A Few Issues

[Itasme]

Hi there everyone - This is my first post here, i'm sorry that it's in the engineering section though ...

I downloaded Starport today and immediately started having issues:

When loading the game, it can take upwards of several minutes to login and a further 5 minutes or so to actually log in to a server.

In Full-Screen Mode, the GUI appears to be choppy and laggy - My ship jumps across the screen, rather than smoothly flying across - There is also no trail from the back of my ship, nor can i see my weapons fire. Warping from system to system takes a good deal of time, where i've been led to believe it's almost instantaneous.

These issues are fixed when i run the game in Windowed Mode - The issue with Windowed Mode is that the window is too big for my screen and cannot be resized. This means i can't see the chat bar/window and most of the mini-map has been cut off.

My system specs are as follows:

Processor: Intel 2nd Gen i5
Memory: 8GB DDR2 @ 1066
Graphics: 4GB nVidia GeForce GT 520M

Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Native Resolution: 1366x768 (There is no option for 1024x768 for Windowed Mode as was suggested elsewhere).

Understandably, my laptop isn't the best in the world, but it should certainly have no issues in running SGE - Can anyone help?

Itasme

[Toonces]

Hi there everyone - This is my first post here, i'm sorry that it's in the engineering section though ...

Nothing wrong with the engineering section Welcome.

When loading the game, it can take upwards of several minutes to login and a further 5 minutes or so to actually log in to a server.

This sounds like a cpu and ram issue. Your cpu is running slow, possibly because you have no free ram. I would suggest using ctrl+alt+del to open the Processes List in Windows, check the system specs and see how much free RAM you have available. If it's not more than 2 megs lack of RAM could be your problem.

In Full-Screen Mode, the GUI appears to be choppy and laggy - My ship jumps across the screen, rather than smoothly flying across - There is also no trail from the back of my ship, nor can i see my weapons fire. Warping from system to system takes a good deal of time, where i've been led to believe it's almost instantaneous.

Check your frame rate by using alt-f in the game. This will display your Frames Per Second performance value. If it is frequently less than 30, you are having a frame rate issue. This means your CPU is strained, possibly for the same reason of RAM mentioned above. If your FPS value is good and stays around 60 or 70 most of the time, then you might have a network issue. Use /ping to check your network statistics. You need a latency under 300 miliseconds, and packetloss less than 10%.

These issues are fixed when i run the game in Windowed Mode - The issue with Windowed Mode is that the window is too big for my screen and cannot be resized. This means i can't see the chat bar/window and most of the mini-map has been cut off.

You can try hiding the Windows task bar to see more of the bottom of the screen. If your resolution is 768 pixels in height, that is enough to view Starport if you are able to elimate anything on your screen besides the Starport display window (Starport runs at exactly 768 pixels height).

My system specs are as follows:

Processor: Intel 2nd Gen i5
Memory: 8GB DDR2 @ 1066
Graphics: 4GB nVidia GeForce GT 520M

Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Native Resolution: 1366x768 (There is no option for 1024x768 for Windowed Mode as was suggested elsewhere).

Yeah this should be good. There's always the remote possibility something is incompatible with your RAM and you don't really have 8gig, or maybe something is flawed with your processor. Check your process list again with ctrl+alt+del and sort the processes by CPU usage. Check in case something is using up a lot of CPU. Grab a virus scan like AVG, you can download it for free and run a trial scan for free.

Let me know if any of this helps or not, and we can go from there.

[Itasme]

Hi there everyone - This is my first post here, i'm sorry that it's in the engineering section though ...

Nothing wrong with the engineering section Welcome.

Hi Toonces - Thank you for getting back to me so quickly I've just finished my degree in networking - I have a good idea at what you're getting at, but as i said, i'm a networking guy, tech support isn't really my forté

When loading the game, it can take upwards of several minutes to login and a further 5 minutes or so to actually log in to a server.

This sounds like a cpu and ram issue. Your cpu is running slow, possibly because you have no free ram. I would suggest using ctrl+alt+del to open the Processes List in Windows, check the system specs and see how much free RAM you have available. If it's not more than 2 megs lack of RAM could be your problem.

I've had a look through my task manager, my CPU seems to peak at 25% and averages 20% when running Starport. For memory, i do have a full usable 8GB, i've needed it over the last few years to run a number of virtual PC's at the same time (I can manage 4 (@1GB RAM Each) + the host (Host takes at least 2.5, leaving me 1.5 for wiggle room)), but none of these run at the same time as SGE as it cripples my laptop - So i don't bother even trying.

The highest drain on my system resources is the Firefox browser - normally running appx 1.3GB. I can account for this however, i play a browser game that i use a few javascript-based extensions to steamline the UI and give added features. I normally have two of these windows open, both running the same scripts. I've watched whats happening using the Firebug extension, but they only seem to call the servers when i'm actually pressing buttons, or using the scripts themselves - They just sit in the background and hog memory.

