The Ball & SSE2

[Nekomancer]

I'm asking for a member of the Steam Community forums, which isn't that tech savvy.

Does "The Ball" require SSE2? I've seen it's more and more the case in Unreal Engine 3 games. This is a problem for older PCs, especially the Athlon XP/Sempron family. AMD started supporting SSE2 with the Athlon64 family. Intel supports SSE2 since the Pentium4.

Borderlands requires SSE2, but a fan patch exists.
Alien Breed required SSE2, but Team17 was friendly enough to fix that.

The file in question is the nvtt.dll. If the file is not used by The Ball it probably won't require SSE2 at all.

It would be very nice if you could look into that. If the game requires SSE2 you should either modify the nvtt.dll or update the system requirements to reflect that issue. Writing 2GHz CPU isn't that precise, you know?

P.S.: The thread in the Steam Community Forums can be found here (Link)

 

[Yin]

The old old old UDK Demo of The Ball has a nvtt.dll in the Binaries\Win32 folder, so I assume it will use it.

 

[Nekomancer]

Well, it may or it may not. That is the tricky thing. It depends on the version of the DLL and the flags that it have been compiled with.

In case of the borderlands fan patch a fan just took the sourcecode (available from nVidia) and compiled the dll again without the "enforce SSE2" flag. But in Alien Breed it wasn't that easy. Team17 sent me three or four DLLs to test until they got it right so that the game ran on my old PC and still work on new PCs.

 

[Yin]

Well, it may or it may not. That is the tricky thing. It depends on the version of the DLL and the flags that it have been compiled with.

In case of the borderlands fan patch a fan just took the sourcecode (available from nVidia) and compiled the dll again without the "enforce SSE2" flag. But in Alien Breed it wasn't that easy. Team17 sent me three or four DLLs to test until they got it right so that the game ran on my old PC and still work on new PCs.

[url]http://www.bigdownload.com/games/unreal-development-kit/pc/the-ball-demo/[/URL]

Try?

 

[PUTZ]

Seriously doubt that will be a good testament. That was over year ago...

Chances are, it does.

 

[Yin]

Seriously doubt that will be a good testament. That was over year ago...

Chances are, it does.

It won't hurt to try though. Especially since he wanted to see if the game will run on his PC on another thread. It's the closest thing to the retail game you will get, besides the retail game itself ofcourse.

 

[Zetsumei]

It won't hurt to try though. Especially since he wanted to see if the game will run on his PC on another thread. It's the closest thing to the retail game you will get, besides the retail game itself ofcourse.

Its probably better to check the latest version of the udk base. As the ball most likely updated to the latest udk base when going to retail.

 

[Hourences]

The Ball is based of the May UDK build.
We are looking into this but chances are we are indeed using it yes.

 

[Nekomancer]

That would be great, even if it seems the person in question has a CPU that supports SSE2. Still, it would be nice to update the system requirements to prevent customers with an Athlon XP which have clock settings up to 2.2GHz (equivalent to P4 3.2GHz) but do not support SSE2. Based on the system requirements they should be able to run the game, but if it needs SSE2, they won't be able. Not very satisfying if you buy a game and have to hear that the system requirements were to vague and you can't play it at all.

I was there with Alien Breed, only thanks to Team17's goodwill i was able to play it. I was the only one who complained about it in their forums and still they fixed it. That's why i love small companies, they care about their customers.

 

[Hourences]

To confirm this, yes it needs SSE2.

 

[Nekomancer]

Thanks for clearing that up. Would be great if you add this little requirement to the system requirements in the Steam Store page.

Have a little +rep .