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turning off smooth scrolling

Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 11:35 pm
by Daniel H.
Hello,

Im a newbie to RND & i was wondering.
how do you turn off Smooth Scrolling?

this option seems to have disappeared.
I know that it can be turned off in
"setup.conf," but i was wondering if
there was a way to turn it off in the game.

smooth scrolling is a pain on older
Computers and when you are trying
to reload a slow tape.

Thx in advance for any support.
Daniel
_________________
OK, just kidding. I'm not a newbie.

Re: turning off smooth scrolling

Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:18 am
by Zomis
Daniel H. wrote:OK, just kidding. I'm not a newbie.
I thought so... :)

Well, I can only find an option named "Delayed scrolling", but I guess that's not the one you are looking for. So well, it seems like Holger removed this option for some reason.

Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 1:43 pm
by Holger
> how do you turn off Smooth Scrolling?
> this option seems to have disappeared.

Since R'n'D has changed scrolling from jump scrolling to soft scrolling (somewhere around 1998), disabling soft scrolling was always a workaround which I only kept for older computers (with "older computers" as in "computers older than five years" or something like that). Using jump scrolling in the current R'n'D always causes graphical problems, which sometimes look really bad.

Therefore, the technical possibility to disable soft scrolling will probably removed from R'n'D very soon -- that's why it's not accessible anymore from the setup menu.

> smooth scrolling is a pain on older
> Computers and when you are trying
> to reload a slow tape.

For reloading tapes on older systems, just use the quick load and snapshot tape functionality, or use the invisible fast forward functionality (where the tape playing progress is not displayed). When using these existing techniques, the limitations of tape reloading are nearly totally bound to the CPU speed, not the graphics speed (that's why I added the snapshot functionality to the quick tape load/save functions).

Generally spoken, the system requirements of current R'n'D are quite high -- you do need some CPU speed, some memory and some graphics speed (recommended: at least something like 500 MHz, 256 MB and a graphics card that has some decent 2D speed). Any system that is not older than five years should be more than enough.

BTW: R'n'D still runs relatively fine on my old (and now used as a file server) AMD K6 system with 200 MHz CPU speed, 64 MB RAM and an old (but "accelerated") ATI Mach64 VGA card which I bought around 1997 (that's ten years ago!) -- you get around 80%-90% of soft scrolling speed. Supporting even older systems (like old 486 or Pentium systems) won't be worth the effort. (The same goes for the DOS version of R'n'D, which I stopped a few years ago, and nobody really cared about that so far...)

Interestingly, some modern graphics cards still have only mediocre 2D performance (while being real 3D monsters), but it's always more than enough for games like R'n'D.

Therefore, jump scrolling will be dropped in the near future of R'n'D.