This leaves me with just over 5.5GB (After accounting for other memory usage) for running SGE.

In Full-Screen Mode, the GUI appears to be choppy and laggy - My ship jumps across the screen, rather than smoothly flying across - There is also no trail from the back of my ship, nor can i see my weapons fire. Warping from system to system takes a good deal of time, where i've been led to believe it's almost instantaneous.

Check your frame rate by using alt-f in the game. This will display your Frames Per Second performance value. If it is frequently less than 30, you are having a frame rate issue. This means your CPU is strained, possibly for the same reason of RAM mentioned above. If your FPS value is good and stays around 60 or 70 most of the time, then you might have a network issue. Use /ping to check your network statistics. You need a latency under 300 miliseconds, and packetloss less than 10%.

I got a lag warning once or twice last night, so when i checked i was running on, or around, 300 miliseconds, but thankfully had no packetloss. I'm currently playing from Cyprus and speedtest.net tells me that i have at least 1.5Mbps when connecting to the University of Houston. I know it's not quite the same and that you might have a different connection from them, but i was hoping that if i could get something in the vicinity, it might give an idea. I assume that SGE won't require anything more than the 1.5Mbps (Hopefully), but if so, then there are other things that i can do to improve this and see how it goes.

These issues are fixed when i run the game in Windowed Mode - The issue with Windowed Mode is that the window is too big for my screen and cannot be resized. This means i can't see the chat bar/window and most of the mini-map has been cut off.

You can try hiding the Windows task bar to see more of the bottom of the screen. If your resolution is 768 pixels in height, that is enough to view Starport if you are able to elimate anything on your screen besides the Starport display window (Starport runs at exactly 768 pixels height).

My Windows Taskbar is actually on the right-hand side of my desktop - Don't ask why, i just prefer it that way

I have noticed that i can press & hold the top of the SGE window and move it upwards so i can see the bottom of chat, but of course, the Windows 7 Snap-To feature immediately snaps it back down again. This is okay for when i'm chatting in corp chat, or shouts, but when i'm fleeing for my life from all these space-cannons, it can cause problems as the auto-pilot likes to take me straight through them (When i press and hold the top of the window to move it, the real-time display freezes, then when i release and it 'snaps' back, the game resumes - my ships jumps forwards to where it should be, depending on how long i've held the window)

My system specs are as follows:

Processor: Intel 2nd Gen i5
Memory: 8GB DDR2 @ 1066
Graphics: 4GB nVidia GeForce GT 520M

Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Native Resolution: 1366x768 (There is no option for 1024x768 for Windowed Mode as was suggested elsewhere).

Yeah this should be good. There's always the remote possibility something is incompatible with your RAM and you don't really have 8gig, or maybe something is flawed with your processor. Check your process list again with ctrl+alt+del and sort the processes by CPU usage. Check in case something is using up a lot of CPU. Grab a virus scan like AVG, you can download it for free and run a trial scan for free.

Let me know if any of this helps or not, and we can go from there.

I hear what you're saying here, i already have AVG (Love it) and i also run Advanced System Care 6 (IOBit) at the end of every session, just to clear temp history and free up excess RAM so it doesn't get cluttered with junk (Things like guestlist cleans are done once a fortnight or once a month at most - Otherwise it becomes counter productive). I did run scans with both, just to be on the safeside and they threw up nothing out of the ordinary - The highest security issues were just tracking cookies from various advertisers and websites - I doubt these will interfere with Starport's operation, but i thought i'd mention it anyway as you'll probably know more than i do in this respect.

My nVidia control panel DOES offer custom resolutions, i gave it a go and it can run a 1024x768, but when i do, my screen is considerably smaller than normal and has letterboxes at the sides, about 2 inches on each side, making the game a little small to play. I'm sure i could get used to it, but i wanted to see if there were any go-to fixes to begin with.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that i can live with playing in Windowed Mode, but not having the chat is an inconvenience, rather than a deal breaker.

Thank you again for the swift reply and i hope that this info is of help to you.

Regards

Itasme

[Toonces]

Mbps is a measure of bandwidth, which is a completely different thing than latency. 300 ms is a latency reading, which is a little high but probably what you'd expect from Cyprus. The bandwidth is good though, you shouldn't have much networking problems with starport.

The snap-to feature in Windows can probably be turned off. Google for how to disable it.

It sounds to me like the most likely source of your performance problem is firefox and the complicated browser applications you're running within it. I would recommend trying Starport with Firefox closed.

[Itasme]

Hi Toonces,

I don't know if it's one or the other, or a combination of both - But after that last Patch, fullscreen mode works perfectly for me again.

Just how i remember it all those many moons ago.

Thank you

Itasme