Spacepiratesandzombies.com

I'm not sure if this is a bug, game engine limitation, or system specific problem but it's making the latter levels almost unplayable. :/
For some reason SPAZ refuses to use more than one core. This is problematic when there are numerous enemies/allies on the screen at once.

Is there any known way to force the game to utilize both CPU cores?

My system:

• Windows 7 Prof.
• 4GB RAM
• AMD E350 1.6GHz dual core CPU (that's the killer..)
• ATI HD6310 GPU

Side note:
Awesome devs/game(got it on reddit a few days ago)!

Edit_1:
Things I've tried so far:

• All sliders down to minimum setting/disabled the various effect check boxes
• DirectX compatibility mode
• Lowest supported resolution
• Windowed mode

Interestingly enough (or predictably enough), those things didn't change much. My video card handles the game swimmingly.

What's killing you is the processor. It wasn't really meant for gaming. Low end casual, if that. It was mostly meant for video. http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-brazo ... pu-review/ "you have a generic GPU at hands allowing all common tasks, a tiny bit of gaming, but where its most interesting is HD content playback. "

My guess is it handles the game fine up to a point. viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2595 also, the engine only allows for a single core.

I've been using this laptop since my PC died(been putting off getting a new PSU for quite some time now..). So far I'm pretty darn impressed with its performance considering I bought it for doing misc. things when out of town.
I beat Skyrim on this machine. ;D

It may just be the placebo effect but setting the processor affinity to all cores seems to help a bit. (uses 70% compared to 50%)

Edit_1:
Hrm, after looking into the issue on other Torque2D games, doesn't seem like much can be done.
Oh well, it's still quite playable if I avoid the hordes of enemies --Will adjust my play style to fit.

Sorry for the speed issues. The radar.cs from the thread below may help. It cuts down some of the work the game has to do. It will at least give you a little more headroom I think CPU wise.

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2648

Next time, multithreaded all the way. We were stupid and we apologize.

Thank you for the link/reply!
That actually helped quite a bit.
-and no worries.

Edit_1:
Have you thought about making a sticky thread for that file?
Seems like that would clear up a lot of framerate complaint threads.

Don't you dare put yourself down. It's great that you own up to things, but that doesn't mean you trash yourself. Making a design oops =/= being stupid. And yes, sticky would be awesome.

Good point on the sticky. I will do that now.

Ok, new problem. When I replaced the file (i'm using Steam) I noticed that the background (the one showing the systems star) no longer stays 'fixed' in the background, meaning it gradually dissapears offscreen if you travel far enough. It stays at a fixed point in the foreground and makes it look like a fised image.

Starting a new game when using the new file fixed it.
I don't mind restarting, just wanted to let folks know that they might need to start a new game after replacing the file.

So the background image on the system map is able to pan off screen? That is really odd! A restart of SPAZ is required with the file change. I will mention that. No need to start a new game though. It should simply be a shutdown and a restart of the exe

Hot swapping game scripts!? He's a madman!

Go figure, this game runs great on my old 2.8GHz P4 box with an X1300Pro graphics card. O.o

Yup, an old 2.8Ghz machine would eat it up. Crazy I know Machines have always gotten faster and faster, until suddenly (if you didn't have a multi threaded engine) it reversed.

I had a the same issue, the game runs like crap when its only using the default 1 core, but unlike polpi I'm using a quad core at 3.2GHz so one core should really be enough. It takes about 5 times longer to do all the loading at the start and the framerate jumps like crazy averageing about 20-30 on the main menu (the launcher gets even less, the mouse jumps all over the place). With all 4 cores tho its really smooth with fps between 60 and 80 at all times.

My main point was is there any way for you to stop windows/the game/whatever from setting the processor affinity to only one core every time it launches?

Not that I know of, but this is actually driver related. There was a recent driver update that is interacting with SPAZ's openGL in a weird way. The 12.2 CCC drivers will cause the game to run very poorly, whereas the 12.1 will run it smoothly. We are talking to AMD now to sort it out.