the dir the files are a few hundered k, but 
it could take minutes to save and load games.  Why all the delay?  How 
much information is really needed to be saved in order to continue 
later?  I have always believe that they were writting out way more 
information than was necessary.  If you compare these times to other 
similar games there is a difference.  Many a quest game I have played 
takes seconds to save.  This may seem a little nit picky, this is the 
kinda thing I have noticed alot with Origin.  Optimization doesn't just 
mean writing the fastest code.  It means taking the time to plan out 
routines and data to be accessed in the fastest METHOD.  An assembly 
program to find all prime numbers could be twice as slow as a C++ program 
doing the same, if the C++ program used a better approach or method. I 
strongly recomend 'Zen of Code Optimization' by Michael Abrash.

I would also agree about the graphics in Ultima 8 being slow.  I upgraded 
to a 486-33 in order to play U8, and it was still incredibly slow for 
me.  And don't say I have a slow setup or something.  WC3 rates my video 
as a 2 (local bus video).  U8 was smooth in some parts, but when there 
were more than 2-3 other moving chars around it bogged down really bad.  
It just seemed like lousy grahpics routines, or an engine that was doing
WAY more than it needed to.

I may be going out on a limb here, but as someone who has programmed in 
assembly language for 7 years before learning C, I know the value of ASM 
code for speed.  I have always wondered if all of Origin's games are 
written completely in C++.  I feel at least a small part of the code 
should be in ASM where timing is critical.  I also feel that Origin could 
do like other companies (ie id software) and shoot for a final product to 
run on a certain processor, and then try to find the right balance 
between features and speed to get it to work on that processor.  If it 
just can't be done, then I can see stepping up the CPU requirements, but 
I think that they just come right out with 'There gonna need a Pentium 
for this one' and then use the speed of the Pentium to make up for lazy 
coding.  I refuse to believe that WC3 couldn't have been made more 
playable on less than a Pentium.  Like the memory thing.  If you don't 
have 16 megs, the game thrashes wildly in combat every time someone 
talks, blows up, etc.  It seems like they have setup virtual memory on 
the drive to make up for the loss of memory (I only have 8MB).  The big 
problem I have with this is that it happens whether I am in SVGA or VGA, 
making them both somewhat unplayable from time to time.  I can't believe 
there couldn't be a way to have setup a VGA only mode which would require 
less memory, allowing for those sound samples to be loaded in the 
available ram, or something along these lines.  I am not complaining 
about the speed of the flight itself.  I am able to play the game pretty 
well in SVGA, with the occasional switch to VGA.  But the pauses to load 
the same sample over and over and over (Flint 'Phew! One less Kilrathi') 
is really annoying the hell out of me.

That's my 2 cents.  I know some will blast me and say I don't understand 
anything about programming.  All I can say is, when you see the finished 
product our team (2 programmer/1 artist/2 musician) is working on you'll 
change your mind.  These opinions are all based on my experience in 
programming for the pc (which covers nearly 10 years now).

--
						Jim Vieira
						jay...@earth.execpc.com