SEQ and Anti-Aliased Fonts

So I finally get X and KDE 3 and QT all working together and using TrueType anti-aliased fonts, making my Linux system look better than Windows on a good day, when I try using ShowEQ. Oops, when I'm playing EQ all UI functions are almost completely non-responsive. I click on a menu or on a spawnlist entry and it's literally 15 seconds before anything happens. However, it was only in ShowEQ when I had the problem; if I switched to a different virtual desktop, everything in KDE and other non-QT apps worked fine, AA fonts and all. Then I turn off AA fonts, and ShowEQ works fine again.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with AA fonts and ShowEQ? This is on a P3 500 system with 128 MB of RAM; a RAM upgrade would probably do a lot of good since most of the memory is used, but I don't want to bother upgrading if it's not going to fix anything. TrueType fonts still work fine, so it wouldn't be too bad going without anti-aliasing in SEQ, but it seems odd that one application could kill performance like that.

One other thing I noticed is that if I run SEQ anti-aliased and wait for a few minutes after quitting EQ, the UI functions again work fine. I don't know enough about how the spawn list works to conclude anything, but could the problem be related to spawn list updates in some way? SEQ also works fine just after I start it up, it's only when I'm playing that it stops working.

have you happened to have tried un-maximizing the map and then re-enlarging it by hand using the lower left corner thing? (what is that called?). also, try using the menu to enable/disable the map or spawnlist. see what that does.

i know exactly what you are talking about, but i don't use truetype anti-alieased whatchamacallits. every once in a while, the eq interface will just be slow as balls. usually i just file / quit and restart it. but it is JUST the seq interface. when using seq, it feels like my computer is lagging like efnet, but if i goto any other app (sometimes even another seq session) its all fast and spiffy like my mom's slk 320 :)

who knows! i sure don't.

Heh, now I don't know what's going on. Started it anti-aliased without the spawnlist, it works fine. Hmm, I knew it was that spawnlist. Let's try spawnlist 1. Works fine, must be spawnlist 2. Let's try that...still works fine. Doesn't seem to be certain zones either as I went to all the zones where SEQ stopped working before. I know it was just a UI issue too; when the UI stopped responding SEQ was still decoding all the packets and updating the console. *shrug*

Welcome to the most frustrating known Seq problem, adinine! If you do a search on the word "performance" you will find a bunch of threads on this. Every time we seem to find something that helps, a few minutes later it's back to being slow again. Some people have had success with using a less intensive window manager such as fluxbox, running in a smaller window, rebuilding Qt with different options, changing Linux distributions, etc. I'm sure I speak for at least a half dozen of us when I say I would gladly buy you a beer if you found the cause of this one. ;)

-Ded

Yeah I see it's not a font problem. My best guess is that it has something to do with the spawn list being populated when SEQ decodes the spawns. I haven't done a great deal of testing, but it seems that if I close the spawn list before zoning and reopen it after the zone has decoded I don't get any problems. Otherwise there's always a chance that it'll freeze up. I'll try going back to QT 3.0.3 and building some older code. Weird problem.

did you say you were using qt-2.3.2 with all those ./configure options? you should use similear (they don't all carry over the same) when compiling qt-3.0.4.

also, what distro?

i seem to remember you were pretty compitent, might try gentoo.org instead of what ever you are using... unless you are using gentoo ;)

No distro, I'm now running a custom from-scratch system. (I was thinking about creating an installer and calling it the adLinux distro ;)) I haven't used QT 2.x with SEQ for a while; I most recently had 3.0.3 installed with Mandrake (without AA fonts because KDE was still using QT 2). Now I'm using 3.0.4 configured with -thread -qt-gif -no-g++-exceptions -xft. I'm currently recompiling 3.0.3 and I'll try using the old libs.

[edit] And I'll try using the old binary with the new QT and vice versa.

Try undocking your map(s). Then tweak the size of the map(s) until the problem goes away. Seems to have fixed the problem on my system.

Heh, that's strange. My maps were already undocked but just resizing them when SEQ started to freeze up seems to fix the problem. Using the old binary and the old library seems to help too, but I haven't yet tried rebuilding SEQ with an older QT.

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Originally posted by adenine!
Heh, that's strange. My maps were already undocked but just resizing them when SEQ started to freeze up seems to fix the problem. Using the old binary and the old library seems to help too, but I haven't yet tried rebuilding SEQ with an older QT.

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Yeah, the sizing thing seems to be the Key. If you get the sizing just right it won't lock up on you in the first place. Atleast it hasn't for me.. ;)