I just came across Simutrans on a link from an OpenTTD site and like the look of it! But I'm having some troubles...
I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu Jaunty with all the non-free stuff installed. The Debian-packaged versions didn't work well for me(v102, which is slated for the next Ubuntu release, had a fatal game save/load bug!) so I downloaded the Aug 08 2009 build. I now have a working installation, but it, like all the others before it, is running as slow as hell! I have a dual 2.8GHz Athlon 64, but it's acting like a 900MHz Celeron. Even 5-10 frames per second is maxing out one of my cores, and there are occasionally seconds-long pauses where the game becomes unresponsive. Is there anything I could try to improve performance?
I'm not a Linux dude, but I have seen mention of midi problems causing delays - that would be my first bit of advice: run with the command-line parm "-nomidi".
Other Linux folks might have better/other ideas :)
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I'm already trying that, to no avail. :p I'm running this command and each thing (that's half-resolution on my monitor) seems to make it just the tiniest bit better:
sim-linux64 -refresh 5 -nomidi -nosound -screensize 1280x800
But even with that, I've never seen it get above 13FPS... and that was with a tiny window on the menu screen.
Try using smaller maps, smaller cities - it speeds up once in game :)
Do any of these threads help?
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=573.0
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=2108.0
I know there have been problems in the past with linux-64 builds (I have no problems, but I'm on a low spec linux-32)
I wish! :( Even at 256x256 it's really slow.
Those are informative, thanks. It sounds like some of those folks are having a couple of the other issues I'm having, like the mouse not responding to clicks... although that was reported with v100, and I'm using a 102 nightly. I also noticed that, strangely enough, my problems get a lot better when the simulator is in fast-forward! Then it actually runs very smoothly and I can click things reliably without lags.
Maybe it'll be worthwhile to see if running a 32-bit version (still on my 64-bit OS) will help clear up some of these issues... I don't know if I'm still an outlier, but I use only 64-bit OSs these days, except for VMs. :) Even if it's only to get a full 4GB of RAM, it's still worth it.