problem running WOW while not the active app

[dawiyhd]

Everything works fine as long as IS/WOW is the active application but when I switch to another program - web browser, text editor, anything, and then switch back I notice that during the time the program was running in the background it had all sorts of problems directing movement of my bot - it will be off the path running through mobs, over cliffs etc.

Soon after I switch back it normalizes and begins working again. This has been happening for some time, basicly I can't run IS/WOW unless I don't do anything else on my computer. It didn't always use to be this way, please help.

[Lax]

The game's framerate determines the precision of any bot, whether in the foreground or the background. If you switch and the game drops from 60 fps to 10, bots will only be 1/6th as precise -- everything the bot was doing will happen slower.

Therefore, you want to increase the bot's framerate. First, check Inner Space's FPS limiter settings (Configuration, FPS Limiter tab). By default, it's set to 60fps foregruond, 30fps background. Make sure that your background FPS setting is no lower than 30, or you're definitely killing your bot. Also, make sure it is set to "Calculate CPU Time" and not "Constant CPU Time". This will make sure that if it's not getting at least 30 FPS, it's not going to purposefully lower the framerate any more than it has to.

Another thing to take into consideration is your system specs (RAM and CPU are the cuplrits as far as framerate loss, and of course video is important for the base operating framerate). If you only have 512MB of RAM, and you run WoW and start browsing in Firefox, you're going to eat through that RAM like it's nothing. If you're using more memory than you have RAM, then Windows is going to compensate by using your hard drive instead of RAM. This is going to hurt your performance very very badly, especially if the game is in the background. The foreground app will take priority and then necessary parts of WoW memory end up getting put on disk, and end up taking some millions of times longer to retrieve.

Also, a dual core (or dual cpu) system will be far better for preserving framerate while you do other things on the computer, especially if you're doing anything CPU intensive. For example, encoding video or using BitTorrent will eat up a lot of CPU time and leave the game running a bit slower simply because there's less CPU time available.

[dawiyhd]

I modified my innerspace.xml file and set background fps to 50 and calculate to 1.

There is no apparent difference. When I switch apps the bot starts running off and gets killed. I have 1 gig of ram, is there a way to test if there is a drastic drop in performance when opperating in background mode?

[dawiyhd]

I suspect (since there was no change in performance when I increased the minimum background fps) that the background fps are dropping way down - below the specified limit, perhaps the limiter is not working properly.

I know for certain that I am not stressing the CPU or running into memory problems.

[Lax]

Heh ok, you can modify the XML if you prefer that, but that's really what the configuration window is for

The limiter works properly assuming you have a single CPU. If you have multiple CPUs or dual core, then the timing in Windows is inaccurate, so you want to set the CPU affinity. If you like the long way of doing that, you can do it through the task manager, or simply enter "proc 1 only" or "proc 2 only" in the IS console within WoW (not the uplink one).

You can enable the IS or WoW FPS displays to watch the framerate. If you cant see it, it's a bit more difficult to know how it's performing. But, you could always run a little script like this:

Code: Select all

function main()
{
  while 1
  {
     wait 10
     if !${Display.Foreground}
       echo Sustained FPS: ${Display.FPS}
  }
}

This will echo the sustained FPS to the console once every second while the app is in the background.