Planeshift?


jjwoznia

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What are the chances this thing will run planeshift? Their site says it needs a 1 ghz cpu, but that is x86. I haven't read how much 3d ram is in the pandora. I know that this would be the perfect setup for a mobile Planeshift device. It has enough controls to "play" and it has the qwerty keyboard for chat. I would buy this thing in a heartbeat if it came out of the box playing Planeshift. The source for the game and server are both available. Thats the only real gpu intensive game i would want to play other than psx emulators.
 
Sorry that's simple impossible given the minimum system requirements:

Minimum
* 1 GHz CPU
* 512 MB or more of RAM
* 64 MB 3D video card

1 GHz x86 is certainly more powerful than a 600 MHz Cortex-A8
Pandora has 128 MB of RAM for both system RAM and 3d.
 
DISCLAIMER: This is not me getting someone's hopes up in vain.

Those requirements might be overkill. The last time I tried planeshift it used very little ram. The gpu ram could be 64 to ensure that the card is reasonably new, it may not need too much.

The DSP may be helpful if the cortex alone isn't fast enough (but would need a lot of work). Most games require at least 1ghz to not look like a toy (since it's very unlikely for someone to have such an old cpu).

Large SD card would be needed, maybe even swap on the SD.

It might be possible, but careful investigation is needed.
 
Don't forget that the resolution would be reduced dramatically for the Pandora version. That also means we could scale down the textures => less memory needed.
That said, I don't think Paneshift is popular enough to get it ported.
 
Simon Parzer said:
Don't forget that the resolution would be reduced dramatically for the Pandora version. That also means we could scale down the textures => less memory needed.
That said, I don't think Paneshift is popular enough to get it ported.
I've just insalled Planeshift. When started, it doesn't go over 120mb ram at 1280x1024. Could get higher when a lot of stuff are on the screen, but most of it is cache usually. Didn't do more cause the servers seem to be down.

The planeshift guys themselves could provide a simple port. But then again, the Pandora might not be popular enough to get it ported.
 
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I'm looking to develop a small game for the pandora using the Crystal Space Engine (same as Planeshift), and the developers said the entire source code is written in c++, and there are no direct assembly calls, so porting the engine itself shouldn't be an issue. Their only concern was the memory requirements.

I don' t know about planeshift, but I think a crystal space engine based game with enough consideration for memory limitations should work great on the pandora. The engine itself is very well put together.
 
Laurent: in theory they are probably more around the same performance; ie: the os for x86 is a very broad operation set, arm tends to have an embedded os that utilizes "builtin" operands. It's very similar to sse and 3dnow. A lot operations the game needs are going to be easily handled by the extra dsp chip. I was more worried about 3d memory, and memory just in general.

sindbad: I never even thought to check what kind of resources I was using to play it. If they ported it, they could probably cut some resource intensive math in the nitty gritty of the game.

gaidin: I would totally be interested to see what kind of game you had in mind.

Everyone, thanks for all the posts. I'm going to look into it more. I've been meaning to look into the source code for planeshift to see what kind of cleaning could be done. I will talk to the devs to see if they think it would be feasible to release a less resource intensive version. It's an mmorpg so the game itself tends to just be math based. You probably could design the game to run off the command line if you were so inclined.

I was just curious to see how people felt on the inside.
 
I tried planshift on my UMPC and it was on the virge of playability as long as not not much was happening at once.

Pentium A110 @ 800MHz
GMA950 @ 133MHz
1GB RAM

Overall, this is speced higher than the Pandora, however with a heck of a lot of optimisations, cheap fog effect, reduction in model complexity... it might be playable. That's what a console is all about, you get to tweak things to an absurd level to get it to work on a specific hardware with locked in settings. (Think farcry on Wii) ;)
 
icurafu said:
I tried planshift on my UMPC and it was on the virge of playability as long as not not much was happening at once.

Pentium A110 @ 800MHz
GMA950 @ 133MHz
1GB RAM

Overall, this is speced higher than the Pandora, however with a heck of a lot of optimisations, cheap fog effect, reduction in model complexity... it might be playable. That's what a console is all about, you get to tweak things to an absurd level to get it to work on a specific hardware with locked in settings. (Think farcry on Wii) ;)
Graphics and CPU wise, they should be fairly comparable. The biggest issue is decreasing RAM usage.
 
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I don't think so. The A110/A100 are real CPUs not to be confused with the nanos. There is a big difference between it and the cortexa8 at 600MHz.

The GMA950 is significantly speedier per MHz than the SGX chip in the Pandora.

The biggest issue will be optimising the hell out of it. Memory savings will come out of the reduced textures and model poly count.
 
The not so great thing about that is that the models aren't necessarily "open." I'm sure it is very do able. Especially the textures. It even has a built in texture downsampling in the setup for the game client.
 
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