rec.autos.simulators

does anyone play GPL with a toshiba 3000 400?
bye

What's the problem?

Malc.

Have you downloaded the D3D and / or OpenGL patches for GPL, and
selected the correct rasterizer?

If not, you're running in software mode, and things *will* be slow
(and ugly, for that matter!)

Ian
--
Ian Riches
GPL Rank +1.76 Monsters of GPL +284.19

Have you applied the cpu fix patch from papy.com?

rastd3d7.dll is correct, don't change it.  Please tell us more about
your machine so we can suggest settings for it.  What speed is your CPU?
How much RAM do you have?  What kind of graphics card do you have?

Quote from the original post:
_____________

does anyone play GPL with a toshiba 3000 400?
_____________

The Toshiba 3000-400 is a laptop with nforce2 (dedicated 16Mb) graphics I
believe.

Couldn't really say what the CPU or ram will be, but it's a safe bet it'll
be above the minimum spec for gpl.

Short of playing around with the nVidia driver settings & core.ini 3d3
settings, there's not much else to suggest to speed it up. If it's already
set to d3d, and it sounds like it is, it's just a matter of lowering the
detail until the framerate is acceptable, or trying OpenGL instead, which
tends to be a bit quicker than d3d on nVidia chipsets.

If the slowdown is only on vroc, try switching off the quality meter bars.
It made a huge difference to my old kyro2, maybe it will here too.
(It's one of the tickboxes on the dialogue box that comes up when you click
to join a race).

Malc.

Okay there's a big one here you need to change. Make "DisableZBuffer = 0"
and you should see a big improvement in framerate.

Here's mine:

[ Direct3D7 ]
D3DDevice = 0
TossHighestMip = 0
DoubleMirrorResWidth = 1
DoubleMirrorResHeight = 1
DirectMirrorRendering = 1
DisableZBuffer = 0
AlphaThreshold = 1
TransparentMipsDrawOrder = 1
TrilinearFiltering = 1
AnisotropicFiltering = 8
LODBias = -50

You can play around with the last three, but the rest are probably best set
to the same as mine.

Read through the readmeD3D.txt file in your gpl folder to see what they do,
but that ZBuffer one is probably the problem.

hth, Malc.

iirc it's for CPU's over 1.4Ghz, but it does no harm to apply it, and may
help fix some minor problems. I have a 1.2Ghz Athlon & needed to use it.
It includes the disco patch too.

Malc.

Absolutely correct, and yours was set to 1 ;-)

Okay, back to basics. If:

You have no updated car graphics,
You have set all the graphics options to minimum,
You have set DisableZBuffer = 0 (if using D3D)
You have tried OpenGL instead,
You have applied the CPU patch,
And you have adjusted the display driver settings (no AA, performance
options everywhere etc),

you are still having a problem, perhaps you could describe the problem in
more detail. What fps, under what circumstances etc. If you try the above
suggestions, gpl will look pretty poor, but it'll run okay on a P200 with
32Mb & a Voodoo2, let alone your spec ;-)

Coincidentally I put gpl back on my recently rebuilt second PC today. It's a
Duron 800 with 256Mb ram & a Voodoo3 3000, running Win2k. I had to use the
d3d driver due to problems with Glide that I'll eventually fix, but apart
from big drops in framerate whenever there's more than a couple of cars
nearby, it ran at 36fps throughout. I downgraded the car graphics to earlier
versions, and even that problem went away. This is a pretty similar spec to
your laptop, and I would imagine a Voodoo3 in D3D would have similar
performance to your Gforce2Go if not worse.

Malc.

PS. For those that are interested, I installed it on the C:\ drive (NTFS)
and had to enable indexing on the gpl folder for it to work, so it's not
just winXP that this affects.

I don't  know how slow it is, but I have Duron 800 with GF2MX 200 card, so
it is simmilar to your config.
My expiriences:
D3D           unplayable at 800x600 (~15 fps) with stock graphics
OpenGL    1024x768, GPLEA lotus, hires dash full details I get 36 fps when
hotlaping and racing if there isn't a lot cars around me, at starts i get
~25 fps

So you should try OpenGL.
When I used Det 23.something i got picture offset i resolutions above
640x480, but i could play on VROC.
Now I use 30.30, there is no graphical problems, but i get black screen vhet
trying to join race on VROC.

Dorjan

The Z buffer, when used, improves 3d performance quite a bit. GPL (in d3d)
will use it if your graphics chipset supports it.
If your graphics chipset doesn't support Z buffering, this switch will have
no effect.

The Geforce2Go chipset does support it, in which case you should _not_
disable it. In fact you should always set DisableZBuffer = 0 no matter what
PC or Graphics chipset you are using. It's only there for troubleshooting
graphics problems like yours.
If you set it to 1, you should see a big dip in performance (it does on my
GF4200). This tells you that when it's set to 0, the Z buffer is being used
as it should be. If you see no difference between the two settings, it's
disabled elsewhere.

For more information about the Geforce2Go chipset, try here:

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/lo/561/SUPP/gf2go_overview.pdf

Malc.

English isn't your native language is it?  SET IT TO 0!!!!  It's a
double negative, when you set the "disable" variable to 0, that means it
gets enabled.  Trust me, you want it enabled.  Just try it, I swear you
will like it.  ;o)

I've sometimes wondered why there's no real consistency with this sort of
switch.

For some, 1=disabled, for others, 1=enabled.

I can appreciate that different games (ie different developers) may prefer
one way to another, but in the same ini file??
Having said that, I know diddly squat about programming in 3d, so maybe it's
a Microsoft restriction or something ;-)

Malc.

I think it is just the way programmers think, nothing more.  Anything
that they think should be normal is on unless you disable it, anything
that they think only a few people will use is off unless you enable it.

Those are very odd settings.  It really seems very unlikely to me that
turning the Z buffer off would help anything.  Are you certain you are
editing the right file?  The reason I ask is that gpl comes with a
core.ini.sample file, and if you have extensions turned off in the
windows explorer the name is displayed as "core.ini".  Therefore it
looks like the right file to edit, but it is not.  You have to turn
extensions on and make sure you have a real core.ini file to edit,
either by copying the core.ini.sample or by renaming it.