FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I was on Redcrab's server a couple minutes ago and I had to disconnect because Minetest was using 40-80% of my CPU, and according to Speccy, both my mobo and my CPU were at 204 degrees Fahrenheit. The max they will go before my computer shuts down automatically is 210. The only graphics setting I had checked was Smooth Lighting. This is from a computer that runs Skyrim, TF2, and Minecraft on max settings.

Rants aside, I should add that I played single player for an hour or so on single player and had no such problems. The game ran fine.

EDIT: Turned off Smooth Lighting, didn't fix anything.

Is your CPU/GPU overclocked? What is the temperature inside your room? What other processes are you running?

4 words: rocketfish universal cooler

thats 3 three words :P

sdzen wrote:thats 3 three words :P

if i would of said 3 words someone would of gone "oh thats 4 words" i cant win xD

maybe put 3/4 instead

but then it will be three quarters of a word!

:)
we should get back on topic

yes we should..okay so this man has a high end pc that can run skyrim and such.. well so do i..and mines massively overclocked 3.9GHz and its a dual core..so idk why hes having this huge temp spike

maybe he accidently turned off his cooling system i did that once

I have similar issues with Minetest hogging CPU (spikes to 90%ish with an average of 40% usage) however, I've not had overheating problems.

I found using the svn version of irrlicht 1.8 and compiling 64bit versions helped a bit, but still 40% is quite high, Skyrim & Starcraft 2 use about 15%ish and BF3 30% on average on my system (on highest settings). I've read (some time ago) on the irrlicht forums of irrlicht hogging CPU so maybe its an irrlicht issue.

there are settings in the conf that keep minetest below 60 fps to prevent cpu waste maybe that isnt working or needs to be adjusted

My first post was sort of a rage post, so I will clarify things...

I have an HP Pavilion g6 laptop. It's not a gaming laptop, but for some reason it runs Skyrim etc. perfectly. I have 4 gigs of RAM and an Intel Core i3 2.40 GHz processor, not overclocked. It has onboard graphics. The other non-Windows processes running when I first posted were iTunes and Dropbox. Ending both of them brought the temperature down to about 200 degrees, which is still way too hot.

According to main site, this game should run on "fairly old hardware". I bought this laptop in August 2011. Maybe strange, but could the problem be with the server, not the game?

As sdzen said it might run on old pc's but still use all available power it can get. Even if using only half of it would still be enough.

I assume you don't have the version with radeon graphics chip onboard. It's might be related to the intel gma driver too?

I might be on the wrong track here, but is there a way to limit the amount of RAM or CPU it uses?

yes but limiting the framerate it can have at any given time it will lessen its cpu usage or at least thats what i think it can do

How do I limit the framerate? I don't see anything in the config file...

fps_max = (insert number here)
wanted_fps = (insert number here)

Thanks, that worked. It still uses quite a bit of CPU but at least my computer can handle it now.

If you are running a server there are a few empty global call backs in default/init.lua and experimental/init.lua you might try removing to see if that helps a little too.

In default they are around line 1440:
minetest.register_globalstep(on_step)
minetest.register_on_punchnode(on_punchnode)

In experimental there are a few and I tend to just remove experimental because I'm not using anything in it.

These changes shouldn't make a big difference for most but for a busy server or a single processor computer they may help a little. If you are running a local server for your own game most of the CPU time will be used by the client drawing the screen and not by the server. For some reason I do find that running the server separate from the client makes it run better than if I run the client and have that start the server. In that case I typically run the client 'nice' so the client doesn't hog all the CPU time.