I'm new to CC (Yet another Humble Indie Bundle purchaser, yes.), but I think it has some great potential. I've read quite a bit on these forums, and I realize this is a Beta, so I'm fine with the current problems and expect these to go away with time. The only problem that really annoys me is the speed. It seems to have almost reached memetic status on this forum that CC simply "Hates" some computers. I appear to have one of these computers, as I can run most modern games just fine, yet CC moves ridiculously slow.

My computer's running with an AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+, and the Graphics Card is a nVidia GeForce 210.

Now, I appreciate all the help that the forums have given me (Oh! There's a weight system that slows you down! THAT'S why my jetpack does absolutely nothing!), and I would just like to know if there is a plan to optimize CC for those "Hated" computers in a later build? I understand that there are other things to be fixed, but is it expected to EVER run well for everyone? I'd really like to play this game, but it's hard to enjoy it when everything moves like a dead turtle stuck in a stream of frozen molasses. Thanks!

http://www.datarealms.com/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=14593

That's a full guide on making Cortex Command run better for you. The problem with your computer in relation to Cortex Command is the processor. It isn't weak in it's own right but this game is a massive CPU hog, so an old athlon even running at a reasonable clock speed is going to bottleneck your performance like you wouldn't believe.

The reason you can run most "modern" games fine but have trouble with CC is that Cortex Command doesn't use your graphics card for anything important (it puts the pixels on the screen after the CPU does a hell of a lot of maths working out where they need to be). Modern games usually make use of 3D acceleration for their physics as well as graphics, and have relatively simple physics at that (thus the "performance" being determined by how fast your computer can handle a lot of 3D maths on its GPU), whereas Cortex Command has incredibly complicated physics (that aren't properly optimised either, sadly) and doesn't let your GPU take part in computing them.

I do expect to see some proper optimization in the future.

That would require Data to rewrite about 10 years worth of work just to get it to work on higher end PC's.
Plus that would take away from valuable game making time, learning how to optimize for dual core pcs.

Due to the way how processing power is gained now-a-days I don't really see CC getting better. Now more power = more cores at lower clock, so CC only takes advantage of a little fraction of the available cycles.

Now I remember why I hate(d) you.

Frankly, optimization on any piece of code is not going to require completely rewriting it, nor should it be so drastically time consuming that it replaces doing anything else.

Plus, if I may make a quick zinger: If what happened out of the last 1.5 years of work is directly proportional to the amount of "valuable game making time" present therein, so help me god, Data is the worst coder of all time.

Incredibly unoptimized physics more like it, yet STILL more than 50% of processor time is spent in graphics library doing mundane things like sprite blitting, rotating, scaling, color conversions, alpha blending. Those were some of the first things to get hardware acceleration more than 15 years ago, and for a reason - there really is no way around it, it has to move to something like Hardware Accelerated Allegro (AllegroGL - http://wiki.allegro.cc/index.php?title=Hardware_Accelerated_Allegro_(AllegroGL)).

And there's no need for 10 years of rewriting, usually lots of low hanging fruits in parallelization can be found inside some of the big loops in critical code-path.

There simply is no will to make it faster.

My pc is pretty much crap(in comparison) but can run CC fine.

Specs-
3 ghz Pentium 4
448 mb RAM
And a sub-decent Graphics card

But I also have a very bloated Paging File.

Weird huh?

A high end single core should do pretty well with CC.

So then why does it run brilliantly on my 1.4ghz pc with 760megs of RAM?

I guess it just likes me.

Dual core? People running windows are very rarely making proper use of their CPU, so using one core just for Cortex Command means you're getting more net cycles on the game than someone with a 3GHz single core processor would when that core is clogged with system processes.
It could just like your computer though.

Where are you getting this info?

Re: "no will to make it faster" Dan's expressed a wish to optimise once everything he wants to get working is working satisfactorily. I have no problem with that personally, because it's what I do as well - it keeps the code easy to understand while you're still ironing out the bugs - but more a problem with the development pace. From what I've heard from the content developers though the team is having a crunch time to get another build out asap so all the metagame work actually amounts to something we can play.

What Paul said, but also Optimisation != Multithreading/Parallelisation.

It's a single core. It just likes me.

Wow.

Lucky your pc has a greater sentience than mine.

Q: Does playing on fullscreen help run the game faster than having it windowed? Seems like that for me for it doesn't have to bother with desktop shenanigans.

From a code profiler, Allegro is easy to map out when statically linked through use of GFX_VTABLE structures. Problem with Allegro is that it was written to be flexible, not fast. Top offenders are:
draw_scanline_8, linear_clear_to_color8, linear_masked_blit8, parallelogram_map, linear_blit32, blender_screen24, blender_trans24, blit_from_256
which pretty much amounts to moving memory around and scary (per-pixel) callbacks for blending.

As to optimizing when it's ready, in general I would agree, but it just looks like there's long wait ahead and one sometimes wishes it wouldn't be so painfull. This game has so much potential that it makes current execution hard to bear (especially for the kind of people a game like this caters to ).

It does? So, my Celeron 2,4ghz with 1GB of RAM isn't too slow but is just "hated" by the game O_o ?