Wirehead Studios

Wirehead Modifications => Generations Arena => Topic started by: Gnam on 2003-05-18, 19:19



Title: Gen's Menu
Post by: Gnam on 2003-05-18, 19:19
I noticed the Gen menu is based on the Team Arena menu. Granted, the Team Arena menu does have more features, but I've experienced problems with it. Maybe it's just my computer, but I've always found it to be laggy. My Arena menu is fine, but in Team Arena it sputters and skips from time to time not to mention, Team Arena, in game, seems to always use much more system rescources than Arena, and aside from the voices and larger maps, nothing is different from Arena. This has brought me to suspicion that something in the TA menus causes extra lag, both in menus and in-game, and my point is it could also be contributing to lag in Gen. I don't know how complicated it would be to reconfigure the menu for Arena, and maybe you guys don't experience this and I'm the only one (my computer isn't exactly optimized for gaming, it's an old HP with stock graphics card and stock RAM, but it runs Arena with high graphics settings on most maps without problems) but anyway I think it could be worth looking into.


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: ReBoOt on 2003-05-18, 21:26
heh i say this: Time for you to upgrade your computer.
I got no probs with team arena nor generations arena ui.


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: Phoenix on 2003-05-18, 23:39
It sounds like an underpowered graphics card to me.  You need more ram for texture memory.  A lot of "off-the-shelf" systems with integrated graphics use system memory for the graphics memory.  You might see if there's some way to increase that.  If you have a separate graphics card then you're pretty much stuck without a new mainboard since just about everything is going to AGP 4x or better now, and a new mainboard means new ram, new CPU, and new power supply if you're on an AT motherboard.  If you have only about 64 megs of system ram you're in trouble no matter what you're running.  That's enough to run a dedicated server, but the client needs more memory.

For the record, I've run Gen on THIS system and had no problems beyond a low framerate:

AMD K6-2 450Mhz
128 MB of PC100 SDRAM
3dFx Banshee AGP with 16 megs SGRAM

That's about what I would consider minimum specs to run Gen OR Team Arena.  I had no problems with the UI at all, and I did a lot of model development on that system before I did a major upgrade.  I had a TNT Vanta with only 8 megs of ram on my other system for a while, and that one choked on the UI pretty hard, and didn't do much better in-game either.  I'd say time for an upgrade, and not just for Gen, but every other game coming out is going to eat your system for breakfast if you don't. :(


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: games keeper on 2003-05-19, 20:13
my last system was.
a pentium 300 mhz
256sdram
 tnt2 32mb

but i also playd gn on a
pentium 200
256 sdram
tnt2 32mb (PCI )


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: Gnam on 2003-05-21, 01:52
My problem was less with using the menu itself as much as games running in it. Even when running FFA matches in regular Arena maps from TA it seems to be laggy. I guess I should lie to my dad and tell him I actually do need a new comp for college next year (even though, being in Illustration, the only program I'll need to run, if any, is Photoshop, which runs fine on almost anything these days). Anyway, my gripe is not so much that my comp is too slow (I can run Arena in 800x600 with high graphics settings and just get a little spawn lag on Dredwerkz) its the fact that in TA and Gen, I have to run the same maps on medium or fast settings if I want to irradicate all the chuggage.


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: IEEE1394 on 2003-05-21, 10:13
I have no problem with the ui.


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: Tabun on 2003-05-21, 11:57
Yes, Generations is a bit heavier on the resources. That's something we've chosen for, mainly because 'the average computer' is a lot better now than it was when Q3A was released (and that was a LONG time ago  ;)).
My computer is over a year old now (1.4 Ghz AMD + Radeon 8500), and, thankfully, kicks ass for q3 & generations. There's hardly any difference for me in framerate. I don't have Team Arena, so I can't test if this is the case in there too, but the difference shan't be too big.


Title: Re: Gen's Menu
Post by: games keeper on 2003-05-21, 21:04
forgot to mention I didnt had any problems with those Pc's expept those 8 fps sometimes
now what i wanned to mention Is that I also found that weird lag then.
I think this comes because.
ingame videos.
much bigger maps .
way better textures.
and  I think it also ahas to do someting with the startup menu.