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Community => Simutrans Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Frank on November 28, 2008, 06:55:37 PM

Title: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on November 28, 2008, 06:55:37 PM
Hello

I think it would be interesting to learn more about the players from Simutrans.

That's why I've created a survey (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=74) ( Article ).

earnings (http://www.simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-survey_stats_survey.php?surveyId=2)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sojo on November 28, 2008, 07:28:17 PM
I have it posted in the german forum.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on December 07, 2008, 06:14:23 PM
when show an error page, then refresh the site

for vote accept you session cookie
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Roads on December 07, 2008, 09:33:02 PM
I was going to do the survey and tried to login with my username and password here but no go.  I need a new login for the site?  I'm a bit pressed for time now but I'll get back to it.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: IgorEliezer on December 07, 2008, 09:55:21 PM
I didn't need any log-in to vote.

If you are getting error, like "Your are not logged" or whatever, then please refresh the page once or twice.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Roads on December 08, 2008, 06:41:06 AM
I refreshed three times, no go.  After that I tried to login using this username.  No go.  Maybe I just don't know how to negotiate the page but when it comes up, it shows me the votes and presents a login box on the left.  I didn't see anywhere to vote...
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on December 08, 2008, 01:54:35 PM
The login data from here not work in german wiki.

For vote activate session cookie for www.simutrans-germany.com.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Roads on December 09, 2008, 04:50:15 AM
Frank, I'm sorry but I don't speak German.  If there is no rush my son (who can read German) will be home Christmas and I'll get him to help me create a login there.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Magic_Gorter on December 09, 2008, 03:02:26 PM
Roads...Press on the link. Then press on button " deutsches Wiki". Next on link wiki.simutrans-germany.com. Then scroll down to the part where stands "Umfrage zu Simutrans 2008" and press on teilnehmen. The poll is german and english. It worked for me so probably for you too.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on December 09, 2008, 03:17:54 PM
the english article (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=74) for this
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Roads on December 10, 2008, 11:20:08 AM
OK Frank it is done.  Many thanks Magic for the excellent instructions.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Magic_Gorter on December 10, 2008, 11:24:48 AM
Good to see you finally have suceeded in doing it. That's great with these forums. Everybody tries to help each other...
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on December 28, 2008, 05:12:25 PM
On 1 January, the 2008 survey (http://www.simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=74) closed. Those who still wish to participate should be up to 31.12. do.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on August 08, 2010, 11:41:21 AM
its time for a new survey

survey on Simutrans 2010 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=128)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: MoTw on August 08, 2010, 03:38:31 PM
I posted an article on the blog and made a post at the German forum.

Right now we are a male-only community  ;D
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on August 08, 2010, 04:57:01 PM
We have a reported ratio on this forum of something like 125:1 male:female ratio. But hardly surprising - we don't exclude women, but it's stereotypically more of a male interest...
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sanna on August 09, 2010, 08:40:43 PM
Oops, I better take the survey to balance the gender ratio a bit *grin*
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on August 09, 2010, 09:06:48 PM
experimental is missing at this question: "Welche Versionen benutzen sie? | Which versions do you use?"
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: IgorEliezer on August 10, 2010, 07:58:23 AM
QuoteHow would you rate your knowledge?
(x) omniscient

*LIES*

Quote from: Isaac.Eiland-Hall on August 08, 2010, 04:57:01 PMbut it's stereotypically more of a male interest...

There's a Brazilian stereotype that says women are very bad at driving. I feel better now. We are not alone. ;D

QuoteHow old are you?
20 to 40     60.00%
This explains a lot why our community isn't a mess, low banning rate, stupid questions are rare, high productivity (see forum stats:    
Incorporated Patches and Solved Bug Reports board is the section with the most posts). In younger communities, the General Discussion board (with spam and games) has the most activist of the forum.

