Grimrock

Dr.Disaster wrote:Overheating issues are a very common problem with laptop owners yet they are quite easy to solve. Fans and air ducts in those machines are already tiny. While designed to keep the system cool even under highest system load they do - like all others small things - love to collect dust over time and so their cooling effectivness is slowly and silently eaten away. Then once in a while you put a demanding program or game on it and - BAMM! - you run into a overheat crash due to dust. It's as simple as that in 90+% of all cases.

Basically all a laptop owner has to do is to take care of his system once in a while because it is used in your regular living environment and not in some dark clean locked and cooled server room. Some of the higher priced laptops even get cleaning routines added by the manufacturer for their cooling system; all you have to do is check how to activate them on a regular basic.

carlo222 did what i told him as 1st thing to do and now his system is running fine again.

I mean, you are right. If systems overheat, their cooling capability is subpar. But here is the point, why was this not noticed before on such systems? Because no other software was stressing their systems as Log2 did. Which is somehow wrong as Log2 should be a riddle focus retro dungeon crawler and not the next-gen super fancy looking FPS shooter with mega-bloom and other eye candy which brings laptops and fully grown PCs (like mine and yours) to their knees.

badhabit wrote:

Dr.Disaster wrote:Overheating issues are a very common problem with laptop owners yet they are quite easy to solve. Fans and air ducts in those machines are already tiny. While designed to keep the system cool even under highest system load they do - like all others small things - love to collect dust over time and so their cooling effectivness is slowly and silently eaten away. Then once in a while you put a demanding program or game on it and - BAMM! - you run into a overheat crash due to dust. It's as simple as that in 90+% of all cases.

Basically all a laptop owner has to do is to take care of his system once in a while because it is used in your regular living environment and not in some dark clean locked and cooled server room. Some of the higher priced laptops even get cleaning routines added by the manufacturer for their cooling system; all you have to do is check how to activate them on a regular basic.

carlo222 did what i told him as 1st thing to do and now his system is running fine again.

I mean, you are right. If systems overheat, their cooling capability is subpar. But here is the point, why was this noticed before on such systems? Because no other software was stressing their systems as Log2 did. Which is somehow wrong as Log2 should be a riddle focus retro dungeon crawler and not the next-gen super fancy looking FPS shooter with mega-bloom and other eye candy which brings laptops and fully grown PCs (like mine and yours) to their knees.

I already told why. Usually you don't push a laptop to it's limits so a degrading cooling system can and will go unnoticed for a long looooong period of time. Then when you once again request it's full system power for like a 1+ hour gaming session with your new toy things just fall together. Been thru this far too often and in fact most solutions only require some intense clearing.

Dr.Disaster wrote:

badhabit wrote:

Dr.Disaster wrote:Overheating issues are a very common problem with laptop owners yet they are quite easy to solve. Fans and air ducts in those machines are already tiny. While designed to keep the system cool even under highest system load they do - like all others small things - love to collect dust over time and so their cooling effectivness is slowly and silently eaten away. Then once in a while you put a demanding program or game on it and - BAMM! - you run into a overheat crash due to dust. It's as simple as that in 90+% of all cases.

Basically all a laptop owner has to do is to take care of his system once in a while because it is used in your regular living environment and not in some dark clean locked and cooled server room. Some of the higher priced laptops even get cleaning routines added by the manufacturer for their cooling system; all you have to do is check how to activate them on a regular basic.

carlo222 did what i told him as 1st thing to do and now his system is running fine again.

I mean, you are right. If systems overheat, their cooling capability is subpar. But here is the point, why was this noticed before on such systems? Because no other software was stressing their systems as Log2 did. Which is somehow wrong as Log2 should be a riddle focus retro dungeon crawler and not the next-gen super fancy looking FPS shooter with mega-bloom and other eye candy which brings laptops and fully grown PCs (like mine and yours) to their knees.

I already told why. Usually you don't push a laptop to it's limits so a degrading cooling system can and will go unnoticed for a long looooong period of time. Then when you once again request it's full system power for like a 1+ hour gaming session with your new toy things just fall together. Been thru this far too often and in fact most solutions only require some intense clearing.

*sigh* yeah...but why is Log2 so stressful, requiring "full system power", despite not being the next gen fancy eye candy game? Because the engine has some problems... sadly.

Because people want a nice looking game

since i have cleaned my laptop sony vaio is temperature ok!!
were very many screws to open the laptop

badhabit wrote: I would love to hear a reasonable answer to this too. But since LoG1 AH has not really responded to the reoccurring performance and overheating issues.... On the other hand, they wrote their own pretty beautiful looking engine, a four men team.... so, I guess the answer will be optimization. On the positive side ... maybe some optimization will happen with the mac port.

Didn't know that it's just a four man team, for that, the outcome is pretty impressive actually. It's just sad that bad optimization is something often swept under the carpet by those that are able to run it without problems. I mean, it's 2014, that kind of mindset shouldn't really exist anymore due to the optimization problems PC gamers had to cope with over the last years. But well, ignorance is bliss.

I really hope the Mac port brings some optimization with it. I really do, because this game deserves better than beind handled as yet another badly optimized indie game.

