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[Squirt]

Hi all,

I bought a licence key today after seeing a recommendation on the Steam forums (in the Starpoint Gemini section) but am having problems getting Starfarer to run nicely on my laptop.

The laptop is an E627 with an Athlon 64 (tf-20, a single core @ 1.6GHz), 3GB, and an ATI Radeon HD 3200 with the latest drivers (checked today), running Windows 7 (in French, but that really shouldn't matter!)

(I know this is far from a decent spec gaming lappy - I've also got a decent gaming rig which I'm sure will run Starfarer without issue, but I'd love to be able to play whilst sat on the sofa so I've spent this afternoon trying to get it to run to a playable level).

The FPS counter suggests there shouldn't be a problem, it floats between 20 and 45FPS, but I'd say averages around 25-30, however I'm seeing some slow down in combat even when the FPS is high. This in itself isn't enough to put me off, but it seems to be causing the audio to crackle as well, which is very off putting.

I've found 2 workarounds for the time being

1) audio off. (I can handle a little visual lag. It's the popping and crackling that's annoying). Not really acceptable though, the audio is pretty damn cool
2) Set java.exe to run as low priority.

The latter surprised me, but the higher I crank the process priority the worse the audio crackling gets. Running as low it reduces the slow downs and almost completely removes the pops+crackles.

I've had similar issues with Minecraft in the past, and the solution was to either upgrade the JRE or run with the 64bit JRE. I've had a bit of a look around but can't work out how to launch the game using the system's JRE as opposed to the one bundled with the game?

(PS: Awesome game, really enjoying what I've seen so far!)

edit: Should have also said I've checked I'm running the latest graphics drivers, and have created AV exclusions for both the relevant folders and processes (running MS security essentials)

[Alex]

Hmm. Thanks for the detailed info - I'll keep an eye out for this.

I've had similar issues with Minecraft in the past, and the solution was to either upgrade the JRE or run with the 64bit JRE. I've had a bit of a look around but can't work out how to launch the game using the system's JRE as opposed to the one bundled with the game?

If replace the contents of the Starfarer/jre directory with the system JRE, that should do it.

One tricky part: you'll either have to copy over the "server" directory from the JDK into Starfarer/jre/bin, OR remove -server from the vmparams file. You probably want to do the first one (the second will reduce performance a bit).

The "server" directory would be in C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_15\jre\bin or somesuch.

[Squirt]

Thanks Alex. I've now tried with JRE 64bit 1.6_31 and JRE 1.7.0_03, both with the same results.

The problem seems to occur when a large number of weapon systems are firing, but not if it's just me and one other ship firing at each other constantly.

My next test will be to upgrade the realtek audio drivers, which are currently dated 2009.

[Squirt]

Upgrading the audio drivers has stopped the pops+crackles during periods of lag, but it's still not running great when there's a lot of action on screen. I'm guessing my CPU just isn't up to the job at the moment - is anyone else running on a non-gaming lappy with a limited power CPU?