any link about minimum requirements of wesnoth?

[Freem]

I have not seen any page listing those minimal requirements, which may be useful for some people (for example, people trying to contribute: should they take care about using less memory, or less CPU cycles? This change the algo you will prefer to use.).

So, I wonder if it would not be useful to have a wiki page with reports about:

* wesnoth version
* hardware+OS where the version works only fast enough to be supportable ( I guess wesnoth's options used should be provided )
* hardware+OS where wesnoth works just well

I guess this would imply having some FPS report option and things like that, but for now people can at least judge in a rough way.

If such page should be started, I can run wesnoth 1.12 on a debian stable (I have compiled wesnoth myself) with a 1.6GHz monocore 32 bits processor, with a GeForce 4 card, using nouveau drivers.
Disabling as many animations as possible (but still showing fights and AI moves, with a turbo mode of x2 enabled ) makes the game slow but it's tolerable.
On the other hand, in the lobby, enabling filter just kill performances, even when enabling nothing in the filter.

[iceiceice]

As far as I know there are no such minimums posted, nor is there an agreed upon standard by which we should judge what is the minimum. Even when it comes to libraries we don't always agree -- some devs think that the minimum should be whatever version will work with no bugs. Some devs think that we should allow older library versions even if they have bugs, to accommodate users who don't have or don't want to get newer versions. In general our "hard dependencies" are very lenient, its just about "whatever you can successfully compile with." There are some "soft" / "suggested" dependencies, which represents what 95% of the users should actually use to build the game.

I don't think it's likely that we would make a hard dependency based on memory, or CPU cycles. As far as what's "recommended", it's probably quite hard to predict and will depend on many details about your technology... I think the most memory-intensive part of wesnoth is caching animation frames, and it's unlikely that wesnoth 1.12 uses substantially more memory than wesnoth 1.2 or wesnoth 1.4. (This is just my educated guess though, I don't have hard evidence.) So I doubt that memory is actually a bottleneck at least in mainline scenarios, even for very old machines.

Actually in my experience, "minimum system specs" has little to do with the measured performance of the program, and more to do with some company wanting to create an escape clause so that they don't have to provide tech support to users with low end machines.

(for example, people trying to contribute: should they take care about using less memory, or less CPU cycles? This change the algo you will prefer to use.).

The most common thing that I have seen is that several parts of the code have "#ifdef LOW_MEM", where an alternative implementation geared towards low memory is provided. If you want to provide general optimizations based on profiling, or more "low mem" patches I guess this would be quite welcome.

with a GeForce 4 card, using nouveau drivers.

Just fyi, this is not relevant, wesnoth is not hardware accelerated at all.

[fendrin]

On my Kubuntu 14.10 the 1.12.0 Version takes ~800MB of RAM when starting "Library of Krathemaqht" campaign.

Thus I guess a recommendation of ~1GB free memory should be on the save side on a Linux desktop.

[Dugi]

800 megabytes? Library of Krathemaqht must have quite an inefficient use of resources, when I run Legend of the Invincibles (Linux 64-bit, 32-bit should use less), it takes only like 350 megabytes, and that one has over 100 scenarios (using about 120 megabytes) and very large amounts of non-scenario code (using about 130 megabytes). Heir to the Throne uses only 160 megabytes (90 megabytes is wesnoth itself, 70 megabytes is the campaign). I suppose that 200 megabytes ought to be enough for playing most campaigns.

I suppose that Library of Krathemaqht uses exceptionally much memory, most likely because of some inefficiencies.

[Crow_T]

800 megabytes? Library of Krathemaqht must have quite an inefficient use of resources, when I run Legend of the Invincibles (Linux 64-bit, 32-bit should use less), it takes only like 350 megabytes, and that one has over 100 scenarios (using about 120 megabytes) and very large amounts of non-scenario code (using about 130 megabytes). Heir to the Throne uses only 160 megabytes (90 megabytes is wesnoth itself, 70 megabytes is the campaign). I suppose that 200 megabytes ought to be enough for playing most campaigns.

I suppose that Library of Krathemaqht uses exceptionally much memory, most likely because of some inefficiencies.

