Detecting computer quality...

[darwin]

I have been play testing my Star Wars dogfighting map on my computer, which is new and pretty good. I had my girlfriend's laptop join it in a LAN game. I don't know her specs exactly, but it's about 4 years old and doesn't have any custom upgrades or fancy video cards. She can play WoW on it well enough.

During one part of the game, where she's in a turret and facing a long horizontal plan (looking out on the horizon) the game becomes very choppy to the point of not really being fun. I think the problem is that I set the view distance very far illuminating a lot of fancy doodads in the background.

Is there some way that I can detect whether a player's system is good and then make their camera different? Keep in mind this is a multi-player game, so I can't use the "easy" "normal" or "hard" like in a campaign.

Thanks.

 

[Adiktuz]

You can just add a command for them... so that they could adjust the view by themselves... because there is no automatic way of looking up the system used by a player...

 

[Bribe]

This is something I've faced before when developing cinematics for my map. Because of the wide range there was a lot of rendering that needed to be done which lowered the FPS.

Something you can use instead of checking graphics settings is to make all of your cinematics on a low-performance computer with no more than a gig of RAM with a single-core processor speed < 2GHz, so if the cinematic doesn't lag on that computer it pretty much won't lag on any computer.

 

[darwin]

This is something I've faced before when developing cinematics for my map. Because of the wide range there was a lot of rendering that needed to be done which lowered the FPS.

Something you can use instead of checking graphics settings is to make all of your cinematics on a low-performance computer with no more than a gig of RAM with a single-core processor speed < 2GHz, so if the cinematic doesn't lag on that computer it pretty much won't lag on any computer.

I'd like to do that, but I'm afraid this isn't a cinematic, it's part of the gameplay. I have hopes that someday this will be played on BattleNet, though honestly I've been up there trying to play test it and no one ever shows. That's another post I suppose.

I pulled back the camera a bit so they don't see so much, so that will probably help. It's also a small part of the game that is player driven; i.e. if it lags when using the ground cannon they can always not do that and fly their ship around instead.

Thanks for the help you guys

 

[Adiktuz]

Just give them a chat command to modify the camera settings...

 

[darwin]

Just give them a chat command to modify the camera settings...

I'll give that a try. I just want the game to be user friendly at first; so if the camera changes haven't worked, I'll put in a hint with the chat commands.

Thanks.