Slow Performance on Linux

[lobo235]

Hello, first let me tell you how great I think Dyson is. It's a very fun and simple game and it is highly addictive. I have played the windows version and was very impressed with the speed and everything but when I try it on linux (Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) the performace is horrible after I capture a few asteroids. I am looking for tips on how to speed it up. I think the game should run flawlessly on my machine since it's a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of memory and an NVIDIA video card with 128MB memory but it becomes unplayable quickly once I capture about 5 asteroids and have a bunch of seedlings. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Alex]

Hmm, I'm sorry but I have never heard of this. Hard to say what is causing it. Does it run ok in wine?

[lobo235]

Alex, I have not tried it in wine yet but I did find something interesting. If you leave the game at it's default size it seems to run okay. If you enlarge the game window at all though it starts to perform badly. If you resize it back to the original size though it seems to do fine again. Maybe it's taking extra CPU to resize all the elements in the game?

I hope this helps to resolve the problem. Once again, thanks for a great game! I played through all the levels and had fun doing it.

[hammerv2]

I'm getting the same problem, under ubuntu intrepid. I've got intel graphics and dyson's performace is pretty bad.
I tried the standard linux install instructions, and I also tried under wine using both mono and .net 2.0... still no dice.
It does run, but the performance makes the game unplayable. Any ideas? I love this game btw. I really enjoyed playing it on windows. NICE WORK!!!

[wogan]

@hammerv2 You might be surprised to learn that Ubuntu Intrepid is the mothership of all memory hogs. If you can, try disabling many of the window effects. You might not notice, but there are fade-in-fade-out effects, slides, etc that chew into performance, even if they're not currently your prime focus. From what I've seen in Dyson, it's basically an OpenGL window layered on top of everything else, which means Ubuntu's still drawing the desktop and panels.

@lobo235 That's X.org for you. Apart from upgrading your machine, there's no real way to get around that.

[Alex]

Cheers for that info Wogan, the world of Linux is evidently a strange and complicated one!

[wogan]

Cheers for that info Wogan, the world of Linux is evidently a strange and complicated one!

It is. Over 300 distros, about 12-odd different core distros, and just about each and every one of them handles something differently . Chances are you'll never be able to support them all 100%, but if I can make a suggestion, just focus on Red Hat (.rpm files) and Debian/Ubuntu (.deb files). From there, there are little patches and fixes and things that'll make them work on most of the Linuxsphere.