Increasing Trespasser's Performance

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Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by awesome24712 »

This is a tutorial / article about how to increase Trespasser's performance.

As we all know, Trespasser was made in 1998 and was built to use the resources it had available to it. However, today the resources of a PC are much greater, however because Trespasser was made in 1998 it doesn't use more resources then it was meant to.

This article tells how to increase the amount of RAM Trespasser can use, thus also increasing the available bandwidth and capabilities of the RAM as it does not have to unload assets of the game out of the RAM.

It's relatively easy, actually. I found out how to do it by watching a YouTube video.

1. First of all, download the CFF explorer: http://www.ntcore.com/exsuite.php and install it.

2. Then find your trespassatx2.exe file (should be in C:\Tres CD, or C:\Program Files [x86]\Dreamworks Interactive\Trespasser) (or just the vanilla trespass.exe if you wish). You may want to back it up.

3. Then, right-click on trespasseratx2.exe and select open with CFF explorer. CFF explorer should then open.

4. In the menu, on the left, select "File Header." On the graph that appears, click on the lower-right box that says "Click Here." In the window that appears, check the box that say, "App can handle >2Gb address space,) and click OK. Then close the window, say yes to any windows that pop up.

5. Lastly, right click on trespassatx2.exe, go to properties, Compatibility tab, and check "Run this program as administrator." Click apply and then OK.

You're reading to play! When you run the game, a dialog box may appear, if so then click yes (this allows it to be run as an administrator).

==========================================================================================

Benchmarks, Hardware Mode, 1680x1050 resolution (which alone would have bogged it down to 10fps), highest draw distance on the slider, (Beta-)Ascent 1, used ATX's native FPS display:

Normal walking: 20-60fps
Looking at sky: 90fps

Same settings, but lowest Draw Distance setting:

Normal Walking: 80-100fps
Looking at sky: ~120fps

Same settings, before applying technique:

Normal Walking: 10fps-Crashing

Same settings, 1280x720 resolution, lowest draw distance:

Normal Walking: ~140fps
Looking at sky: ~200fps
=============================================

I think the greatest potential for this is stabilize levels that often crash, like the East Dock, and thus allowing greater detail and quality of Trespasser levels while still maintaining an easy 30fps. And on more powerful systems than mine, you could probably achieve ~60fps on the East Dock.

And on already low-power-demanding levels, like the retail, you just send the Draw Distance through the roof in ATXconfig.ini, while still maintaining decent playability.

Also setting Trespasser's priority in Task Manager to High, and setting its affinity to be sure it's running on one core (like it was meant to) might slightly increase performance as well.

Eager to see how this will fare on my up-coming new PC, with considerably higher speeds.
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by hppav »

Well, I attempted this and noticed no change with either trespasserATX2 or Trespasser Twilight.

Though it could be just that my laptop is crap, but it does have 2GB of DDR2 RAM so there should have been some increase. :? I mean I can play Doom 3 on this laptop just fine and that game came out 5 years after Trespasser :lol:

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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by tatu »

Will test this out at some point. Interesting. Could you do the test but for the IJ beta level? Where you first meet the T-Rex. Since there is a lot of foliage and stuff, and is known to crash the game.
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by machf »

I tried it with the Pens on my laptop but it still crashes when I teleport to a certain location.
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by hppav »

Maybe the amount of polygons the engine is allowed to render is hard coded and if it reaches or exceeds that number it'll automatically crash to keep the application from hanging with the original low memory allocation? I mean, it's known that the engine will sometimes not render an object just to save the engine from rendering polygons, so they could have set a limit and told the engine to try to avoid that limit as much as possible before a crash is inevitable.

Since I'm not a programmer this is just a guess.
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by awesome24712 »

I'm pretty sure this only increases the amount of system RAM it can use, not video RAM. But it still gives better performance.
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by RexHunter99 »

awesome24712 wrote:I'm pretty sure this only increases the amount of system RAM it can use, not video RAM. But it still gives better performance.
Video ram can't be limited anymore, the problem may be that the dev's kept track of the 'video' ram on the CPU which means they capped it at 32mb regardless of the card, even if it was a 64mb, I haven't got the code anymore but I would check out all of these if I could and maybe compile a new .EXE that would remove such limits... again the best performance acheivable would require us all to modify the source-code to work in Visual Studio 2010 edition and take advantage of modern optimizations which would also allow for the game to run more smoothly, take advantage of Intel threading (and AMD to an extent) port the code to work with DirectX 7/8/9 perhaps (each subsequent SDK had vast optimizations done to the deprecated DDraw and D3D6.
I think Trespasser's problem is cycles, it tries to do EVERYTHING on one single core, in one thread. Perhaps splitting heavy CPU work into different threads and limiting the cycles in those threads would improve performance such as processing AI in a different thread, physics in another (or allow physics to make use of nVidia GPU's with PhysX available? I ran some tests and PhysX tech demos ran amazingly well compared to 'software' Havok engine demos.

meh... I need the code once more, maybe I will attempt to reacquire it and will host it on some SVN or Mercurial for us 'coders' to work with...
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by awesome24712 »

Decided to post it in this thread rather than making a similar thread.

Please compare these two images, if you will:

Image

Image

There is a difference between these, can anyone figure it out? :wink: These were taken at the same resolution.
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by awesome24712 »

Well. . .

The second image is unique in that there is in-game anti-aliasing, as well as anisotropic filtering. I forced these settings into Trespasser with my Video Card's control panel. Just a nice trick if anyone else wants to improve Trespasser's graphics, or any other game/3D application for that matter. :P
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by hppav »

Well, I will say that on my new computer this little hack has greatly improved the FPS rate on my WIP projects. I think my laptop, on which this didn't work, was just too old and slow to make any real difference. :yes:
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Re: Increasing Trespasser's Performance

Post by awesome24712 »

hppav wrote:Well, I will say that on my new computer this little hack has greatly improved the FPS rate on my WIP projects. I think my laptop, on which this didn't work, was just too old and slow to make any real difference. :yes:
Nice to know. Some more modern professional applications though already have this trick performed on them. So you won't be able to do this in, say, your 3DS Max. :)
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