This is going to raise the hackles on a lot of people but I think it needs to be said. (Hence why I'm starting this discussion on the Forums instead of privately among the developers.)

I think it's time we defined some minimum requirements for scorched3d. A good third of the forum topics are

Ok so I exagerated a little on the last one. But you've got to realize that this is scorched _3D_. And as such it requires a minimum hardware standard to play.

Recently I loaded one of the development builds on a friend's laptop ( a P200 compaq with an integrated video card- non 3d) And surprise surprise it ran.... kinda... at a framerate of .02 fps. This wasn't playable, hell it took 5 minutes to calculate the hightmap/lightmap before the game could start.

Now I'm sure the developers have better things to do than track down every brand of *ucked up ancient hardware to test scorched on (then test the linux/windows/other flavors), so put your experinces below. But for now here's my general guideline for playing scorched. A GeForce 1 or equivalent graphics card. (before that OpenGL hadn't truely penetrated the desktop and was still the domain of sun workstations-see Voodoo and Monster3d cards for examples of half assed implementations) a Pentium 500? or equivalent system, and 128 megs of RAM.

I'm guessing on the system requirements.. Personally I play on a 1.4 Athlon, a GeForce 3, and half a gig of Ram. hehehe. So post your experences and we'll try and come to a standard. We've pushed about as far as the standard level of video cards will allow (and beyond), new features from the latest and greatest games will require better hardware -if Gavin decides to add them to the game. If your machine can't play it, tough luck, go back to playing :-
http://www.classicgaming.com/scorch/

Cam

P.S. If you are having problems running scorched, here's a list of things to try before complaining:<br><br>1) MAKE SURE YOU ARE RUNNING THE _LATEST_ DRIVERS FOR YOUR 3D VIDEO CARD. CHECK <a href='http://WWW.NVIDIA.COM'>http://WWW.NVIDIA.COM</a> OR <a href='http://WWW.ATI.COM.'>http://WWW.ATI.COM.</a> THERE ARE __HUGE__ PERFORMANCE GAINS FROM RUNNING THESE DRIVERS, ESPECIALLY NOT THE STANDARD ONES THAT COME WITH WINDOWS.<br><br>2) Make sure you're running only scorched. Other programs that use a 3d engine may interfere with scorched running.<br><br>3) Double check the settings of scorched. You may have accidently screwed up a setting so double check the settings window before posting.<br><br>4) If scorched does crash please give us the exact error message.<br><br>If you DO post a bug report PLEASE include your system specs. We need to know what version of what O.S. you're running, and what type of system hardware you have. (CPU, RAM, VIDEO CARD)<br><br>Cam

sounds like a good idea...<br>will have to do some playing around with the copple of computers I have here, from memory the last version worked fine on a celron 600, with an 32mbgforce2mx, it also ran quite smoothly on a PIII 500 with a 64mbGforce4ti. will have to do some more testing with this version...

64MB GeForce 4 Ti : shes pumping out eye candy !<br>P4 2.0Ghz : No complaints ere<br><br>thats all i could think of...

Cameron, passionate as ever m8, nice 1 <img border=0 src=/images/icon7.gif>.<br><br>Heres my findings...<br><br>o P3 900 Mhz, S3 Savage MX<br>10 fps fullscreen 320x200 (ughh), all settings off<br><br>o P4 1.4 GHZ, geForce2 MX 100/200 <br>30 fps windowed 800x600 all settings on.<br><br>o Athlon 1.0+ GHZ, Voodo III (forget the model)<br>~20 fps fullscreen, all settings off<br><br>o Athlon 2.0+ GHZ, Radeon 7200<br>20 fps fullscreen 800x600 all settings on.<br><br>o Athlon 2.0+ GHZ, geForce2 GTS<br><code>></code>60 fps windowed 800x600 all settings on.<br><br>o Athlon 2.8+ GHZ, geForce2 GTS<br><code>></code>100 fps windowed 800x600 all settings on.<br><br>o Athlon 2.8+ GHZ, geForce4 ti 4800<br><code>></code>200 fps windowed 800x600 all settings on.<br>

