HunterZ

Thanks, I saw someone say something similar in another thread too, so I dropped him a line. To follow up on previous posts: My CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5GHz. I just fired up Avadon while watching the CPU usage on my G15 keyboard. After loading my saved game and waiting for a minute or so for things to settle, it appears to keep one core running at 100% while running the other at ~10%. Interestingly, hitting Esc to open the in-game main menu makes the ~10% core jump up to ~80% in fullscreen or ~50% in windowed. Alt+Tabbing the game to the background in fullscreen or windowed appears to pause it, which causes my CPU usage to drop to 0-1%. As for temperatures, SpeedFan shows that my CPU runs at about 42 degC while idle. After letting the game run without being touched for around a half-hour, my CPU temperature was around 64 degC. That's a significant increase, but nothing to worry about. Of course, other computers may react differently.

Originally Posted By: Master1 I'm sure that there are Windows equivalents to the previously discussed programs that will underclock your processor. There should also be ways to limit how much processing power an application can take. I don't know any, but I'm sure they're not too hard to find. Thanks, but I'm not looking for a workaround (my laptop is a few years old now, so I wouldn't be devastated if it burned up). I just wanted to point out that there's a very simple fix that can likely be made to the games' source code to make them behave much better.

I'll check again to be sure. I'm running it on a >2GHz Core 2 Duo laptop with nVidia 8700M GT SLI (with SLI disabled), 2GB RAM and Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. Keep in mind that with a quad-core CPU, you're only going to see 12-25% combined CPU usage even if the game is hogging an entire core.

Originally Posted By: Spidweb There is a lot of long-standing confusion on this issue, so I'll add an entry to the support page. On CPU Usage and Laptop Heat There have been a lot of questions over the years about high CPU usage and laptop heat for our games. Hopefully the following will clear up questions on this issue. There isn't much we can do to make things better, I'm afraid, but we might be able to illuminate the issues involved. Our games, while relatively low-budget, are still games. To maintain a high frame rate, they require a lot of processing power. To fill all of the pixels on a monitor and run the game itself (the combat, the AI, the movement, etc) at a high rate of speed requires a lot of energy, whether the graphics themselves are 3-D or icon based. That is why, if you look at your activity monitor while playing, you will note that our games take up all of the available CPU power. This doesn't mean that our game keeps anything else from running. Our games just take up all of the processor energy that isn't playing music, checking e-mail, etc. If you switch out of our game and run something, it should work more or less normally. Alas, many models of Macintosh laptop have, historically, had a problem with heat management. This problem that has shown up in many models running many different applications. This means that, when playing our games, the fans might start to spin. If you are having a problem with this, there might be tips online to solve the problem. Do a Google search for your laptop model and "heat issues" and something useful might come up. Sadly, there is little we can do about how Apple engineers its laptops. Hopefully this clears up some of these issues. I'm sorry that we can't be of more help. Sorry for the necro-post, but I'm experiencing this issue on the Windows version of Avadon and have what I feel is some important feedback: Why this is a problem: From what I know of game engine design, I cannot reasonably believe that it is legitimately pegging one of my CPU cores at 100%. I strongly feel that it is much more likely that one of the main loops of the Avadon game engine is spending most of the time simply running in a tight loop that is doing little to nothing. As others have mentioned, this is potentially very bad for desktops and especially laptops because it needlessly wastes power and generates a lot of excess heat that can potentially lower device life and cause fans to run loud and often. What hasn't been mentioned, however, is that hogging the CPU in this way can actually be bad for game performance/smoothness as well, because it can force the OS to preempt the game engine at less opportune times in order to give CPU time to other running applications that need it. What can be done about it: The kicker here is that the solution is probably simple: Most modern game engines at least run a 0-1 millisecond sleep command once per loop (which is less than 6% of the 16.7 milliseconds of time available per frame when rendering at a full 60fps). This allows the OS to either temporarily halt the CPU when there is nothing to do (minimizing power usage and heat generation), or else give some time to another application while the game doesn't really need it. I'll bet that if something like this is added to Spiderweb's game engines, it would largely mitigate the issue.

Just wanted to mention that I purchased Avadon from Direct2Drive today, and I had a lot of trouble getting their bolted-on activator to accept the serial they gave me. I think it took a half-dozen tries before it finally magically worked. I guess their authentication servers just aren't very reliable.