SFXB Forum

Brilliant, if you could give the program a bit of a testing-out when you can - I'd be very happy.You can get at all the levels from the Missions menu.Just so you know - the Dai-X can be got at by pressing Tab.I know a new version *might / should* be on its way eventually but ... well I've had trouble with the game's performance so you'd be doing me a major favour.

Thanks for the tips! I'll probably give the game a nice run later this weekend.

Curses! My system just will not play the new version of the game! Is the older version still available anywhere? I can't find it on the home page.Denied by technology!

That's interesting... does it just not run the program at all or is it slow?The previous version, 0.34 can be found here: http://www.xbomber.co.uk/files/xb2-034-install.exeI don't suppose you could send some specifications of your machine for the sake of my sanity?It's annoying since future versions are going to be based on the latest engine.

My system is somewhat antiquated so I wouldn't get in too much of a tizzy about it.The new version runs just reeeeally slowly, took about 20 mins to get past the movement training and once the attack kicked off well, glaciers spring to mind lol.Thanks for the link to the older version, I'll run off and get that now. I used to keep a copy of it for when my Pc fell apart but, hey, my filing system sucks.If it helps at all my computer is a Compaq Deskpro, PIII 733Mhz, 326 Mb Ram running the motherboard graphics chip, an Intel I believe. Technically it's way below par but runs most games quite happily.Since I can't get on the online Hi-Score table don't forget to pop by The Bragging board and put up a killer score!!

I see - I've found that the performance of the new engine is great on dual-core machines (even though it doesn't use both cores) but on Pentiums and Athlon_64s it runs much more slowly than the old versions.I just want Clickteam to finish their DirectX hardware acceleration feature so I can crank up the speed for older machines.

(Crash Override @ May 13 2008,08:41)QUOTETo the right of the score is the frames-per-second counter (in smaller characters). As long as it's around 50 it's doing what it should.The game works fine up to mission 03, when the frame rate drops to around 5fps. That's with an Athlon 1800 and a GeForce4 Ti 4200. Not exactly state of the art, but I hadn't expected it to choke on a 2D game...Aside from that little issue, very nice work!

The problem is that Mission 3 needs far more visual processing than the other levels due to its full-screen dynamic rendering of the planet's atmosphere.The thing is that the game runs solely on the CPU rather than getting help from the graphics card. That is the same CPU core that runs Windows and any other background applications.Are you using version v0.37 or v0.34? I would be interested to know what the outcome would be of trying the other version's Mission 03 on that machine. v0.37 runs pretty shakily even on an Athlon_64 3200+ / 3500+. This is why I'm so annoyed that Clickteam haven't finished hardware acceleration like they have been promising for ages. I wish I'd written the thing in Blitz or Gamemaker perhaps.

Yes, I've just tried 0.34 and that runs fine.

Swell huh? Yeah. One problem is that the old version cuts down animation and movement smoothness to maintain a constant framerate of 50fps so we're not comparing like-for-like when we look at the two version's framerates. This function was removed in the latest version so we could actually tell more clearly how demanding it was on certain machines.The new engine that I'm using seems to run badly on older machines full stop. I'm not the only person who's found that and there was a message on Clickteam's forum today from a guy with the exact same problem (so I dropped him a private message just now).When I get my holiday in a weeks time I'm gonna test this on one of my older machines and try pulling out certain elements of the game to see if a certain thing is causing a slowdown.I'm not holding my breath because I wrote another very simple but only slightly graphically-demanding application from scratch and the performance was dreadful with that too.