Messages

Thanks all.

Running in a window seems to help, but not enough to make the games playable. 

I'm going to chalk this issue up to some combination of (1) the anti-virus I can't turn off (2) the hard-drive encryption software that adds overhead to absolutely everything running on the machine and (3) karma, for trying to play AGS games on my work laptop.

Meanwhile, I got a new HP laptop for Xmas that runs AGS great, so problem solved...or at least generally avoided.  :-)

Happy New Year!

Speaking of broken links, I'm new to the board and decided to read the "READ FIRST" post in the Beginners Technical Forum before posting (who wudda thought!)
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=14373.0

And while clicking some of the links, I was pretty surprised to find myself being redirected to "americangirlscouts.org".  Not exactly the "AGS" I was expecting!  I know it's a two-year-old post, but it's still a post that gets plenty of traffic.

OneDollar - Which Windows compatibility options should I try playing with?

Yes, this one has been difficult to troubleshoot, which is why I wanted to ask the collective minds of this board.

Again using Rockabilly Kid as the example...
- Rockabilly process uses about 3-6% of the CPU and 13,600K of memory.  Without killing/exiting from everything else I have running, my machine has almost 2GB of RAM free, and a page file of about 800MB.
- A very quick test of 5 Days a Stranger seemed fine.  But the Art of Theft definitely seems to speed up and slow down.
-  VS: I'm running McAfee VirusScan Enterprise Workstation 8.7, Agent Version 4.0 with AntiSpyware.  The settings on the laptop won't let me disable the on-demand scanning.
- Yes, WinXP Service Pack 3

Could it simply be my company doesn't want me playing AGS games on my work laptop? :-)  If I get a chance, I'll ask someone with the same laptop build around here to try and run some of the games and see if they have the same issue - it should at least tell me if it's just me or it's some general HW/config issue with these laptop builds.

Thanks!

Ha, all that info and I forgot the OS.  :-)

It's actually Windows XP Professional.

Hey AGS community!

I've been playing AGS games for a couple years now and LOVE them.  Unfortunately, I got a new laptop and the performance on the games is just awful.  I've tried everything I can think of to no avail.  This performance issue has been pretty consistent across all the games I've tried, from Art of Theft to Nanobots to Rockabilly.  I've been using Rockabilly as a test game because the awesome music makes it pretty clear that the game is running slow.  More info below.  Any ideas?  Couldn't find anything similar on the boards.  I need my AGS fix!  :-)

Symptoms: (using Rockabilly Kid as example)
Music is sloooow, then speeds up, then is sloooow again.
Animation clearly speeds up/slows down with the music.
Animation can slow to the point of being unplayable.
No performance issues on this laptop with desktop applications.  Other than AGS, I don't play games on this laptop.

Things I've tried:
Killed all unnecessary OS processes.
Exited all other programs.
Changed resolution on the game to the lowest setting.
Changed graphics drivers between Direct3D and DirectDraw
Turned off the graphics filter
Turned off the sound options (no digital sound)
Set the CPU affinity on the game's OS process so that it only uses one CPU, or the other.
Set the OS process so it has 'realtime' priority.
Ran all HP and Intel diagnostics tools I could find (everything checks out OK on the CPU and performance)
Updated to latest CPU, sound and video drivers.

Laptop specs:
HP EliteBook 6930p
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz, Chipset 2917
Bus 1066 MHz
L2 Cache Memory 6MB
3GB RAM
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450
Sound: SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio

THANKS!