Library of K. Is also a huge download, which I think is from the animations- based on what iceiceice said, the resource hog of that campaign could be all of the dragon animations that get loaded.

My experience with lag has always been concerning ai calculations, in particular with the one large cave scenario in Northern Rebirth.

[Pentarctagon]

If we're trying to measure minimum requirements, perhaps we should stick to vanilla only? Otherwise there is effectively no minimum requirement (for memory at least), since anyone can make an arbitrarily large add-on.

[fendrin]

LoW uses about the same amount of memory.

edit:
The ~800MB is the memory peak usage.
With all libraries.

If the environment already uses some of the libraries then the extra amount for loading Wesnoth is smaller.

Thus the value is a worst case one.

[Anonymissimus]

I originally wrote this into the corresponding FAQ question, but it's too chatty and subjective for an agreed standard and better suits the forum:

I happened to set up a 1GHz 512MB RAM machine with win xp and a GeForce2 MX/MX 400 with corresponding drivers. This is hardware from about 2000. Scrolling the map is jumpy, but not much, and multiplayer in wesnoth 1.12.3+dev, Isar's Cross, runs fine otherwise. Of course, make sure you reserve as much resources for wesnoth as possible, deactivate animated map and standing animations, and don't have too many AI units on the map. I've played wesnoth on a weaker machine too and would call the above a recommended minimum for enjoyable play. Alternatively, use a lightweight Linux distro. Singleplayer performance seems, for some reason, a good deal better than multiplayer, especially scrolling the map. When in multiplayer lobby, don't filter for games, it's a total CPU eater.

I compiled also on that machine...took some hours in total, did it with breaks/shutting down in between.
It's not clear to me why filtering the games for empty player slots needs such a lot of CPU, some heavy WML parsing must be going on there and/or there's room for improvement.
A lot of people would cry out load about using an OS that's no longer supported by its company, but fact is, XP is a very lightweight OS by today's standards, compared to both never windows OSes and non-lightweight Linuxes.

[puranglista123]

Minimum requirements are:

If it can run, you can play it!

No big deal!

[Elvish_Hunter]

I happened to set up a 1GHz 512MB RAM machine with win xp and a GeForce2 MX/MX 400 with corresponding drivers. This is hardware from about 2000.

In my case, until recently I had an Athlon XP 3000+ with 512 MB of RAM, from circa 2003. I had to install Xubuntu on it, because both KDE and Unity were too heavy, and LXDE seemed to me like it was missing some feature - so the only Ubuntu flavor that made sense to me was the one with XFCE.
Wesnoth ran fine on that system, as long as I deactivated the map animation and didn't play maps too big, or with too many units. The problem was everything else: trying to use Firefox or Chrome was becoming a sort of mystic experience, so I was forced to change it with my current system (Core 2 Duo E8400 with 2 GB of RAM). After a few months, the older computer decided that it had enough and its main supply got fried Anyway, even on the newer system I'm still using Xubuntu, because I prefer to spare about 300 MB of RAM rather than have some fancy graphical effects which just slow me down

[Anonymissimus]

After a few months, the older computer decided that it had enough and its main supply got fried

Can you send me the rest of it ? xD
Keep it until you have available some power supply and reinstall an OS, so there's a fallback PC.

My stronger machine is like yours but I use Lubuntu anyway. I refuse to throw away old hardware just because web content, applications and operating systems grow fatter and fatter over the years and decades. Unless developers put intentional effort into keeping or making things lightweight, that's the way it goes.
Wesnoth's RAM usage went up slightly as well for instance. In multiplayer it needs 150-200 MB for me, strongly depends on how many and what addons there are, in singleplayer a bit less. That allows for another heavy application to be open at the same time with 512MB RAM, since the OS is slim; Firefox, also 150-200 MB without too many tabs or addons, newest versions seem to have gone down a little again. Currently showing 182MB, I use noscript and ImageBlock to improve performance.
The problem with the more feature-full desktops like Xfce is that they need those deamons to provide certain features, and those need RAM which would be needed desperately for e.g. linking a debug executable.