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Can a netbook play STO (for doffing, chatting etc?)

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
edited March 2012 in Ten Forward
As the title says, I'm hopelessly addicted to STO and I do not wish to have withdrawal syndrome when I'm away from home for long periods of time.

Can a netbook barely run this thing on minimum settings and do doffs? I see a lot of people playing STO on their laptops... or at least, I was a busybody as usual on Zone chat and asked around :P
Post edited by Unknown User on

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  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Haven't tried STO, but I ran Champions on my netbook over Xmas a few times. Couldn't do much more than chat, but it functioned.

    If you do, /renderscale .5 is your friend.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    HEH when the cardassian boxes came out, I didn't have my new PC yet so I had to use my netbook. Took me 8 minutes to get from outside quinn's office to the exchange on my netbook >.>

    however before that I did play it fine and dandy using remote desktop from my PC to my netbook. Little lag but still ran decently.

    So yeah it's possible, just going to be really really slow hehe.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Holy cow, that's slower than... my grandma.

    I'll have to check out the remote PC thing then. Being able to remote pilot starships while commuting on the train would so blow my fellow commuters' socks off as I make their Angry Birds apps hopelessly obsolete :)

    May involve higher than average electricity bills at home though, so I hope there is a remote shutdown feature or whatever.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Tumerboy wrote: »
    Haven't tried STO, but I ran Champions on my netbook over Xmas a few times. Couldn't do much more than chat, but it functioned.

    If you do, /renderscale .5 is your friend.

    It's true. I even played the game with that half-pixels setting on my parent's old PC* that didn't have anything resembling a decent graphics card...

    But I'd not be to optimistic with a netbook.

    (*I had to vist my parents, and I was bored and addicted to STO at the time.)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    i can play quite comfortably on my Advent Vega using splashtop.

    admittedly my desktop is doing all the processing but still...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    I've been overseas for a month using a crappy old Inspiron 1520 laptop with the godawful Intel 965 GFX driver and it will still run STO on minimum settings, so long as I stick to doff missions and try to be patient. The game really slows down when windows like the inventory and the doff roster are open.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    I can play STO just fine with my Asus Transformer Prime using remote desktop (they call it splashtop streamer).

    Granted all the effort is on the home PC end, but the tablet still has to display it, and it does a dang fine job.

    It is MUCH easier to do with the keyboard attachment though . . . . . .:D
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    carmenara wrote:
    As the title says, I'm hopelessly addicted to STO and I do not wish to have withdrawal syndrome when I'm away from home for long periods of time.

    Can a netbook barely run this thing on minimum settings and do doffs? I see a lot of people playing STO on their laptops... or at least, I was a busybody as usual on Zone chat and asked around :P

    if you have a gold account you can log on to the chat server without having to run the game.
    info can be found here: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=159864

    we really just need an iOS app all decked out to be LCARS eye candy and fun, fully functional with everything from DOff system to inventory/bank management, exchange interface, mail/chat server connection, and other tools that would justify the cost of a one time payment app. there could be two forms. one being the free silver mode that has a lot of things crippled, and the paid (one time) Gold mode which is fully functioning and offers a bonus, like in game storage increase and other little perks.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    if you have a gold account you can log on to the chat server without having to run the game.
    info can be found here: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=159864

    we really just need an iOS app all decked out to be LCARS eye candy and fun, fully functional with everything from DOff system to inventory/bank management, exchange interface, mail/chat server connection, and other tools that would justify the cost of a one time payment app. there could be two forms. one being the free silver mode that has a lot of things crippled, and the paid (one time) Gold mode which is fully functioning and offers a bonus, like in game storage increase and other little perks.

    I'd buy that if they made it for Android. :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    I do not wish to have withdrawal syndrome

    hey man, I got the good stuff, primo ketracel white :D
    Haven't tried STO, but I ran Champions on my netbook over Xmas a few times. Couldn't do much more than chat, but it functioned.

    If you do, /renderscale .5 is your friend.

    yeah pretty much this. netbooks don't have the hardware for it really. should see what STO looks like and runs like on even my old comp, which is a crappy emachine with 1.6ghz, 1gb ram and 512mb video card. it runs but the graphics are really really weird
    Holy cow, that's slower than... my grandma.

    ouch :P
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    it works. i've seen sto run on a netbook. you can't play the "misions" and opening windows realy hurts performance but for inventory, bank and doff tinkering it's ok.

    it's odd that opening windows slows the game. the windows hide the resource consuming 3d-graphics and the ui is pretty simple without fancy efects. i've asked myself more than once why?

