Re: 7.5 release? - How you can help

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>AFAICT (from some debugging sessions on the Win95 installation I use
>to play games) the situation is as follows:
>
> - Tk (and/or xconq win32 glue code?) grabs GDI resources on image
>   creation (and the GDI heap is restricted to 64k or something in
>   Win9x because of Win3.1 compatability; this restriction does not
>   exist in NT)
>
> - when the resources are exhausted image creation fails (i.e produces
>   a warning and returns null)
>
> - when this null image is used somewhere xconq crashes
>
>Unfortunately I'm not familiar with neither Tk images on windows,
>xconq image handling, nor the xconq image drawing code. But it seems
>like fixing the resource requirements altogether would require changes
>to Tk. That leaves fixing the crashes on null images as a first step
>which will probably result in a seriously degraded display on Win9x,
>but is a good idea anyway, because one can probably create the same
>crash by some other means. In a further phase it could be evaluated
>whether it is actually neccessary to have all the images instantiated
>all the time and what kind of performance impact there is to
>instantiating the images on demand.

Thanks for the feedback! We should definitely fix the null image crashes. I
thought a generic image (black box) was used if image creation failed, but
this may be specific to the Mac PPC interface. I will look into this.

As for hacking Tk, I already did that to enable various graphics features
in the Mac Tk interface, but I would rather avoid doing it again. Lots of
work.

What I have done instead is to get the Windows version through GetVersionEx
at launch time, and set a flag that disables various graphics features if
you are running 98/ME. By disabling terrain transitions and unseen fuzz,
enough GDI memory is left to run most modules under 98 or ME.

I agree that in the long run we should check what images are really needed
and when. One obvious fix would be to instantiate only those terrain images
that are used in the current resolution. That would save a lot of memory.

Hans

P.S. It was interesting to hear that xconq also runs under Win95. I have
not been able to test that myself.