Dr.Disaster wrote:Because people want a nice looking game

And nice looking it is. Lighting is quite beautiful in this, and such are the effects. But it's not quite as beautiful as Skyrim with HD textures on pretty much everything, enhanced lighting and new lighing sources, LOD enhanced meshes everywhere, plus real time rendered clouds and fog. It's an unfair comparison no matter how you see it, but the interesting part is, that this modded Skyrim runs better than LoG2 does. Or Alien Isolation, arguably the best looking game on the market right now. +60FPS on max settings? Not a problem, but a problem for LoG2 it is....

Dr.Disaster wrote:I already told why. Usually you don't push a laptop to it's limits so a degrading cooling system can and will go unnoticed for a long looooong period of time. Then when you once again request it's full system power for like a 1+ hour gaming session with your new toy things just fall together. Been thru this far too often and in fact most solutions only require some intense clearing.

By that logic, playing a game with higher requirements, that uses much more system resources than LoG2, should revoke the same reaction from the system. Yet, that's not the case.

Bad optimization exists, and simply saying "clean your vents", won't help much. Sure, in some cases it does, but so does the answer "update your drivers", or even "switch from AMD to Nvidia you pleb!". Point is, generic answers may help the individual that has problems running the game now and then, but "bad optimization" is based on comparisons of resources and performance. And LoG is by definition badly optimized.

Without going ad hominem, I'd doubt that someone who's most demanding game in the library is Tomb Raider, will have proper experience about resources and perfomance of demanding games, and thus can make an objective statement about the state of the game, based on said comparisons.

I agree that there is still room for improvement but "badly optimized"? No, that's over the top.

I don't hesitate to call bad software bad. To give an example: when Diablo 3 was just released i tried to help the community over half a year to get this piece of garbage running as good as possible without the need to resort to USB3 sticks, SSD drives or a new system. Was quite some work but paid off for many players. The expansion RoS now might have improved that game a bit but IMO it remains a piece of overpriced badly optimized garbage.

When facing a problem with software i always look at the available info and if the problem starts with "laptop" and "crash after playing a while" it's most likely too much heat. I've seen brand new laptops getting really hot when stressed - easy enough to do with a good gfx demo or Furmark - but very rarely crash. Now when a brand new laptop crashes from heat is a bad design and you should return it and get a refund.

It does sound trivial but from my experience over many years dust is the top reason to heat crashes on laptops. In those mobile systems cooling is in permanent danger of degrading 'cuz dust is a silent killer. Of course i can say "use an fps limiter" but that'll very likely fix only a symptom and not the cause of an overheat problem plus: it robs the player of experiencing the game as it's ment to be.

ITwiener wrote:Without going ad hominem, I'd doubt that someone who's most demanding game in the library is Tomb Raider, will have proper experience about resources and perfomance of demanding games, and thus can make an objective statement about the state of the game, based on said comparisons.

Tomb Raider can be very demanding, way more then LoG2 ever could. It only depends where you are in the game.

Dr.Disaster wrote:I agree that there is still room for improvement but "badly optimized"? No, that's over the top.

It's not over the top. Even your system, which is way beyond the recommendation, has in game spots < 60fps. Also, some of the AH recommendations for optimal gameplay are plainly wrong and misleading: while the engine is CPU bound, the AH recommended quad core system is not helping at all (beyond 1.68 cores), only more CPU clocks help. So, if the recommendation of AH is even testable wrong, I think here the level is reached where we can call a engine badly optimization (or we could call this even "misleading customers"... I think I will fill a bug report here).

Dr.Disaster wrote:Of course i can say "use an fps limiter" but that'll very likely fix only a symptom and not the cause of an overheat problem plus: it robs the player of experiencing the game as it's ment to be.

Cleaning the vent as limiting the load are both symptom treatments, shadowing the real cause, a engine which produces not enough performance in large parts of the game ("outside world").

Dr.Disaster wrote: Tomb Raider can be very demanding, way more then LoG2 ever could. It only depends where you are in the game. 5 cores in use, GPU pretty much maxed out and i did not even active every available gfx option.

it utilizes at least 2.64 cores... 1 core more than LoG2 which stucks below 2.

badhabit wrote:

Dr.Disaster wrote:Of course i can say "use an fps limiter" but that'll very likely fix only a symptom and not the cause of an overheat problem plus: it robs the player of experiencing the game as it's ment to be.

Cleaning the vent as limiting the load are both symptom treatments, shadowing the real cause, a engine which produces not enough performance in large parts of the game ("outside world").

Cleaning air vents might be symptom threatment for you. For a system that wants to keep itself cool but can't it's a problem solved.

Reducing system load works for a while until the remaining air flow is again not enough to keep system temperature under control. I have seen systems shutting themselfs down after a few minutes of normal activity because their air flow was entirely blocked.

Did you clean your air vents, Dr. Disaster? If you did, did that fix YOUR framerate loss in outdoor areas?

If it isn't vents, what could the problem be other than a poorly optimized engine?

We are doing a method of elimination. If it isn't all the other problems, and there is still a framerate drop, then that implies that its the engine.