    side note:
    i have two pc's one high-perf for gaming and an ION with intel atom n330 and Nvidia chipset. when im too lazy to turn on the big pc i run STO in the ION. i have only full-hd screens and STO at full HD with pixel doubling and lowest possible details is a totaly different game. iit's fast enough to play the missions but you have to be patient on the loading screens. i think this is the slowest possible and cheapest pc that allows acces to all areas and aspects of the game.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Interesting, the ION is pretty much a dual core netbook in terms of specifications. Looks like in an emergency a netbook could be of value but definitely stay out of crowded areas or else loading times will be in the range of 'forever' :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    UI does nothing to the underlying scene rendering. UI is put on top, after the scene has been rendered to the screen. I know that UI is a big hit to performance in our games, not entirely sure why opening a new window would cause such a slowdown, but it's not surprising to me.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Tumerboy wrote: »
    UI does nothing to the underlying scene rendering. UI is put on top, after the scene has been rendered to the screen. I know that UI is a big hit to performance in our games, not entirely sure why opening a new window would cause such a slowdown, but it's not surprising to me.

    Don't underestimate the drain Ui elements cause.

    Opening the inventory drops on one of my rigs the fps from 60-70 to just 13-17 in some worse case scenarios.

    I don't know what will happen to a Netbook that is already at low fps.

    So unless there is no imense overhaul/optimisation of how the Ui is rendered i won't forward the idea of playing STO on a netbook with more then the lowest of lowest possibel quality settings if necessary at all.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    I have played on an old pc with this spec:
    - AMD Athlon 3200+ (2 GHz)
    - 1 GB ram
    - integrated NVIDIA 6100 (uses up to 128 mb system memory)

    With options set to minimum I had about 12 fps with exception of klingon academy, there fps was 1, but I still could do the daily lore missions.
    FPS was low but very stable, I was impressed. I have even done STFs (infected space and ground) on that machine.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Dell Inspiron 1520 reporting in here.

    Celeron 1.8GHz, 1GB DDR2 and an Intel 965 chipset.

    It *just* about works. Space combat is playable but really ugly, ground combat is... not so great, but still just about doable.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    asteconn wrote:
    Dell Inspiron 1520 reporting in here.

    Celeron 1.8GHz, 1GB DDR2 and an Intel 965 chipset.

    It *just* about works. Space combat is playable but really ugly, ground combat is... not so great, but still just about doable.

    Lol. I was just about planning to do my hair the same colour as your avatar :P

    Holy cow it works on a Celery? But its a 1.8 Celery so its about twice the power of a netbook processor.

    I'll probably scrap my netbook plan then because after much consideration I have no practical use for a netbook, and even if I wanted to be Picard in Nemesis with his tablet PC, tablet convertibles are way too expensive.

    Whereas if I wanted a spare Android tablet, it costs just $150 USD or so for a Made in China beaucoup type. I have to replace my Galaxy Tab anyway, because the battery is just about kaputt and I could not redneck engineer it back to its stock battery capacity.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Tumerboy wrote: »
    UI does nothing to the underlying scene rendering. UI is put on top, after the scene has been rendered to the screen. I know that UI is a big hit to performance in our games, not entirely sure why opening a new window would cause such a slowdown, but it's not surprising to me.

    Remember when Windows 7 came out and everyone praised it so much as having better performance than Windows Vista?

    While there were some genuine performance tweaks (the startup process is now threaded to take advantage of multicore CPUs), one of the things that led to this perception was giving more priority to the UI in the thread scheduler. This means the UI gets more time slices on the CPU and thus feels more responsive to the user, although the time slices available to number crunching stuff in your applications is actually reduced.

    I am no programmer and I certainly have never seen the code you guys use in your game, but I suspect something similar is going on here. The netbook is not adequate to run the game, and so anytime something big happens with the UI, massive resources are pulled from other tasks such as rendering.

    Although honestly, that netbook probably has a completely inadequate GPU for running this game, and is most likely well below the listed minimum specs for the game. The player should have expected serious performance problems of some kind.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Trying to play on my old netbook was HELL! infact i gave up on the original launch day because it was more frustrating than anything else and had to wait two years till i got my laptop, which plays it perfectly (touchwood)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    I am now downloading STO onto my office computer. It is a laptop with Windows 7 and an Nvidia Cuda GPU in it.

    Can't be bad, right?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    I have played STO on my psp.It was kinda fun lol.And yes you can play it on your psp my psp is TRIBBLE and i used PSP Disp on my psp and PC Works like remote pc i guess
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Wow, that blows away all other PSP games :D
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    It's not about what the hardware is called it is about the technology within it.

    The best mobile phones can play this dude, especially the ones planned for market over the next 2 years, dedicated graphics and intel processors etc.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    Like the quad core ipad type things comeing out.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2012
    How do they fit so many cores into an ipad without it melting down? Sorcery I tell ye xD

    At this rate, we should have a functional warp drive ship by 2140 :D
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