MHGames » linux

Windows 7 woes, defeat, change of the war plans..

Mika — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:50:17 +0000

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 90% of the time, and Windows XP 10% of the time, for about a year and half now. I’ve been keeping an eye out for Windows 7, though, as it seemed like a good Windows after the disappointing Vista.

So when I saw that Windows 7 RTM was already available at MSDN AA, I decided to give it a shot, having never seen it in action. I was expecting problems, since this PC is based on components made in 2004, so it is quite old. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked quite well, even before installing any drivers manually. Networking worked, sound worked, the spiffy Aero desktop compositioning worked. (My tv-tuner, Terratec Cinergy C PCI, didn’t work, but that’s no biggie — it works in Ubuntu.) Then I tried some OpenGL — oops, no hardware acceleration. No problem, I thought and went to install the latest drivers for my Geforce 7600 GS (AGP).

After the driver update I tried Tomatoes, worked just fine. Great! I went on installing Eclipse and setting up my workspace for the game project going on. And what did I find out: it was running very slowly, barely making 40-50 fps and fluctuating a lot! What the hell, it works solid 60 fps even in Linux (it’s capped to 60 fps, so in reality it would run even faster), not mention Windows XP!

Then I thought, ah, the Aero effects, obviously they would affect the performance on machine this old. Disabled Aero, tried again: same results. I tried plenty of older drivers, plus a new set of drivers released a couple of days ago. Nothing changed. It would sometimes reach 60 fps when there was not much to render, but especially the water shader was killing the performance. This was not acceptable, I mean it does not really motivate me to develop something running too slowly, when I know it works much better on this very piece of hardware I’ve got.. Of course I understand that it will run slower than in XP (on this old PC), since W7 requires more resources to run, but it should not make this big a difference in fps.

After asking about the problem on Windows 7 forums and getting nothing, I decided to admit my defeat.. I guess either the OpenGL drivers just are not what they were before, or this PC is plainly too old for W7. I suspect the first. Of course, OpenGL has always been the ugly step child in Windows world while Direct 3D is receiving the love, so.. Too bad, really, I was starting to like W7.

I went and dropped back XP, and boom, everything runs fast again. Ubuntu dual-boot comes a bit later.

However, I might try W7 on the laptop of mine, that is currently running Vista. Vista seems too bulky for that cheap laptop, starting up very slowly etc., so I suspect W7 might help a bit. Indeed, I will probably see how the install goes on the laptop. Stay tuned for my report!

UPDATE: Writing this from the laptop running W7. Seems to be working fine, except the smart card reader. Better than Vista, that’s for sure.

Qt 4.4 released + plans for summer

Mika — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:11:00 +0000

Qt 4.4 framework was recently released. Hopefully PyQT 4.4 soon follows. Qt just rocks. =) Having been working with Java Swing (*cough*h o r r i b l e*cough*) these last four months, Qt 4.4 brings some light to the end of the tunnel..

Now that that’s out of the table, I can talk a little about a project I’m perhaps going to do next summer. It’s about remaking CSSTint. While I think the current Windows version of CSSTint is quite nice, it’s still… well, Windows-only. While I am using wxWidgets, it’s still doesn’t work in Linux properly – I have tried. I’m doing some nasty, ugly hacks in the code, so no wonder. All this could probably be fixed, but for the sake of learning and for an interesting experience, I’ve been thinking of rewriting the whole shebang.

I’m sure I will use Qt for the job, but I’m still undecided between C++ and Python. Learning Python has been interesting for me, as I’ve blogged before. Python version would also work on Windows as is, which won’t hurt even if the original is also for Windows. On the other hand I could reuse some of my non-GUI CSSTint code if I went with C++.. Decisions, decisions…

Anyway, that’s my current plan – things might still change.

Why I use Linux more than Windows on these days..

Mika — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:21:00 +0000

Yesterday I dug up my Jewels-project from under the thick layer of frost it had gathered during the winter days. As it is a XNA-game, I have to boot into Windows to develop it. I installed XNA 2.0 and started porting the game. After a few head scratchers I finally got the game working properly in XNA 2.0. Great!

I’ll try to finally finish that game, so I have been making some improvements and fixes. I need to add the timed play mode, and the do the game settings menus.. *sigh* Damn, why games must have settings menus..!?

Anyway, I noticed that I needed a key typing sound for the highscore screen where the player enters their name. You know, the old typewriter sound. So, I browsed my earlier game sounds, found a sound, double clicked it. Winamp starts. At this point it occured to me: oh crap! I have Winamp set to playlist looping, which is what I like when I listen to music. However, double clicking a file replaces the current playlist and plays the single file looped. In case of a short sound clip, the sound repeats quite often. It sounds a bit annoying, but that’s not the worst effect here.

You see, on this machine, Winamp somehow cannot handle a short sound clip played on repeat (I only remembered that *after* I had activated the file!) – it crashes. And hard. So Windows presents me a message the Winamp had to close. When I click on Close, the computer reboots cold. Same as when I press the reset switch. And that annoys me. This has happened several times, and it’s annoying. A cold reboot doesn’t exactly do wonders on your HD..

When Windows finally comes up (that’s another thing, it takes ages to start up – although I do have years worth of crap installed, so no wonder..), it presents me a familiar little dialog:

Feels like coming home.

My adventures with Python / PyQT

Mika — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:26:00 +0000

First of all, let me just say that Python + PyQt just rocks.

I’ve been recently learning Python. Just for fun, basically. Additional benefit is that now I have a better understanding on how to cope with Zope/Plone at my work. Anyway, apart from the Zope/Plone stuff the first thing I did in Python was a command-line script that allows creation and handling of .mpk files that I’ve used in a couple of my games. MPK or MPak is a simple WAD-like format that stores all the game files in a single package file. I had a C++ CLI application that did the job, but it was really a piece of crap..

So I deciced to write a replacement for that app, in Python. The finished script (mpak.py) is much nicer to use and works better. I wrote it in Linux and it worked as is in Windows too – neat.

Then, I wanted to try GUI stuff and went with PyQt. I had a simple DVD collection management software called MyDVDCollection that I had written in .NET using C#. It worked, but was not too good either. So I began hacking away with PyQt and now I have PyDVDCollection (pretty clever names, huh? ) that I use for maintaining my collection. It has less code and more features than its .NET counterpart. It works in Linux, naturally, and also beautifully in Vista.

As you can probably tell, I’m very impressed with PyQt and the Python language, and I’ll be using them in the future as well. =)

I Have No Delete Key

Mika — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:21:00 +0000

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS aka Hardy Heron was released yesterday. I had previously installed 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon on my new laptop, and upgraded to Hardy last night. The update process went quite nicely, except for one strange thing: my delete key no longer works! O.oWhen I press delete, the laptops WLAN led goes on – nothing else happens. When I press it again, the led goes off. [Homer impression:]“Led goes on, led goes off, led goes on, led goes off…”. (sorry about that – just when they’re going to release the season 11 on dvd!?)

On this laptop (Acer Extensa 5220) the WLAN led is always inverted in Ubuntu; when the WLAN is in use, the led is off. That doesn’t bother me at all. However, I would like to get my delete key to work again. I use that one quite a lot in typing/programming, and well, in deleting things…

I made a thread about this on the Ubuntu forums, but so far the problem remains a mystery. Other than this little annoyance, Hardy seems very nice. And it works quite well in this laptop.Update: Turned out it was a known bug. It works now.