Well I've been doing all my playing and testing on a PII 333 (256MB)with a geForce2GTS(32MB)using linux (all options on). Startup is rather slow and the first 5 frames displayed are a bit jerky when moving the camera. After that the game is always fully playable with no know problems. (~40 fps)<br><br>So looking at the other findings it seems that the playability is determined by your graphics card performonance only.<br><br>As soon as you own a card performing like/or better than<br>a geForce2GTS everything should run smoothly<br><br>red. -

I'm running 2.53 p4 with an All-In-Wonder 9700 and plenty of features to boot<br>I run the server and several programs simultaneously...<br><br>All I can say is this- the game runs PERFECTLY graphics wise up to 1200ish resolutions. there is some slowdown between this and 1600. 1920, my max res, has constant slowdown when calculating things like deaths heads.

<br><br>With the default settings (800x600, medium settings etc)<br>on my dual celeron 366, with a 64MB radeon VE/7000 (dual head) I get about ~10fps while shooting, and ~20 while moving the camera around..<br>

AMD Atholon XP 1700+<br>512 MB 2100 DDR<br>Windows XP Pro<br>ATI AIW-Radeon 32mb<br><br>Ran in 800x600 medium texture windowd.<br>Ran great. No slowdown at all.<br><br>In 1280x1024 Fullscreen. Ran good. Looked great. Occasional slow down when there was a lot of action on screen but not bad at all.

Pentium 100MHz
32MB RAM
3dfx Voodoo2 12MB
SB Awe64
Windows 98SE
30MB free space

Low texture detail, no waterdraw, no water animation.

800x600x16 fullscreen, 40fps. Around 51 with the interface closed. Goes down to 9 with the water drawn. Goes down to 4 with the water being animated. Without draw, it goes down to 30 when a projectile hits the (invisible) water surface. ?!

Dual Xeon 2.67GHz CPUs
1GB Dual-bank PC-2700 DDR SDRAM
GeForce4 4800SE 8xAGP Video
Windows XP Professional
1024x768 window (1280x1024 desktop)
Large textures, all details on
55-80fps, 75fps average, 22fps when a death's head detonates
Runs smoothly.

Celeron 1Ghz
768MB of PC133 SDRAM
GF2 GTS 64MB video card
Windows XP Pro w/ DirectX 9.0b
1024x768 full screen w/ all details on

About 60 FPS when not doing anything
About 50 FPS when moving tank/cannon
About 20 FPS when Death's Head is making a crater

I've only ran this on one computer, my main one.

2.26GHz P4
512MBs DDR
15,000rpm Ultra 160 SCSI drive
128MB GF4 Ti4600
Win2K Pro

Ummm it runs perfectly smoothly at 1600x1200 lol. Sorry its not much help but its all i can do. The only other computers here dont even have 3D cards

Sorry to say, but S3D is crashing on a very frequent basis, ie 99.whatever% of the time. No joke. Sometimes it's early in the game, other times it's not. It frequently seems to be related to using large weapons, eg Death's Head, other times not. Once in a great while I can play an entire game.

Here's my system information:
-P3 800 (not Celeron)
-Asus CUV4X
-1.5GB PC133 RAM
-System managed swap, 3.96GB free on swap partition
-20GB WD HD (x2)
-Matrox G400 (running latest drivers)
-Windows XP (all updates)


I run the game as follows:
-Version 35
-1024x768 (lower res doesn't seem to change frame rate or crash frequency)
-Small texture size
-All Detail Settings checked
-No GL extensions
-No sound


I have a set of crash dump files if anyone is interested in taking a look.

I would love to see the files. Could you mail them to me at glcamp@ntlworld.com.

Thanks, Gavin.