Topic: Build report: Widelands on a PowerMac G5
|
Foxpaw Topic Opener
Joined:
2011-03-16, 16:59 UTC+1.0
Posts: 9  Pry about Widelands Location: Budapest, Hungary |
Posted at:
2011-03-16, 17:23 UTC+1.0
It's not a technical problem, it's a technical success! As I noticed, Macs with ppc processors are not officially supported, due to development problems and lack of performance. Nevertheless, I've succeeded to build the Build15-release from sources out-of-the-box with the build_and_run.sh script. The game works flawlessly, no freezes, sound and music are working, etc... The performance is great. In smaller resolutions (800X600, 1024x768) its like butter. In higher resolutions (1280x1024) with 6 player maps and 6 players it's playable perfectly up to 3x speed. 4x speed starts to get jerky. And from 6x it's not really playable. (In smaller resolution it's not a problem.) The game uses about "50%" of CPU power in lower resolutions, and it goes up to "110%" in higher resolutions with lots of players and lots of game units. (My system is a dual processor unit, the maximum usage noted by "200%".) My system specs: Powermac7,3 (Early 2005 model) Dual Processor 2.0 GHZ 3GBytes of PC3200 DDR RAM Ati Radeon 9600 (128Mb) OS X 10.5.8 (I bet the later models with 2.5, and 2.7 GHz CPU-s and DDR2 RAM would perform even better.) So, my message to powerpc users: You can give it a try! 
Top
Quote
|
|
SirVer
Joined:
2009-02-19, 15:18 UTC+1.0
Posts: 1442  One Elder of Players Location: Germany - Munich |
Posted at:
2011-03-16, 21:59 UTC+1.0
Great! thanks for sharing. The only reason why we do not pack a universal binary is that we have no macs available to build them.... It's good to know that everything works fine on PPC as well.
Top
Quote
|
|
Foxpaw Topic Opener
Joined:
2011-03-16, 16:59 UTC+1.0
Posts: 9 Pry about Widelands Location: Budapest, Hungary |
Posted at:
2011-03-23, 14:30 UTC+1.0
I managed to build widelands build-15 on my office G4 Mac Mini (1.4 GHz, 1GB ram). (The same way as described above, macports and build_and_run script used.) To my big surprise it runs smoothly. In smaller resolutions it's perfectly playable up to 4x speed! (50% average cpu utilization.) However, I can imagine, that bigger maps and 5-8 players could be a problem, but 3 players and smaller maps on smaller resolution (800x600) is perfectly manageable. Should build-16 is released, I will test it too on my powerpc machines.
Top
Quote
|
|
aber
Joined:
2010-04-18, 18:45 UTC+2.0
Posts: 52  Likes to be here |
Posted at:
2011-03-23, 15:36 UTC+1.0
Thank you for your feedback. I tried to enable the build system to produce universal binaries.
Top
Quote
|
|
Foxpaw Topic Opener
Joined:
2011-03-16, 16:59 UTC+1.0
Posts: 9 Pry about Widelands Location: Budapest, Hungary |
Posted at:
2011-03-23, 18:28 UTC+1.0
I figured out you've probably meant http://wolkentempel.de/widelands.html . Wow! That's a big improvement in speed! I am now running a 6 player map on my office G4 Mac Mini with 6 players, 6x speed and 1024x768 resolution. The machine fan started, so it must be pretty high cpu utilization (Activity Monitor shows around 65%), but it's very smooth (no hint of lag) and playable! The official build-15 was much-much slower on this machine. (I noticed it's smooth in full screen mode, and it's a bit laggy in windowed mode.) Everything seems to work fine, though I never tested multiplayer.
Top
Quote
|
|
Foxpaw Topic Opener
Joined:
2011-03-16, 16:59 UTC+1.0
Posts: 9 Pry about Widelands Location: Budapest, Hungary |
Posted at:
2011-03-23, 18:32 UTC+1.0
Do you have some "Widelands benchmark?" that I can run on my machines and share the results with you? (Some replays or some way to do a Widelands "stress test".) I think it might help you in the further development, or it might help the other powerpc users around...
Top
Quote
|
|
Foxpaw Topic Opener
Joined:
2011-03-16, 16:59 UTC+1.0
Posts: 9 Pry about Widelands Location: Budapest, Hungary |
Posted at:
2011-03-23, 21:23 UTC+1.0
Ok, I checked your build at home on my PM G5. It's perfect. I managed to play at full HD (1920x1200 !), up to 12x speed with minor lag (full playability) on a medium sized map with 4 players (no interface lag with 8x speed). The speed up is wonderful compared to build-15. I don't see why this game can't be played on these old powermacs. Even on my old office G4 Mini it's well playable and smooth. (After this many improvements I can imagine it will be ported in the future to smartphones or tablets...) Thank you for making the daily development build universal! It is a pleasure to play my favorite open source game on my ppc machines.
Top
Quote
|
|
ixprefect
Joined:
2009-02-27, 14:28 UTC+1.0
Posts: 367  Tribe Member |
Posted at:
2011-03-24, 08:41 UTC+1.0
It's impressive that it runs so well on these older machines. I would have guessed that the software rendering of terrain really hurts in higher resolutions. Or did you enable OpenGL rendering when you tried the development build? As far as benchmarks go, we don't really have or need them. When using software rendering, the terrain rendering is the biggest part of CPU utilization, but it is essentially a constant load. When using OpenGL rendering, the rendering part of CPU utilization is negligible, and you should get full fps all the time. Widelands is not Quake
Top
Quote
|
|
Foxpaw Topic Opener
Joined:
2011-03-16, 16:59 UTC+1.0
Posts: 9 Pry about Widelands Location: Budapest, Hungary |
Posted at:
2011-03-24, 10:39 UTC+1.0
I did it with software render. I will try it with OpenGL. Is it possible that you will reconsider making the next releases of widelands for OS X universal binary?
Top
Quote
|
|
SirVer
Joined:
2009-02-19, 15:18 UTC+1.0
Posts: 1442 One Elder of Players Location: Germany - Munich |
Posted at:
2011-03-24, 14:29 UTC+1.0
We consider this very strongly. Aber will likely build 16-rc1 as universal binary and we will see how the reaction is.
Top
Quote
|
