Wow, killer game. I’m impressed. My stats:
Machine Specs:
P4 1.7Ghz
384 MB RAM
Win 2k
16MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra
Gameplay results:
56 FPS Fullscreen
5-6 FPS Windowed
Nice game! Missiles are a bit powerful though! 
Windowed, 4fps, unplayable - game runs too slow.
Full screen, 60fps, perfectly playable but flashes constantly - looks single-buffered?
Laptop, Toshiba 2800-400
750MHz PIII
8MB S3 Savage/IX
WinME.
cfmdobbie:
Flashing? In full screen mode? Weird the program uses tripple buffering with the buffer strategy.
Thanks for trying it out everyone.
“8MB S3 Savage/IX”
“VolatileImage is an image which can lose its contents at any time due to circumstances beyond the control of the application (e.g., situations caused by the operating system or by other applications).”
1+1… o_O
8mb… maybe he gets out of ram… and therefore the volatileimage loose it’s content.
[quote]Flashing? In full screen mode? Weird the program uses tripple buffering with the buffer strategy.
[/quote]
Yep, the screen flashes constantly, and appears about half brightness compared with windowed. I can’t judge how many times it flashes per second. Lots. It’s playable, but will probably provoke an epileptic fit in anyone playing it for more than a few minutes.
Occasionally the game pauses for half a second or so, during which the screen is full brightness. I’ve never seen it pausing with a blank screen.
I wouldn’t worry too much - it’s bound to be a combination of my pathetic OS (WinME) and my pathetic graphics card (8MB Savage/IX)! :
[quote]8mb… maybe he gets out of ram… and therefore the volatileimage loose it’s content.
[/quote]
Could easily be. Knowing the problems this card has playing other games (Q3A, B&W) I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t like rendering screens that had lots of green on them or something…
Had another try, but exiting FS still freezed my system. I suppose it’s my video drivers.
I noticed another thing in windowed mode. It seems that the title bar of the window appears on top of the playfield; for example the ‘F15’ title on top right is partly obscured by the window.
For the rest, nice retro game if a little easy (that’s maybe because it’s too slow on my system). I would get rid of the damage meter and make one hit fatal.
Greetings,
Erik
Of course it’s not your drivers. Your own game runs perfectly.
Cas
BTW, why tripple buffered?
(I never understood why one should use tripple buffering).
On my desktop and my laptop, tripple buffered seems slower even though my desktop has 64Mb vram.
Maybe having an option for double buffering too would also help cfmdobbie’s problems as he seems he’s getting out of vram. 8Mb vram should be enough for this game I guess.
Well, I’ll put up another version later today with the code in it so the people that have machines that this crashes can try and figure out what I’m doing wrong. I would really appretiate some help on this this because I can’t reproduce the problem.
Also I’ll drop the buffering to 2 instead of 3 for low memory video cards.
EDIT: Okay a new version is up with the source included and the buffers dropped to 2.
[quote]Of course it’s not your drivers. Your own game runs perfectly.
[/quote]
Well, my LWJGL based game does lock up my machine every now and then when I exit from full screen. I haven’t heard that problem from anyone else so I don’t count out my drivers.
u could try to set your desktop resolution/bpp to match the game settings. buggy drivers seems to have much less problems then.
tools like powerstrip allow to change between different setups quickly (it’s in the tray… rightclick->mode(or so) click and u r done :))
but maybe it’s better to search another driver 
[quote]Also I’ll drop the buffering to 2 instead of 3 for low memory video cards.
EDIT: Okay a new version is up with the source included and the buffers dropped to 2.
[/quote]
Erk, sorry, that’s even worse!
Before the screen was flashing. It’s still flashing, but now it totally looks single-buffered - I see frames where the buttons on the title screen haven’t been drawn so I can see the picture behind them. Also, last time the whole screen flashed/pulsed, now the flashing isn’t in sync with the video refresh, so the light and dark areas appear in wide bands across the screen which move (probably up) rapidly.
If you want to pursue this, I’d start to look at how the screen rendering is synced to the video refresh rate. Does your code expect a minimum fps? (It’s being displayed as 36.) As I’m seeing the picture behind the buttons, look into how a partially-rendered buffer could be being displayed.
Infuriatingly, I can’t get a screen grab of what my eyes are seeing. I guess the partial frames I’m seeing really are partial frames - I’m seeing them as they’re being drawn, but the final image is complete.
After lots of trying, I seem to be able to grab four different frames. One of the full screen as it should be, and the following three:
http://www.padcroft.org/cfmdobbie/f15/01.jpg
http://www.padcroft.org/cfmdobbie/f15/02.jpg
http://www.padcroft.org/cfmdobbie/f15/03.jpg
Well this must be a driver/J2D issue. I’m using a buffer strategy so it should be vsync’d but I read posts were some people couldn’t get the buffer strategy to track to the vsync. That would certainly explain the flashing your seeing.
Edit: Yep those are definately partially drawn frames.
More info:
That strange block of corruption seems to be located over the (invisible) mouse cursor. If I move the mouse the corruption moves with it.
Edit: Changing Windows’ settings to 640x480@16-bit doesn’t change anything.
[quote]but maybe it’s better to search another driver
[/quote]
I have the latest drivers from nVidia so I’ll just wait for new ones.
Just had a thought - LWJGL detects my screen as 0Hz refresh - would Planetation be doing the same? If there’s some calculations on game speed based on refresh rates, this could cause some issues.
“0Hz refresh”
0hz just means use the default refresh for this resolution+bpp combination (like in quake3) :]
eg my default refreshrates are like this:
640x480x16bbp=60hz (i use that for emus)
640x480x32bpp=85hz (i use that for q3)
device.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(sW, sH, 32, 0));
screenwidth, screenheight, bits per pixel, hz…
my suggestion (based on my great trial’n’error skills :))
add a commandline switch to specify the refreshrate…
eg:
-displayrefresh 60
Has anyone tried this game with Mac OS X? I just did, but I can’t discuss the results here because of the NDA involved with the 1.4.1 JRE develper preview.