Required system specs

[bjg]

The one offered by the Lenovo's update utility seems to be good enough.
The install went smoothly. The game plays well (so far).
The embedded video isn't all bad.

BTW, generated files in the ArtCache directory are different on my laptop and my desktop. Was it OK to copy them from the desktop to the wife's laptop?

[sven]

BTW, generated files in the ArtCache directory are different on my laptop and my desktop. Was it OK to copy them from the desktop to the wife's laptop?

Interesting! Different how?

(In theory, copying over ArtCache shouldn't hurt anything. Though if you ran into a very nasty bug during your original install, it *might* lead to some corrupt art, that could manifest in game as "invisible ships" or something similar. I'm aware of a bug of that sort having happened exactly once in the lifetime of the betatest.)

[bjg]

Some files are missing (on the desktop), some (a lot) are different.
The tool I'm using doesn't allow to output list into a file, and it's too big for a screen shoot (too many screens). Please suggest a (small) tool that allows recurring compare by content and can output to a file if you want me to produce a detailed list.

[sven]

Some files are missing (on the desktop)

Some missing files are to be expected. The install script only generates art for ships/weapons/etc that you're likely to encounter. The first time you run into a ship with an unusual color scheme (like, say, a gremak scout ship captured by orthin), that art asset will be generated on the spot, and saved to ArtCache. So, over the course of normal gameplay, it will expand a bit.

some (a lot) are different.

That's also expected. Minor differences in video card design will cause slight differences in the pixel values of the reduced size art stored in the "pyramids" subdirectories.

If you notice that some of the PNGs in the ArtCache stored on one machine *look different* than PNGs stored on another machine -- that's worth reporting. But if you just have a tool that's telling you that the MD5s don't match or something -- that's fine, and, indeed, expected.

[bjg]

It had crashed couple of times even on the HD 4000 (i7). The second time it said that it did ran out of video memory. Do you want the 1.8 gig dump?

[sven]

It had crashed couple of times even on the HD 4000 (i7). The second time it said that it did ran out of video memory. Do you want the 1.8 gig dump?

No -- I've got a few. It will likely be somewhere in the planet texture allocation. Debugging the apparent memory leak that we're seeing on the intel hd graphics remains one of my more important outstanding TODO items.

[bjg]

Do you have actual plans to accommodate weaker hardware? You where saying you did, but a lot had changed since.

[sven]

Do you have actual plans to accommodate weaker hardware? You where saying you did, but a lot had changed since.

Implementing a low-res texture option is still on my TODO list for release. And I *think* that will improve performance and stability on most laptops.

I know it won't fix all the known issues though. Your newer Intel (i7) HD 4000 latop will probably see significant stability and performance improvements, but some of the bugs we've seen on very old cards, including your ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT and GeForce 9200M GS, look like they may be caused by thorny driver issues that we may never be able to adequately address.

[bjg]

some of the bugs we've seen on very old cards, including your ... GeForce 9200M GS, look like they may be caused by thorny driver issues that we may never be able to adequately address.

You have just put "NVIDIA Geforce 8 Series or better" as a minimum requirement. A "normal user" would say that GeForce 9200M GS is compliant. It seems like you need to adjust either the minimum requirements or the previous statement.

[sven]

some of the bugs we've seen on very old cards, including your ... GeForce 9200M GS, look like they may be caused by thorny driver issues that we may never be able to adequately address.

You have just put "NVIDIA Geforce 8 Series or better" as a minimum requirement. A "normal user" would say that GeForce 9200M GS is compliant. It seems like you need to adjust either the minimum requirements or the previous statement.

The troublesome thing here is that some 9200M GS cards might well be compliant, the problem is that there are driver issues specific to particular manufactures.

That said, I had been meaning to change the minimum specs. The lowest-spec card that people do actually seem to be running the game on without too much trouble is ATI Radeon HD 4000, so I've gone ahead and updated the store to reflect that.

[bjg]

The troublesome thing here is that some 9200M GS cards might well be compliant, the problem is that there are driver issues specific to particular manufactures.

I did update to the latest "generic" Nvidia driver (using the Nvidia tool) - just to be clear.
It's good you've changed the "official" requirements.