Game Speed

[Commander Strife]

I kinda noticed the game has very different playing stlyes that also depend on the computer it's being played on. for example I have a friend that has a vista that has 350 gb of ram (something stupidly ridiculous like that) and it plays very fast and smoothly, but my computer has 500 mb of rab and it plays slowly and kinda smooth, sometimes it speeds up a bit. but my point is is that, the creeper and weaponry speeds depend on the performance and hardware of the computer. another one is that his comp's blasters without any upgrades fire as fast as my blasters do with the upgrade on. I bet anyone knows this but I'm just wondering... what can i do to get it faster, or why does this happen. just wondering.

[knucracker]

CW is a frame-locked game.  THis means that everything slows down if the computer it is running on can't keep up.  So everything just gets slower (the creeper moves slower, guns move slower, packets move slower, even the clock ticks slower).  It is done this way to keep scoring 'fair' across different platforms.

To make the game run faster, click the options button in the lower right hand corner of a mission and click the button to set the optimal game size.  You may also want to turn off a some of the effects.  When you run the game, make sure you don't have lots of other things like browsers loaded up with pandora, or other pages that have lots of cpu intensive flash apps.

[Timwi]

Or, if you want to play at full-screen, just turn down your screen resolution to something like 1024x768 or even lower.

[jecowa]

The optimal resolution of Creeper World seems to be 700 by 525. If you want to play at full screen and use the optimal window size at the same time, then set your screen resolution to something with a vertical pixel count of 525. On a traditional 4x3 screen, that would be 700 by 525. On a 16x10 screen, that would be 840 by 525. And on 16x9, it would be about 933 by 525.

On Mac OS X, you can use custom screen resolutions by downloading and installing the free Newscreen program (http://nickbonadies.org/newscreen.zip). You install it by placing it in usr/bin. (It's an invisible folder.) Then you launch the terminal and use commands like "newscreen -h 840 -v 525" (without the quotes) to change the resolution.

If that's too hard and tedious to do. You can use SwitchRexX (http://www.madrau.com/indexSRX4.html). It is a shareware that can automatically change the screen size to whatever you want when you launch a specific application, and it is able to change the resolution back when you are done too.

[Karsten75]

The optimal resolution of Creeper World seems to be 700 by 525. 

How did you determine this?

Do you have any idea how horrible it would look to set the screen resolution of a 1680x1050 screen (my lowest res screen) to that resolution? LCD screens do not take kindly to lower resolutions and the interpolated images look terrible - not to mention what it does to the arrangement of my desktop icons.

[jecowa]

The optimal resolution of Creeper World seems to be 700 by 525. 

How did you determine this?

While playing a game of Creeper World, click the "Options" button in the bottom-right side of the screen. Then under where it says "Set Window Size for Best Performance", click "Set Size Now". The game window will attempt to change to 700 by 525. The game will run fastest at this size.

Do you have any idea how horrible it would look to set the screen resolution of a 1680x1050 screen (my lowest res screen) to that resolution? LCD screens do not take kindly to lower resolutions and the interpolated images look terrible - not to mention what it does to the arrangement of my desktop icons.

The thread is about making the game run faster, not making it look its best. My iMac's LCD is 1680x1050 too, btw.

[betadata]

I notice that some maps run faster right from the start while others from the start run slowly. Any one else see this?? I will try to get some map names that will shw this for others to try.

[Karsten75]

I notice that some maps run faster right from the start while others from the start run slowly. Any one else see this?? I will try to get some map names that will shw this for others to try.

I remember one game that ran very slowly. The author had stacked a lot of resources on top of one another. For a short period at game start, it ran slowly and then it evened out.

[creeper killer]

I noticed something also. When I play CW on my computer with a crappy vid card, full screen was horrilbly slow. And when I changed the vid card to an ultra fast high power vid card the perfomance was clearly 2-3 times better on Full screen so If the game is slow I'd suggest you change your vid card if it's not up to date