Hi there,
I'm having a performance issue in the game and I was hoping to get some assistance with it. Whenever I'm using the station interface or PDA interface in space, or caught in an ion storm, my frame performance drops significantly (haven't quanitified it, but it gets really slow). During the rest of the game play situations I've encountered, though, things seem to run fairly smooth on my current settings.

Can anyone help me out with this?

I have an HP laptop with the (dreaded and awful) Intel 945 GMA chipset in it. I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 currently. It's a 1.8GHz Centrino processor.

What should I test and do and try?

P.S. for a really long time, I could only play VO with the windows client under WINE. I *finally* got the linux build to run last night by disabling basically everything in the refgl section of the config.ini file. The graphical slow-down occurs in both the windows client under WINE and the linux native.

Try disabling the "show station in menu" under interface

As for ion storms.. it might help to disable the "full scene glow effect" in the graphics options. otherwise try reducing the background detail...

Toggling options->interface->"show station in menu" off will probably help with the overlay slowdown.

Make sure that options->video->shader capability is off. Enabling texture compression might help too.

edit: doh .. I shouldn't leave tabs open that long

Mr. Spuck and Kihjin,

Thanks for the tips! I had disabled the "show station" already and full screen glow was off already. Shaders are turned off by default with Intel GMA cards such as mine, though I turned it off in the config.ini file already.

Any more ideas past these?

Reduce all the rendering distances as far as they go, reduce the resolution, play in full screen.

GMA 950 is a pretty basic card, I am somewhat surprised you are able to get VO to run on it at all.

It's solved!

Turns out there have been some updates and bugs with the Intel drivers or some-such under Jaunty. I followed these instructions:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1130582.html
I only did the "safe" update here, but it's working great so I don't know if I'll try the kernel update for "optimal".

Now whenever I have the screen overlays, my fps doesn't drop significantly. I haven't been in an ion storm yet, but I'm betting it'll be solved as well.

I still have my graphics settings down in the medium-low range, but I'm quite a bit happier in the game now that ship configuration isn't such a bear.

Thanks for all the help here.