That version takes 2 seconds to load for me, instead of the 9 seconds it took before, so something must’ve changed. It also doesn’t seem to lag as much. Steady 64fps, but it goes down to 20 if I turn bloom back on, which I don’t want to do anyway.

Edit : I was getting the window-flicker sometimes with the last version, so it’s not something new. (I have a radeon 3600series graphics card and 2gb ram, don’t ask me more than that :p)

Works fine on dual monitors too.

my work laptop just displayed a black screen with the previous version: with this one it hangs at what appears to be a random spot in the loading process… :( I’m on a core 2 duo laptop, 1gb ram and an integrated Intel 945GM graphics adapter running XP.

Worked fine with latest version at home, I’ll try this one when I get back home tonight. (main PC is a core 2 duo with 2GB ram and an nvidia 8800GTS – works fine. haven’t tested with the Athlon XP2800+ with ATI card I also have – both run XP)

I have a three monitor setup, and it won’t run at all. the thumbnail preview in the screen saver tab used to take a minute or so to load, and now loads nearly instantaneously, but I can’t get the screensaver to actually run.

Well, this version doesn’t work on my laptop, either. The previous one would just show a blank screen for a minute or so before popping back to the desktop. This one shows the loading icon, which fills quickly (<2 sec) to 60-90%, then hangs there. If I move the mouse or hit a key to cancel the screensaver, it takes ~5 sec to go back to the desktop.

I’m checking this on my graphics-underpowered work laptop (a Compaq 6510b), specced as follows:

Core 2 Duo T8100 @ 2.1 GHz
2 GB RAM
Integrated Intel Mobile 965 graphics (I suspect this may be the problem)

It loads much faster on my crappy Intel card at work, but I’m getting, maybe 1 frame every 2 or 3 seconds. Stoopid crappy Intel card.

yes! this works on my core duo with intel 945gm. the earlier one just showed a black screen. but now it starts loading instantly and very quickly. the framerate is only 15-20 but i guess this crappy 945gm can’t do anything more.

This one works in a reasonable amount of time, now. :) Thank you!! I was very much looking forward to running it, and nearly wept like a little girl when I couldn’t.

While before, it took an hour or more to load the city (I just let it crank while I was doing other things), this one loads in 30 – 40s. I’m still only getting about one frame for 3 seconds with default settings, ~1 FPS with bloom off, but I’m either running it in a Windows XP VirtualBox VM or through wine, so I’m expecting slowdowns.

I can back up the reports of missing help text… but on watching a little more, it looks like the help text is just black, and so only really appears when it’s backlit by a building.

It looks like the help text turns white again during loading (like when regenerating the city)… sometimes. I saw it once, but couldn’t duplicate it.

It also may have been the slow framerate and general unresponsiveness, but it seemed like the hotkeys weren’t working either…

My Guest “hardware”:
Windows XP VirtualBox VM
32 MB Video Memory
896 MB Base Memory
VT-x/AMD-V Enabled
3D Acceleration Enabled

My Host hardware (which was also running Wine):
Wine 1.1.15
Fedora Core 10
Intel Pentium Dual-Core 3.60 GHz
2 GB RAM (note that ~1 GB was dedicated to the XP VM)
256MB ATI Technologies Inc RV380 [Radeon X600 (PCIE)]
– setup for a dual-head display

One last request – I love the screensaver, but I would really like just a straight executable version, or a way to lock it to ignore mouse movement, and only exit when I hit Esc. It’s nice to open it on a second monitor and let it run while I’m only working on a single monitor.

-Sean

Load time is significantly better, but I couldn’t tell a difference on program performance, I’m at 3-4 fps in letterbox with bloom off. Oddly, the framecounter (or any other menu/display screen) would only show up when the bloom was off.

Specs: XP Pro, AMD Athlon 3000+, 1 gig memory (two 512 sticks), Nvidia TNT2 64 video card

As you might guess, the really old video card is the bottleneck. In the preview box on the screen saver options page the program runs ~25 fps.

I have an XP laptop with crappy onboard video card (Intel 855GM) — with the previous version it took five minutes to get through the load screen, after which it would crash immediately.

This version loads much more quickly — just a few seconds — and runs without crashing, but at less than 1 fps. There’s something odd about the bloom lighting, too; it’s much more prominent and is sort of spread across the screen instead of near the lights, it looks a bit like the photoshop “radial blur / zoom” filter, if that makes any sense. If I turn off bloom lighting and switch to the plain texture, I can get up to 5 fps.

(FWIW the previous version ran beautifully on my dual-monitor mac in bootcamp. Haven’t tested this one yet because I don’t want to reboot right now.)

As a web developer I often get irritated about having to support four or five different browser environments… I’m gaining a new appreciation for how difficult it must be for windows developers, who need to support hundreds of different graphics cards and hardware combos — what a nightmare! (I’m also gaining a new appreciation for how truly junky Intel integrated graphics cards are.)

[This time you asked for feedback]
I couldn’t get the original one to work at all. This one does something which is an improvement.

Here is what happened:
I don’t know if this is significant, but is started loading, and did most of it quite quickly, but then hung on 85.74 for several seconds. It then went to a blank screen for about 10 seconds.

I have not problem with the overall look of the buldings which do look very cool, but unfortunately it is more like a slideshow than a screensaver. It looks like a succession of stills which jolt from one to another every 5-6 seconds.

Strangely, in the properties section when choosing the screensaver, the miniscreen on there has a frame rate of about 5 frames per second.

