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Windows How do I decide the minimum PC requirements for my game?

Pandavim

Member
My game's called Extra Galactic:
That video is quite an old version but it still looks similar. ^^^

I've been sending the different versions around and I've been getting feedback on it. Nearly all my friends can run it well at 60fps, but some get around 40fps. Playing the game at 40fps is only a tiny bit less enjoyable because it's pretty fast paced anyway. Am I supposed to set the minimum requirements as what is needed to achieve 60fps or just the requirements that make the game playable? Sorry if this is an obvious question, thanks!
 

RujiK

Member
60 fps would be the recommended req's, 40 would probably be the minimum req's.


Slightly unrelated, if you are having trouble maintaining 60 fps you are doing something tremendously wrong. Looking at your game, I would expect around 300-400 fps on a good rig and 100 or so on a 6 year old laptop. Your game is incredibly bare-bones so I suspect your code is horribly inefficient.

Forgive my bluntness, I hope you can take this as constructive criticism.
 

Pandavim

Member
Thanks for the answer! It's only running at 40 fps on my friend's £140 netbook they bought a few years ago, one of the testers said they got 1400 fps.
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
Maybe do some profiling on it. Even on a netbook I would think it would run fine....except I see what appear to be particles. Is the ship's trail a particle system? If you are using actual objects...that may be part of the problem. If you are using particles, you may simply have too many of them.

About requirements...I would think you decide on your FPS. You coded at 60FPS I assume(room speed) so even though the game may be enjoyable at less, I don't think it is fair to the players, as there are different experiences, and different difficulties even related to those differences. Frankly, the game is likely easier for the one playing at 40FPS. You can forget I just said any of that though if you are calculating movement based off of the time per frame instead of the room speed.

So, if you intend on keeping pretty particle systems, but still want to support older slower systems, you need to either dynamically automatically, or in a menu somewhere, be able to disable some of the eye candy. This could be in having less to no particles, etc... Or, you could just have a little higher minimum requirements. Of course, this assumes you have no way to optimize the game any further and it is indeed too slow for older systems.
 
J

jackhigh24

Guest
it might be a good idea to also ask the person that could only run it at 40 fps to tell you their system specs, then you can say to people that the min is higher than that.
 
GM doesn't play well with some graphics cards or something, actually. My last computer could play Xbox360 games fine, but certain GM games that scaled to full screen would chug at like 20fps for no recognizable reason while scaled up. It was really weird. You could be experiencing the same thing with your friend's netbook.
 
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