And I know: we DO LOVE children. :P
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: skreyola on August 10, 2010, 05:15:34 PM
Quote from: sdog on August 09, 2010, 09:06:48 PM
experimental is missing at this question: "Welche Versionen benutzen sie? | Which versions do you use?"
Sounds like 'other' to me.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on August 15, 2010, 06:11:48 PM
Results of the first week

earnings (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-survey_stats_survey.php?surveyId=3)

Users: 62
Age: 80% older than 20 and younger than 60 years

playing Simutrans:
34% 1 - 3 years
39% 5 - 10 years

time: 62% 4 - 20 hours

And the most interesting result of 3 users say they are omniscient.
My suggestion: these 3 users should maintain the help text and wikis

I miss an entry blog.simutrans.com (http://blog.simutrans.com)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Fabio on August 16, 2010, 09:48:12 AM
Quote from: Frank on August 15, 2010, 06:11:48 PM
And the most interesting result of 3 users say they are omniscient.
My suggestion: these 3 users should maintain the help text and wikis

I think those 3 users are already active members of the community :)
(And one is probably Hajo himself)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Spike on August 16, 2010, 10:55:54 AM
Maybe in another life ;D

No, that must be some other people. Most of my Simutrans knowledge is so old now that I can't even help with many questions here in the forum. I think Frank is the one besides the programmers themselves who has the most complete knowledge about Simutrans. Prissi would be the other one, and the third in the survey was making fun ;)

Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Lmallet on August 16, 2010, 01:13:49 PM
Maybe Simutrans has become self-aware, and is voting by itself.   ;D
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on August 16, 2010, 01:31:45 PM
Quote from: Hajo on August 16, 2010, 10:55:54 AM
.... I think Frank is the one ...

I never consider myself as omniscient.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on August 16, 2010, 07:02:52 PM
What do you exactly mean with this Frank?

Quote from: Frank on August 15, 2010, 06:11:48 PM
I miss an entry blog.simutrans.com (http://blog.simutrans.com)

you mean we should publish an entry at the blog that redirects to the survey or on the contrary, we must publish a survey like that at the blog. Another posibility would be to comment the results in a blog entry...
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: jonasbb on August 16, 2010, 07:31:24 PM
You could publish both.
At first the survey and then the results.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on August 16, 2010, 08:55:16 PM
But, as far as I've understood, the survey is not closed yet, right? I mean, these would be the preliminary results...
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on August 17, 2010, 07:47:17 PM
"At first the survey and then the results" says to me "You can publish the survey now, and then later publish the results". :)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on August 17, 2010, 09:04:11 PM
Roger that, then...  ;D
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on August 19, 2010, 02:43:05 PM
example

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&p=894978&sid=a399d111c3e962fe23ab2873f3228a78#p894978 (http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&p=894978&sid=a399d111c3e962fe23ab2873f3228a78#p894978)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on August 19, 2010, 03:57:51 PM
Ok, I see. I'll post something soon (in a few minutes... ;D)

EDIT: done. Btw, I've realized that some of the questions have been already included in recent polls at the forum like the map size one.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on August 19, 2010, 07:28:26 PM
People are being asked to log in - I can confirm that when I try to open the survey, it asks me to log in (I previously complete it a week or so ago):

http://blog.simutrans.com/?p=998

EDIT: Commenter reports it's working now.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on August 20, 2010, 04:32:03 AM
Quote from: Frank on December 07, 2008, 06:14:23 PM
when show an error page, then refresh the site

for vote accept you session cookie

And the session  does not start/resume by called directly the page.

Better it is linked to the article.
http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=128 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=128)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on August 20, 2010, 06:21:29 AM
Quote from: Frank on August 20, 2010, 04:32:03 AM
Better it is linked to the article.
http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=128 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=128)

Done.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on August 23, 2010, 02:00:26 PM
over 100 participants have been achieved




Interested members who wish to display the survey in their own language is the translation file attached.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: An_dz on September 09, 2010, 08:33:51 PM
Quote from: Frank on August 23, 2010, 02:00:26 PM
Interested members who wish to display the survey in their own language is the translation file attached.

OK Frank, I've translated it to portuguese.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: IgorEliezer on September 10, 2010, 01:41:29 AM
Quote from: An_dz on September 09, 2010, 08:33:51 PM
OK Frank, I've translated it to portuguese.