I have a fairly old computer, and here are the specs:

Windows XP
Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz processor
1.00 GB Ram
Intel(R) 82865G graphics controller

I don’t know what it was, but I tried pressing buttons and couldn’t access the thing to turn off bloom or change things which I heard made things faster.

The above was found after clicking ‘preview’. I set the time for the screensaver to 1 minute before it came one, and it refused to even show what I had above-just a blank screen. I didn’t sit around and wait to see whether anything would load after that (I am a busy man, I have games to play…).

You know, I think that these problems are deliberate and that you are building up the suspense for people with low end machines, and have a properly working copy of it just ready to upload.

I haven’t been this interested about a piece of software for quite a while, so this tactic is obviously working.

Cheers.

EDIT: I rebooted and tried again, no change. I did however see one of the company names as “Green Health” which was coloured green.

I found this amusing.

New Zealand huh? Interesting. Maybe you got linked by a well known New Zealand blogger?

Like several other people reported, this version loads quickly (3-5 seconds) but then runs at 1/3 FPS. Also, I too have not been able to view the F1 menu or framerate.

Definitely loads quicker, but like others I’m having difficulty with the menus displaying with this version.

They usually appear black, sometimes grey, sometimes flickering between black and grey, and only the “rainbow” lighting effect does the menu show up as white.

This version loads faster (approx. 5 secs. in preview and 20 secs. in full-screen), however it only runs at less than 1 FPS.

Windows XP Home SP3
Intel Celeron M 1.3GHz
2GB RAM
Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller

This version does offer the promised improvement on city generation time, down on my work laptop from several minutes to about 5-10 seconds. It hangs around 90%, but I believe that to be when the program goes to start drawing the city. Given the unfortunately abysmal framerate (I would estimate 1-2 new frames every 20 seconds or so) I still can’t run it on my primary work laptop, but I have it set to run on a spare machine now where it merrily chugs away at 20fps, just enough for some procedural eye-candy when I’m not using it for terminal clients.

XP Pro SP3
Intel Pentium Dual Core T2390 @ 1.86GHz
2 GB shared RAM
Intel 965 Express Mobile (Shared RAM up to 384MB)

Yeah, that “z-fighting” I noticed in the earlier versions, but it was so rare, it didn’t really affect the experience, but in the new version, it seems like every other building has got a brawl going on.

And key-strokes seem really hard to get to work.

Well, this version works less well on my XPS Gen 2 (Nvidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra) generally running at about 25-30 FPS instead of 60.

As others noticed, the menus are colored black, grey, or flickering unless it’s on the rainbow setting.

I’m also still getting funky skies. This time I took screenshots.

Funky skies: http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q131/Zubenel/pixelcity1.jpg

Obscured FPS menu just visible: http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q131/Zubenel/pixelcity2.jpg

Note: You really have to squint to see the FPS menu in the second picture, but it’s there, I swear! I tried to get it at a moment when a light colored patch of sky was visible behind it.

First, the system specs:

Dell Inspiron E1705 running Windows XP (Media Center version, I think)
1.7 GHz Celeron Dual Core
1 GB RAM
Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express Chipset Family (from the Device Manager – I have no idea what that equates to)
1440×900 screen

Now the results…

On version 1, I assume I had one of those 5 minutes build times, but I can’t verify that. Impatience had me bail out long before anything showed up on screen.

With this version, It loads everything up and builds the city quite rapidly, then things get interesting. The screen updates about once every 15 seconds. I had to watch it for several minutes when a lucky window backlit the black text showing 1 FPS.

The really odd thing was the light bloom – the displayed bloom didn’t correspond to any existing lights. After watching for a couple of minutes, I noticed that the bloom matched the lights in the *last* displayed image.

When the city rebuilt, the menu finally showed up in white (hallelujah!) and I could finally figure out what to press. (Oh! ‘G’ to toggle Fog, not ‘B’ for ‘Bloom’…) It took a few times alternately hitting G and E to finally get the Bloom to disappear completely, which helped the framerate some. Also, switching to letterbox mode got the observed about the same as the reported framerate – 1fps or so.

As mentioned above, it runs like a moderately fast slideshow, but at least I can see the coolness now. :)

A few of the more interesting signs I’ve seen:
National Aerospace (Isn’t that a real company somewhere?)
eData
Green Petroleum
Monolithic Financial

This version loads ridiculously fast compared to the previous version. I think it loads in less than a second, as compared to 2-3 previously…

It looks like you can’t access the menu unless you’re in the “standard mode”. As soon as you switch to another special mode, the fps counter disappears and the the menu is inaccessible.

Definitely an improvement: loads equally fast as a screen saver and as an exe file, BUT the screen saver load screen stalls at 96.something %; maybe it would run eventually but I lack the necessary patience.

Remaining issues, all mentioned before, in order of relevance to me:
- Z-fighting aka Blinkenlights effect. This is ugly!
- Predictable camera paths. Gets boring after a while.
- Delayed bloom effect. But my machine’s too slow anyway.
- Black menu texts. Which I don’t usually need.

If the Z-fighting, the camera paths and the remaining screen saver loading delay were fixed, I could happily live with it. As it is, I start the exe every now and then and despite the great looking images get a little annoyed with the first two issues. I mean, forget about cars and streetlights and stuff; they could use some work, granted, but I don’t really care. But Z-fighting and the ever-repeating camera paths are really beginning to annoy.

That said, I still think this is an outstanding project. I wouldn’t keep bitching about what’s missing if I didn’t really want this to be my sceen saver! Thanks again Shamus!