Scroll Speed

[Lou Wigman]

I have just started playing AOM. There is a problem with scrolling in the game. I am running it on P4 2.8GHz machine.

Scrolling the horizontal direction is way, way too fast. As soon as I move my mouse either to the left or right of the screen the scroll moves at lightning speed away in that direction. This makes the game very, very difficult to play.

Is anyone involved with the Source Code Project prepared to look at this issue?

[Immortal Wombat]

There's an ingame scroll-speed setting. Is it not working?

[Lou Wigman]

The ingame control is a scroll delay. The default setting is 3/10th of a second. This means that when the mouse is moved to the edge of the screen the scroll will not start until this time has elapsed. It then rockets away in a totally uncontrolled fashion.

This is evident in many older games. The problem appears to be that scrolling is tied to CPU speed in some manner rather than to a fixed time or frame rate.

A while back when I was very bored I started to write a game from scratch. I forced it to have a frame rate of 60 milli seconds (i.e 16 frames/sec). I then organised for it to scroll by 2 tiles per frame.

Doing this makes scrolling completely independent of CPU speed since it's the frame rate that determines how quickly the screen gets redrawn.

I really have no idea of how scrolling is done in CTP and my knowledge of C/C++ is minimal at best. I don't even know if other people are having the same problem. My previous PC was a P3 1.2 GHz and everything was OK with that one. So there seems to be a threshold of some sort above which scrolling breaks down.

[SithUK]

I'd like to second this one. Scrolling is just crazy at the moment.


Loving AOM2 though!

[J Bytheway]

I've been trying to figure out what's going on in the source code, but it's a bit of a mess. Is this keyboard or mouse scrolling that's giving you problems? They appear to be implemented somewhat independently... I see that it was mouse scrolling for Lou Wigman. In either case, could you try the other type of scrollling, and report back. It would help me understand what's going on.

[child of Thor]

have you tried running a 'slow-down' utility like 'turbo' or some such. I find they often help with issues such as these, of course it wont just be the scrolling that slows down - but i suspect around 800mhz max is fine for running anything to do with CTP2?

[Ekmek]

I believe its fixed in the playtest though, it might be because AoM doesnt use the playtest