*APPLAUSES*  ;D
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on September 10, 2010, 08:02:01 AM
Translated into Spanish too.  ;D
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Zeno on September 10, 2010, 08:43:50 AM
Quote from: vilvoh on September 10, 2010, 08:02:01 AM
Translated into Spanish too. 
*MORE APPLAUSES* ;D
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: vilvoh on September 10, 2010, 08:59:39 AM
Quote from: Zeno on September 10, 2010, 08:43:50 AM
*MORE APPLAUSES* ;D

Thanks to all... (http://www.greensmilies.com/smile/smiley_emoticons_danken-mit-hand.gif)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on September 10, 2010, 09:19:04 AM
thank you

upload to Tikiwiki
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on January 01, 2011, 10:29:23 PM
survey closed

earning (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-survey_stats_survey.php?surveyId=3)

have many thanks to all who participated
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: An_dz on January 01, 2011, 11:41:57 PM
Wow, at least 6 girls playing the game. ;D
Come on girls show your women power, spread Simutrans :D

Lets start a 2011 one?
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on January 02, 2011, 04:37:13 AM
perhaps we should spread the news it's not all about trains and trucks, but with some pack sets they could also play with horses! ;-)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: skreyola on January 02, 2011, 05:27:02 AM
Someone needs to make a pack of all pretty horses... that go fast. ;) 40mph team of horses, hehe. :)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on February 26, 2013, 09:15:19 PM
new year new survey

survey 2013 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=155)

sorry, translate not work in new Wiki
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Combuijs on February 26, 2013, 09:30:10 PM
Filled it in!
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: An_dz on February 26, 2013, 11:43:45 PM
Filled and added on Facebook.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on February 27, 2013, 01:33:59 AM
This is going to be chaotic:

http://i.imgur.com/Y3SyVgj.png

hehehe

(http://i.imgur.com/Y3SyVgj.png)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on February 27, 2013, 03:25:35 AM
in this stage the poll has in its results mostly people who:
know simutrans perfectly, do so for a long time, are old, and don't actually play it :-)
devotees to the front!
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Sarlock on February 27, 2013, 03:35:22 AM
And visit the forums multiple times a day and see this first :)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: ӔO on February 27, 2013, 03:58:23 AM
screen sizes and resolution are quite chaotic, yep :D

I fully expected these sizes to be popular:

PC: 22~24"
laptop: 15.4"

and these resolutions
1366x768
1920x1080
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Zeno on February 27, 2013, 05:56:28 PM
Absolutely. For statistics lovers, there are at the moment 3 variants of 22" monitors and 2 of 24". To say nothing about some strange resolutions such as 192x1200, etc. :P
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on February 27, 2013, 07:22:48 PM
do not panic because these two questions and their results


I need to provide some information only once to meaningful options
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on February 28, 2013, 05:06:48 AM
at the end the result of that poll is: "every user uses some kind of display device"

i wonder what the 15 foot display is
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: IgorEliezer on February 28, 2013, 05:10:54 AM
Quote from: sdog on February 28, 2013, 05:06:48 AM
i wonder what the 15 foot display is
Probably someone plays Simutrans in their particular movie theater.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on April 13, 2015, 09:28:25 PM
it's time for a new survey 2015 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=161)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Combuijs on April 14, 2015, 08:26:13 AM
 :thumbsup:
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on April 14, 2015, 09:58:31 AM
?
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Spenk009 on April 14, 2015, 06:21:50 PM
Many people on small-ish screen resolutions. Don't you get cramped? I get a bit claustrophobic on 1920x1080 if I cram the map in too.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on April 15, 2015, 04:20:10 PM
My new¹ laptop has a screen resolution os 1366x768. It drives me batty. But it was all I could afford.

_____________
¹ new to me, anyway
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Ters on April 15, 2015, 04:41:32 PM
It's interresting that vertical space hasn't increased much in the last 15 years, until quite recently when 4K appeared (along with other super-HD resolutions). I don't find 1920x1080 cramped as long as I keep just 4 windows open, or map plus one other window, which I only exceed in rare cases. For the world view alone, pak128 would naturally show less of the world in 1920x1080 than pak64 does on 1024x768.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on April 15, 2015, 07:02:20 PM
I blame LCDs for that. Some good things about them, but at one point, I had dual-CRTs each running at 2048x1536. I miss that very much.

With LCDs, and the growing proportion of laptops, it set back resolution growth, I think. :)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Ters on April 15, 2015, 08:22:12 PM
Quote from: Isaac.Eiland-Hall on April 15, 2015, 07:02:20 PM
[...] at one point, I had dual-CRTs each running at 2048x1536.

For that, I'd have to buy another desk to place the mouse and keyboard on. (But in the CRT days, computer desks had drawers of sorts for the keyboard and mouse.)

