Windows woes

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-13 20:12

Hello all -

I'm getting ready for next week's Ludum Dare by doing a quick, one-day mini-game event. Basically a lunar lander type thing.

I develop on OSX Lion, using ruby 1.9.2 p180 (in rvm), and gosu 0.7.33. Everything works like a charm. I get 60 frames per second, as expected.

Then I copy the game over to Windows. I'm using XP SP3 and Win7 to test with. I have ruby 1.9.2 p290 (i386-mingw32) and gosu 0.7.35 (i386-mingw32).

On both Windows setups, my frame rate drops to around 16fps. And when I close the window, rubyw hangs around in the task list, until I manually kill it. I have tried using the console version, and when the game exits, the console stays there, but is unresponsive, and I have to manually kill it.

I realize that both of these questions are probably more about ruby than gosu, but I'm wondering if other developers using a similar setup have seen the same thing.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-14 22:18

No, Gosu hanging around in the task list is a problem with OpenAL. OpenAL seems to be terrible, but at least it doesn't crash in-game like the last library did. I will try to fix it until the Ludum Dare is coming up.

Gosu running slower is news though. Are these native Windows installations or running in a VM?

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-15 12:30

Hi jlnr -

I have run my Windows code on both a VM (Parallels on the Mac) and actual hardware. It was consistent on both, which is what got me thinking it might be a Windows specific thing.

I'll get mingw installed on one of the Windows images and see if I can help troubleshoot. I can also post my ruby code, if that would be useful.

Thanks for all your hard work! I'm really liking the library.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-16 01:31

Is your game running faster if you use an older version of the Gosu gem, e.g. 0.7.33 or 0.7.30?

I haven't yet tried p290, maybe something has changed there. I will check it out.

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-16 03:31

No, both 0.7.30 and 0.7.33 give me the same results. I was thinking that maybe it had something to do with blitting to a window versus full screen, so I reran the tests with fullscreen set to true. I got the same frame rates, and a 640,480 window in the middle of a big black background.

On the plus side, the console didn't hang afterwards when using 0.7.30 or 0.7.33.

It would be a little tougher for me to roll back to an older ruby version, but I can if you think it will give you some meaningful info.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-17 02:29

Is your game resource intensive at all? Gosu tends to be slower on Windows, but I never heard of such a crass difference. Is the code to your game available online?

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-18 20:36

I pasted it to http://pastebin.com/53beHCdB

Now, keep in mind it's not *good* code. I was going at Ludum Dare speed. It ran fine on my Mac, so I didn't worry about it much. It wasn't until I copied it over to Windows (to configure ocra, not even really to test it) that I saw the speed difference.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-19 05:57

Can you also upload the media files so I can test it on my machine? You can simply zip them & attach the ZIP to your posting here after answering too. My schedule is a bit rough but if there is anything wrong with Gosu, I'd like to issue a hotfix before the LD starts.

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-19 16:43

Doh! Media files would definitely help.

Attachment: Lander.zip (2584k)

By Maverick Date 2011-08-15 18:12

There's got to be a good audio library alternative. I wish there were! D:

What are the ones you've already tried? Maybe in my spare time I can do a little research and find one?

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-16 01:30

No, please not another one :) OpenAL seems to work fine if you are super, super careful about resource management. It works okay for Ray (another Ruby gamedev lib). I will try to get it fixed this week.

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-16 03:34

I noticed that my background music played fine on the mac, but was unsupported on windows. It was an m4a file. I guess I need to convert everything to ogg?

Also, and this was weird, on Windows, some of the color constants didn't work. Gosu::Color::GREEN was undefined. It worked fine on the Mac side. I got around it by just setting my own constants, but I thought that was maybe worth mentioning.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-17 01:55 Edited 2011-08-17 02:28

Hmm, the constant thing sounds very unusual too. Can you post a minimal script that doesn't work with GREEN?

And yep, you may need to convert the files. OGG is great except on iOS, where m4a is a much better choice (hardware accelerated decoding!). I updated this wiki page a bit to reflect the recent library changes on Windows and Linux, though my writing skills aren't great today: https://github.com/jlnr/gosu/wiki/Supported-Audio-Formats

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-08-17 11:23

Does this OpenAL32.dll solve your problems?

http://www.libgosu.org/mwf/attachments/49/4749/OpenAL32.dll

It should work if you just put it in your game's directory; otherwise you can overwrite the one in the lib folder of the Gosu gem.

By siebharinn Date 2011-08-27 04:37

Better late than never. The new OpanAL library did not cause a hang on exit. That lib is what I ended up using the Ludum Dare. Thanks!