OpenTTD and some problems

I wonder if anyone can help.....

Just downloaded the game and fired it up and it works well.. full screen and
I love the extras such as canals and the extra airports......

However, two problems.. the game runs very slow compared with the windows
version that I have. Buses are slow and the Concorde look-alike airplane
(Yate Haugan) takes off so slowly that it threatens to fall out of the
air..... I am running the game using a AMD 300 chip, bags of memory and
without anything else running in the background apparently. Is there a way
to speed the game up?

Secondly, I have the music playing in the openTTd version but no sounds of
the vehicles. Coincidently, in the windows version that I have on my disc I
have the sound effects but no music... is there a solution to get the sound
effects in the OpenTTD version?

All help most appreciated...

CTM


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Hallo!

CTM <cliff.martin.TakeThisOut@NOSPAMvirgin.net>:

> However, two problems.. the game runs very slow compared with the windows
> version that I have.

Yes, it is slower. I used to play the DOS version on my Pentium 200
without any problems, but with OpenTTD you can hardly move the mouse
around. So I decided to play on my Pentium III with 700MHz.

> Is there a way to speed the game up?

Disabling animations and full details helps a little, but for me it's
still unplayable on my older computers.


> Secondly, I have the music playing in the openTTd version but no sounds of
> the vehicles.

I had the same problem on my computer. The problem was timidity. It
was started first and locked the /dev/dsp device, so OpenTTD couldn't
use it for sounds. Modern sound card drivers may have no problems with
that locking because they mix the sound when the device is used be
multiple processes, but it didn't work with my sound card. To I
configured OpenTTD to use another audio player I named "soundsystem"
which is lying in /usr/local/openttd/. In fact, it is a little script
looking like this:

#v+
#!/bin/sh

trap "test -n \"$PID\" && kill $PID" SIGINT SIGTERM

PID=""
# playmidi "$1"
ssh hugh timidity "$1"
PID=$!

exit 0
#v-

As you see, it will ssh to another machine called "hugh" an play the
sound via timidity on this machine. Of course you have to copy the gm
folder on this machine to the same location. For example, when the
sounds are lying around in /usr/local/openttd/gm/ on your local machine,
you will have to put them in the same directory on the remote machine or
do some extra path rewriting (for example with sed) before ssh-ing to
the remote machine.

The other way would be to use /dev/sequencer for the midi sounds on
the local machine. This would be the case if you uncomment the playmidi
line and comment out the ssh line. Depending on your hardware, the music
may sound awful or really good, and /dev/dsp will still be free for
OpenTTD to play the ingame sounds.

The script isn't perfect yet. It uses the trap to kill ssh if it's
killed by OpenTTD (when you exit the game or use the stop button), but
timidity will continue to run on the remote computer until the song is
over. I'm thinking about a better solution, but with the playmidi
variant everything works fine for me.

Christoph