But I do wonder if Simutrans is readable in 4K. I've just learned that a piece of software I've worked on becomes unreadable in such resolutions, like all such Java applications apparently. (Unless you sit as close to a 40" as you would a 20" I guess.)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on April 15, 2015, 08:32:38 PM
I cann't really see a point in resolutions beyond 1920x1080 for notebooks. When crawling into the display, so to say, I can only see individual pixels on the new 12" or 13" 1080 hd screen because I'm so myopic. But those high resolutions drain batteries quite quickly. In the end it is for most applications more important to have a notebook that uses 6W rather than 7W under light load.

On the desktop it just drives up screen sizes: I'm not so sure if it is so good to sit right in front of a screen that is a metre wide.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: DrSuperGood on April 15, 2015, 09:23:00 PM
QuoteBut those high resolutions drain batteries quite quickly.
The resolution itself does not drain the battery for reasons you said, rather what is being displayed does (or how it is produced). In the case of Simutrans with its software render then display area in pixels converts directly to processor load and so energy consumption.

For most applications however (eg browsing or looking at file managers) a discrete GPU (or integrated) will barely be loaded at all. As such the power consumption increase from the resolution is minimal. The same can be said about the CPU (Simutran's problem) where anything that loads it heavily causes a sharp increase in power.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Isaac Eiland-Hall on April 16, 2015, 01:06:49 AM
Quote from: sdog on April 15, 2015, 08:32:38 PM
I cann't really see a point in resolutions beyond 1920x1080 for notebooks.

I'm sure that's true for many, but I use my Kindle Fire with its high DPI and am fine fitting a lot on there for the size. If I had a larger monitor that pixel dense... I'd be fine with that, too. I crave more pixels. Always more pixels.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on April 16, 2015, 03:52:13 AM
Quote from: DrSuperGood on April 15, 2015, 09:23:00 PM
The resolution itself does not drain the battery for reasons you said, rather what is being displayed does (or how it is produced). In the case of Simutrans with its software render then display area in pixels converts directly to processor load and so energy consumption.

Exactly that.

But also when the computer idles, to be able to provide stutter free, say 4k, video, and simple 3d all must be able to handle greater peaks, which limits power saving through undervolting, increases leak currents due to larger dies, requires larger heatsink areas, greater max currents from batteries. When dealing with baseline power of a few Watt this matters.*

*My outdated notebook has a baseline power of 8 to 9 W, measured with powertop. My wive's new notebook must be considerably more parsimonious, perhaps in the few Watt range. If the manufacturers claims are correct, 5.6 W under load, for playing HD video (45 Wh/8h).
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Ters on April 16, 2015, 04:53:30 AM
Quote from: sdog on April 15, 2015, 08:32:38 PM
I can only see individual pixels

You're not supposed to see individual pixels. That's the point of high-res.

Quote from: sdog on April 15, 2015, 08:32:38 PM
I'm not so sure if it is so good to sit right in front of a screen that is a metre wide.

I remember when we used to look at desks. Those usually were, and still are, wider than that. Often much wider. Sure, one tended to focus on just one part, but I guess that's the idea with big screens as well.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: DrSuperGood on April 16, 2015, 06:25:12 PM
QuoteBut also when the computer idles, to be able to provide stutter free, say 4k, video, and simple 3d all must be able to handle greater peaks, which limits power saving through undervolting, increases leak currents due to larger dies, requires larger heatsink areas, greater max currents from batteries. When dealing with baseline power of a few Watt this matters.*
Clock rates dynamically drop when not running performance intensive applications or running in an energy saving mode (power management). This provides the biggest power savings since power consumption is related to clock rate squared (this is because of the inter-track capacitance aka the cause of leakage). Sure they will never be super energy efficient due to the size and design (they are performance parts) but then again power savings can be made elsewhere of equal magnitude.

Additionally even if running at full clock speed a processor will use less power idling than it does doing something (any instruction other than idle). This is because most of the processor is in a steady state and switching the transistors causes a flow of current (so I2R losses).

As such the energy cost for performance is minimal. It is often better to build a laptop capable of performing when required rather than one which is slightly more energy efficient but has a much lower maximum performance. If a person wants to watch full 1080p video (something not unreasonable in this day and age) then the laptop should have those resources available to do so. When the resources are not used their energy overhead can be minimized to acceptable levels.

Cooling has other issues not related to performance. Laptops mostly have under designed cooling as they are not designed to run at full performance for more than a few minutes at a time. If someone is playing a game (modern demanding games especially) on a laptop and reports crashes than 9/10 times it is due to the laptop overheating due to insufficient cooling.

