How to download version 97.0?
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Right on. Not intending to be a bother, I just saw that the poorly-performing msvc versions continued to be the versions on offer at the main download page for two more releases and thought something was up.
It seems to me the short-term fix is to simply offer up the mingw version for public-facing download since it already exists and works flawless so far as I can tell, with the optional long-term fix of figuring out what's going on with the msvc version. But I'm not running the show here, so do your thing and I'll just keep using the mingw version in the meantime =)
Best of luck!
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@BlivetWidget (View Post)
There are concerns that the mingw version might not run on all computers. It's not fully static, and does require one dll that's part of the msvc redistributable. It's extremely common to install this, but it's not guaranteed to be a part of every Windows install.
If we were to release an update that switches to mingw without guaranteeing it runs for everyone, a lot of people will break their TPT installs just by updating. -
An interesting insight, thanks. I'm not surprised to read there are mitigating concerns, and I don't envy whoever is trying to figure out why the msvc version runs so slow now. Gonna be one o' them weird bugs.
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FWIW, The mingw vesion of v99 also runs about 8 fps faster than the 'regular' download of the same version for my test case.
Edited once by BlivetWidget. Last: 18th Dec 2024 -
@BlivetWidget (View Post)
Ok. I hope the separate rendering thread negates some of the performance losses in 98.0.
Switching to mingw officially probably won't happen (because of the issue above).
But the full-scale investigation I wanted to do never happened either. I got too busy, I guess. I still did check a lot though, comparing snapshots. I just never compared individual commits to blame any specific change. We came up with some ideas, but it's hard to say. Later on (for the Steam release) I wrote a script to more accurately benchmark fps and prove that performance was identical to the non-Steam release. It might be worthwhile to use that script to check this issue. -
One major reason for preferring the msvc version is that LuaJIT, the moderately performant Lua implementation we use (as opposed to PUC-Rio Lua, which performs horribly) doesn't fully support compilers / runtimes other than msvc's. It does chug along when built with mingw, but e.g. exception handling goes out the window.
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My test case doesn't benefit from the rendering option, so far as I can tell. The sim doesn't have any fancy effects, but is computationally intensive in its calculations (from all the streamers getting blown around by fans).
And I guess let me clarify, maybe my intentions have poorly articulated, that since learning of the limitations I'm not advocating that anything switch to mingw per se. I'm just trying to point out that there has been some significant performance loss (for some simulations, anyway) introduced in v98 for msvc, that is still present to some degree in v99.
In v99 it seems not as bad as before (about 8 fps loss vs 19) but it's interesting that the mingw version has had no losses this entire time.
