While people are porting the game, I've been working on performance and bug fixes as I play through the game (again ;))

In addition to overall performance improvements, my version includes a workaround for the horrible FPS in the questbook page (and other parts that display text).
The performance bottlenecks vary depending on the resolution, and apparently also from one graphics card to another; On my computer, at 1680x1050 resolution, the game is much smoother than v1.21

Don't hesitate to report whether you get better or same (or worse?) performance !

http://code.google.com/p/arx-fatalis-fixed/

EDIT:

Latest download: http://code.google.com/p/arx-fatalis-fixed/downloads/detail?name=arx-fatalis-fixed_v0.03.zip


v0.03 09/06/11
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-Fixed magic symbols not disappearing when closing spellbook
-Fixed NPC detection dots appearing over wrong maps
-Fixed inventory mouse offset


v0.02 07/02/11
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-Increased questbook performance, at the cost of font quality for now
-Fixed main menu back buttons clickable zone to match their appearance
-Increased main menu left side performance


v0.01 28/01/11
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-Increased ingame performance
-Increased main menu performance
-Fixed character speed increasing with computer uptime (also fixes animation problems)
-Ingame minimap shows more of the surrounding map

Just tried it, didn't work, but the intention is what counts, I'll definetely keep trying your fixes.

Also, I'm still wondering, I've heard of demanding features in games like Screen Space Ambient Occlussion, Cloth Simulation (And destruction), Tessellation and even ray tracing (I know that's impossible to render it with current technology in real time but whatever) but I didn't knew that text was such a huge performance hog XD

Hey Nuky, thanks for the patch! I haven't tried it (yet) but I too will definitely keep my eyes on your work!

If I may make a suggestion, could you do something to HUD scaling? Especially inventory shrinks too much with bigger resolutions..

KillerJuan77: What error did you get ? I *think* I might have broken compatibility with previous saves (investigating that), but New Game should work.

NeutronStar: I'll add that to my todo list :)

No errors of that kind, I just have the same horrible performance as before.

I tried it on mine (started a new character, so i can't comment on saved game compatibility), but it GREATLY improved performance when combat text or help text is displayed, and when viewing certain pages on the diary. The character stat page still slows a bit (the mouse cursor feels noticeably laggier), and occasionally if in a large area the combat text will have a barely noticeable impact, but this is a significant improvement from the base 1.21, where these events caused the game to slow to a crawl.

I have a nvidia GTX 465, and am running the game at 1680x1050.

Thanks Nuky, the game was running terrible even at ver 1.21. I'm using a GTX460 so the issue must be with the card. Anyway, your patch made a huge difference in performance. I've barely played the game, so I don't know if the whole thing is playable, but the intro cinematic and opening scene don't look like jerky puppetshows anymore. Please keep working on this; Arx Fatalis is a wonderful homage to my absolute favorite game of all time, Ultima Underworld, but UU's control scheme is just too archaic for me to wrestle with anymore. Arx scratches that itch, though.

Just wow.
Thanks!

downloading, will test tonight or tomorrow. Thanks so much for donating your time and expertise to this game. :)

EDIT: Just tried it, I have not really played the game before(I will be soon I swear), but I played for a bit before patching and yes, I found the text rendering to be REALLY slow when trying to hold the book open while walking around. However, I applied the patch and it WORKED. It worked really well actually, I don't even notice any real decrease in the quality, but I was not looking that hard. Also, I made a save right at the beginning before you jump down the hole and loading it worked, though that could have been due to how early it was.

And if it helps any I'm running with an ATI Radeon m5650.

All in all great work!

Also, may I ask what it is that you are changing, I could(and probably will) go through the commits, but I would also kind of like to know outside of that.

THANKS!

May I say, "I love you"? I bought this game this weekend and had the "character believes he is The Flash" issue, which was funny but made the game unplayable for me. This fixed it and I cannot wait to play this over my vacation!

Thank you so much! :)

I did that, it didn't work, I'll install it again and I hope it gets fixed after that.

I just tried the patch. It definitely sped up performance and ran better but is still unplayable. I've read though all the threads (maybe I missed something) and can't fix the problem. The main menu is extremely dark. I can't see mouse cursor and have to move mouse extremely lightly in order to get to hightlight an option in the main menu but usually this doesn't work either. When I click on options I get 4 bars that move across screen with no words anywhere. I was able to start a game but everything was so dark I could not play it. I think it's a montitor problem ( I'm not very good with computers ). A few times my monitor would not display the game at all. Changing brightness levels does nothing.

Geforce 5200 with latest drivers. Sound card has latest driver.
AMD Athlon 64 3200. Windows xp with service pack 3.

This patch had some very nice performance increase. I used FRAPS to make 1 minute benchmark from the beginning with no cutscene, I had minimum 49FPS..quite amazing! It's a pity VSync didn't work so at some point when I'm looking at a wall I have 120FPS.

A question, I didn't get the mouse lock bug I had before. Is that a common bug?

Hi! I had no performance issues in 1.19 or 1.21 (everything was very smooth in both: Core i7-Q820, ATI FirePro M7820, 16GB, Win7Pro), but when I went to 1.21 I got an interesting new bug: turbo walking by *enemies* when my uptime was low [possibly also by me with high uptime, didn't test much]. Your patch 0.02 fixed that.

It *may* have reduced performance slightly, as it seems slightly slow when spellcasting with the stats page open, but that may also just be the game being odd, since it also breaks sometimes when I do that. In any case, I played through the whole thing with no significant problems.
This is a bit of a long shot, but I had strange display issues in the main menu that were caused by a bad save file. Try moving all the folders in the Save directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Arx Fatalis\Save) elsewhere - if that fixes the problem, you can add them back one by one until you find the one that causes the problem, delete that one, and move on. In my case, it was the most recent quicksave and the contents of the Cur0001 folder that were the problem; I started a new game, made a couple dummy quicksaves, then copied all the rest (Save0003-0015) back from my backup, and everything worked again.