Your backlight power issue can also be minimized by manually setting your backlight brightness. Setting it dimmer (which most laptops allow one to) decreases the power it uses and so a 5 watt source might end up considerably less. In really bright situations it may even be possible to disable the backlight all together, a feature that was used by early portable LCD devices so that they did not need a backlight at all (something that was hard to make originally). There also exists alternative display technologies such as OLEDs which can provide better energy efficiency as it only illuminates pixels that need light but these currently are too costly for the average consumer.

Ideally laptops should have more intelligence for controlling their processor resources. Specifically the full power of the processor should be more limited in availability to only under exceptional performance loads and even then in small bursts to prevent overheating. The technology is either not there yet or so obscure that people seldom use it.

The problem with Simutrans is that of its design. It produces a single heavy thread that utilization depends on the output display area in pixels. Many laptops have high density displays (eg some MacBook Pros and many tablet devices) and rely on multi-core processors for energy saving (most modern portable devices, run many tasks in parallel at a slower clock speed for power saving). Running Simutrans on such a device full screen runs the processor at full clock speed doing a lot of work continuously on a single core. Obviously what one views makes a difference but simple actions like panning the window can waste a lot of processor time. This problem has also been reduced thanks to multi-thread rendering functionality (if enabled). As such it can be quite energy efficient and has no problems running on most portable devices.

However for those people who want to get a little more battery life out of their device when playing Simutrans I suggested a possible solution a while ago. There should be some functionality to allow for "upscaling" of a lower resolution output to the full screen size. When playing in full screen mode this could be achieved with non-native resolutions supported by the display (and letting the display driver handle the scaling). When playing in windowed mode some form of scale factor could be used with an OpenGL (or something else) accelerated up scaling. This could be used to reduce the number of pixels filled when playing as well as handle high density display scale problems (too small to resolve what is happening).
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on April 16, 2015, 11:21:53 PM
QuoteYou're not supposed to see individual pixels. That's the point of high-res.
If there are no conditions under which individual pixels can be seen, than it is certainly over-engineered. Individual pixels only have to be unnoticeable under under usage conditions plus a decent margin.

Example for badly overengineered: Build a car that can drive very well at close to 200km/h for markets where the maximum speed is 130 km/h. Side-effect, because such a car looks cool, the whole fleet gets over-motorized and too heavy because of market forces and irresponsible consumers.

QuoteI remember when we used to look at desks. Those usually were, and still are, wider than [one metre]. Often much wider. Sure, one tended to focus on just one part, but I guess that's the idea with big screens as well.
To keep a good overview when the screen size increases would require to move further out. That is perhaps not such a bad thing, possibly reducing eye strain. However, the pixel density can also be lower while keeping the same angular resolution, i.e. just enough that individual pixels are not discernible. Increasing the resolution further quickly provides only diminishing returns. Unless one gets to the point where not the whole screen ought to be perceived at one time, traditionally done by multiple monitors.


Quote from: DrSuperGood on April 16, 2015, 06:25:12 PM
Clock rates dynamically drop [...] Sure they will never be super energy efficient due to the size and design (they are performance parts) but then again power savings can be made elsewhere of equal magnitude.
That is exactly my point.

Quote
As such the energy cost for performance is minimal. It is often better to build a laptop capable of performing when required rather than one which is slightly more energy efficient but has a much lower maximum performance. If a person wants to watch full 1080p video (something not unreasonable in this day and age) then the laptop should have those resources available to do so. When the resources are not used their energy overhead can be minimized to acceptable levels.
1080p is the lower end today, and i think a very sensible resolution. The next step in resolution is 4k, and i argue it costs more than it provides. I tend to differ in the first part. Saving one or two Watt of peak power might often be quite relevant, just the difference between passive and active cooling. The shift to completely closed passively cooled notebooks is perhaps the most important step in notebook design presently.

Quote
Cooling has other issues not related to performance. Laptops mostly have under designed cooling as they are not designed to run at full performance for more than a few minutes at a time. If someone is playing a game (modern demanding games especially) on a laptop and reports crashes than 9/10 times it is due to the laptop overheating due to insufficient cooling.
Only a badly designed machine. It ought to go into thermal throttling. But it is exactly the point that increasing possible peak power has a whole train of secondary design costs attached. Therefore it is preferable to be cautious about the max TDP when designing a system.

I think that is also one of the reasons the Core M is so beneficial to notebook design, the whole series has a TDP of 4.5 W.

