Re: Simgear
On Thursday 18 November 2004 14:28,
debian-user-digest-request@lists.debian.org wrote:
> > Simgear is the simulation library used by the "flightgear" flight
> > simulator and the "vamos" car race simulator. Neither of these will run
> > on my system.
> >
> > OK, it is "just" a PIII at 575mhz. The graphics card is an ATI mach64
> > clunker. DRI is working. Vamos reports a 33 fps frame rate which should
> > play quite well. Other games doing more rendering, I believe, such as
> > "Tuxracer" play just fine on this hardware.
> >
> > What might be symptomatic: The sound in Vamos is intermittant. One hears
> > the "engine", then silence, then the sound again, then silence, once a
> > second or so.
> >
> > Is it simply impossible on this older hardware or may there be something
> > I can do to get simgear based games running? Tweaking X? Etc.
>
> I'm a bit confused by what you've written above. In your first
> paragraph, you say that Vamos won't run on your system; in the second,
> you say that it reports a 33 fps frame rate. So apparently it does
> run. So I'm not sure what the problem you're experiencing is.
> Similarly, you don't actually say what the problem you're experiencing
> with fgfs is. Won't start at all? Low framerates? (you can turn on
> the displaying of framerates through a menu option, or a setting in
> the properties browser) Decent framerates, but odd behavior of some
> kind? Help us help you, please.
Both programs startup fine. Vamos comes up at reasonable speed, Flightgear
comes up very slowly. One of the open-GL billiards games behaved this way as
well.
Once up, both programs are unplayable.
>
> The only thing out of SimGear that Vamos uses are classes/methods for
> reading and processing XML files. So I don't think your problem is
> SimGear.
Wow--why bother with Simgear at all? There are enough XML libs around which
are much lighter-weight. Simgear could well be the problem.
> Both Vamos and fgfs depend on plib. Recent patches to plib available
> in its CVS dramatically improve the framerates one gets out of fgfs.
> Be aware, though, that if you switch to CVS plib, you're going to
> also have to download CVS OpenAL, SimGear, and FlightGear, and build
> local versions.
Might be worth a try. I built the Vamos locally. I have plib 1.8.3-2 library
installed. If this is recent enought, the full '-dev' is on sid as well.
libopenal0 0.200409090 is on sid and so is the cvs 20041020-3. The headers
were not needed to compile vamos.
> The stuttering sound issue you describe sometimes happens with
> FlightGear when it expects a more recent version of OpenAL than is
> installed. That shouldn't happen with the Debian packages; but I use
> CVS so I dunno. I occasionally run into this effect when I've
> updated and rebuilt FlightGear from CVS; running off and updating/
> rebuilding OpenAL makes it go away. That wouldn't explain your
> problem with Vamos, though; Vamos doesn't use OpenAL to my knowledge.
>
> Sadly, for fgfs, a P3-575 with an ATI mach64 is not going to give you
> very good performance. I have an Athlon XP 2000+; I had a Matrox
> G550 32MB and was lucky to get 6 fps flying near the default area.
> Switching to an nVidia GF4 Ti4600 (the sexy card from 2 years ago,
> now available quite reasonably on ebay), plus the patches mentioned
> earlier, boosted that to about 30
This is probably the main reason. Old clunker.
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