Quote
Your backlight power issue can also be minimized by manually setting your backlight brightness. Setting it dimmer (which most laptops allow one to) decreases the power it uses and so a 5 watt source might end up considerably less. In really bright situations it may even be possible to disable the backlight all together, a feature that was used by early portable LCD devices so that they did not need a backlight at all (something that was hard to make originally). There also exists alternative display technologies such as OLEDs which can provide better energy efficiency as it only illuminates pixels that need light but these currently are too costly for the average consumer.
I don't know what you are referring to exactly. The backlight is a major power sink of course, and not much dependent on screen resolution. It indeed takes the lion's share of my battery, at this time 5.5 W of 9 W, while mostly idling.

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Ideally laptops should have more intelligence for controlling their processor resources. Specifically the full power of the processor should be more limited in availability to only under exceptional performance loads and even then in small bursts to prevent overheating. The technology is either not there yet or so obscure that people seldom use it.
Well, that is not a 'should' but an is. There is also not much to do, the OS and frequency governor. I've just pulled the plug to go from ondemand to powersafe, both my cores are more than 95% of the time in C7 state. 0.1% of the time at 1.5GHz (3 GHz max). And this is a 5 year old cpu, and running under Linux that is not yet as well optimised for power saving as other OSes are. I think lack of proper controll of processor resources is a problem of the distant past.

Quote
The problem with Simutrans is that of its design. It produces a single heavy thread that utilization depends on the output display area in pixels. Many laptops have high density displays (eg some MacBook Pros and many tablet devices) and rely on multi-core processors for energy saving (most modern portable devices, run many tasks in parallel at a slower clock speed for power saving). Running Simutrans on such a device full screen runs the processor at full clock speed doing a lot of work continuously on a single core. Obviously what one views makes a difference but simple actions like panning the window can waste a lot of processor time. This problem has also been reduced thanks to multi-thread rendering functionality (if enabled). As such it can be quite energy efficient and has no problems running on most portable devices.

However for those people who want to get a little more battery life out of their device when playing Simutrans I suggested a possible solution a while ago. There should be some functionality to allow for "upscaling" of a lower resolution output to the full screen size. When playing in full screen mode this could be achieved with non-native resolutions supported by the display (and letting the display driver handle the scaling). When playing in windowed mode some form of scale factor could be used with an OpenGL (or something else) accelerated up scaling. This could be used to reduce the number of pixels filled when playing as well as handle high density display scale problems (too small to resolve what is happening).
Well that is a completely different beast. Blitting 2d is also not a very typical application on notebooks, else one would return to single core, single thread designs. In particular a mid 1990s approach scaled up some orders of mangitude just because modern hardware also provides more single thread performance.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Ters on April 17, 2015, 05:07:00 AM
Quote from: sdog on April 16, 2015, 11:21:53 PM
If there are no conditions under which individual pixels can be seen, than it is certainly over-engineered. Individual pixels only have to be unnoticeable under under usage conditions plus a decent margin.

I wan't suggesting that there is a goal to make pixels smaller than the Planck length, just so small that they can't be individually seen by the naked eye. A 20" 4K screen might be enough, I haven't tried.

Quote from: DrSuperGood on April 16, 2015, 06:25:12 PM
The problem with Simutrans is that of its design. It produces a single heavy thread that utilization depends on the output display area in pixels. Many laptops have high density displays (eg some MacBook Pros and many tablet devices) and rely on multi-core processors for energy saving (most modern portable devices, run many tasks in parallel at a slower clock speed for power saving). Running Simutrans on such a device full screen runs the processor at full clock speed doing a lot of work continuously on a single core. Obviously what one views makes a difference but simple actions like panning the window can waste a lot of processor time. This problem has also been reduced thanks to multi-thread rendering functionality (if enabled). As such it can be quite energy efficient and has no problems running on most portable devices.

Although it's reported that multithreading the rendering does help, there is still an issue that the bus might not be dimensioned for moving full screen images at 25 Hz in addition to all the other data Simutrans processes. (Actually, when panning around the map, it's more than two full screen images, because Simutrans always renders a complete image to the back buffer with some overdraw, then, in this case, needs to blit the entire thing to the front buffer.)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: sdog on April 17, 2015, 04:55:25 PM
Quote from: Ters on April 17, 2015, 05:07:00 AM
I wan't suggesting that there is a goal to make pixels smaller than the Planck length, just so small that they can't be individually seen by the naked eye. A 20" 4K screen might be enough, I haven't tried.
Planck lenght displays!
Angular resolution is just 4 arc minutes, or more convenient unitless 2.9e-4 (used to be rad). With small angle approximation tan x = sin x = x at 1 m distance nothing smaller than 0.3 mm is discernible.

A typical notebook display is about 11" wide (12.5" diagonal, 16:9) that is about 30 cm. Dividing it into 1000 pixels is already sufficient. I.e. there is no gain to even go from the WXGA resolution  (1280) to FHD (1920). It is still ok, because it is very much a standard resolution and a lot of things fit natively, and it doesn't hurt to have quite a bit higher resolution. The next resolution step to 4K means 80 μm pixels. At 1 m they fill 1/5 of the human angular resolution.
Quote
Although it's reported that multithreading the rendering does help, there is still an issue that the bus might not be dimensioned for moving full screen images at 25 Hz in addition to all the other data Simutrans processes. (Actually, when panning around the map, it's more than two full screen images, because Simutrans always renders a complete image to the back buffer with some overdraw, then, in this case, needs to blit the entire thing to the front buffer.)
Well, we get away with it because modern hardware is so extremely powerful. Are there secondary applications that sample low res up to the native resolution? Might be more sensible than actually dealing with the problem yourself.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Ters on April 17, 2015, 06:54:22 PM
Quote from: sdog on April 17, 2015, 04:55:25 PM
1 m distance nothing smaller than 0.3 mm is discernible.

My display is more like 0.5 meters aways, at least when using laptop on my lap. When at my desk, the distance varies with sitting positure. My laptop is also 15.6". It's also just 1366 pixels wide, which is good, because that gives it almost the same DPI as my external 22" HD monitor. I think both could benefit from better resolution (not so much for text due to cleartype, although cleartype doesn't cope as well when screen is rotated), although splitting current pixels in four as in 4K might indeed be overkill.

(PS. A rotated HD screen looks ridiculously narrow.)

Quote from: sdog on April 17, 2015, 04:55:25 PM
Well, we get away with it because modern hardware is so extremely powerful.

When I hadn't set up hardware accelerated video decoding on my Linux box, it couldn't handle HD video. Sure, it wasn't the most powerful CPU, but from what I read, doing HD video without GPU help isn't a good idea, even though the software decoder is multithreaded.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: DrSuperGood on April 17, 2015, 09:01:07 PM
QuoteI don't know what you are referring to exactly. The backlight is a major power sink of course, and not much dependent on screen resolution. It indeed takes the lion's share of my battery, at this time 5.5 W of 9 W, while mostly idling.
Adjusting display brightness usually adjusts the power going to the back light. This is why many laptops automatically dim when disconnected from a charger. At very bright settings you might notice black contrast being reduced as the LCD can only filter a certain fraction of the light out to form black.

Do note that a laptop and notebook are two entirely differently designed computer systems. A laptop is generally bigger and is designed for performance at times. Notebooks generally are smaller and designed for battery life. This could be seen with the sort of processors they used with laptops generally using revised versions of desktop processors while notebooks uses special low energy processors. In this day and age the line between tablet and notebook is becoming increasingly blurred and fundamentally they are very similar.
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on September 15, 2015, 07:59:18 PM
I think survey closed 30 Sep 2015

survey 2015 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=161)

result (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-survey_stats_survey.php?surveyId=8)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Yona-TYT on September 16, 2015, 08:02:44 AM
Processed and ready.  :P
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on March 03, 2017, 08:46:32 AM
it's time for a new survey 2017 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=192)

Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Yona-TYT on March 04, 2017, 01:51:52 AM
Posted in Facebook  :thumbsup:
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on March 05, 2017, 05:47:00 AM
as an addition the paksets (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/article166-new-survey-paksets-to-play-2017)
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Combuijs on March 05, 2017, 12:53:05 PM
Quote from: Frank on March 05, 2017, 05:47:00 AM
as an addition the paksets (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/article166-new-survey-paksets-to-play-2017)

I play my own pak64, but that's an answer I can't give...
Title: Re: general survey on the players play Simutrans
Post by: Frank on January 01, 2018, 09:27:40 AM
Quote from: Frank on March 03, 2017, 08:46:32 AM
it's time for a new survey 2017 (http://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=192)


closed

Result (https://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/tiki-survey_stats_survey.php?surveyId=14)

Thanks to all who participated