Hardware Recommendations/Requirements

We don't have any firm requirements at this point. Our target hardware is:

• Athlon 700 or better
• 128 Meg RAM or more
• GeForce Video Card

Current testing is showing functional performance with a 400 Mhz CPU and a GeForce 256 video card.

We do intend to utilize (push) the hardware more than current games, but what will be acceptable performance is a very subjective measure and will be determined by each individual player. We have found that the video card is more important than the CPU speed for what we are doing.

We encourage everyone to get a high speed connection (DSL or Cable) but since we are a small company and can't afford massive Internet trunk lines, thus we are more restricted by our connection, we don't expect to be able to overdrive a standard 56k modem.

CPU

We recommend an Athlon 700+ but we expect many will be able to tolerate the performance of a 350+ Mhz CPU (if coupled with a good video card).

Graphics Card

We highly recommend a GeForce chipset video card. Other hardware accelerated 3D cards (Matrox G200, Voodoo 3, TNT2) will work but at dramatically slower frame rates (the worst problems we've seen have been with the ATI video cards).

Known troublesome video cards (these cards have serious issues with Java 3D):

• Matrox G450 - should work if you manually set the Matrox driver to a 32 bit zbuffer depth. (or requires a code change to set "template.setDepthSize(0)")

Memory

The most important hardware requirement will be RAM memory. We are going to attempt to keep the initial release operating on systems with only 128 Meg RAM but as the world grows this will be the first limitation that we'll encounter (and thus will become the first hard requirement that we'll have to raise).

Operating System

We recommend Windows 98 Second Edition as the best performing and least troublesome operating system. Pernica should however run on virtually all operating systems.

There are some issues however:

• WinNT 4.0 - must have Service Pack 3 or later
• Apple Mac - Pernica will not run on a Mac, this is because Apple and Sun can't agree on some licensing issues for Java 3D and hence Java 3D is not available on any Mac operating systems.
• Win95 - technically if properly patched Win95 should work fine, but we'd highly recommend you update to Win98SE.
• WinXP - WinXP is a bit slower and has some bugs but Pernica will run just fine. Some of our players have had corrupted Java installs under WinXP where they could log in just fine but would then go link dead (uninstalling and reinstalling Java fixed this). Another WinXP user suggests editing the batch file to launch Pernica via "java -Dsun.java2d.nodraw=true -Xms96m -Xmx96m -jar Pernica.jar" (same hardware and video driver version works perfectly fine without this on Win98).
• Linux - Pernica should run fine on Linux. However it's your responsibility to properly configure Java and Java 3D on your Linux system as well as properly installing the 3D graphics card video drivers. Also some filename / pathing issues might come up (because Linux is sensitive to upper and lower case filenames / paths), please let us know about any of these and we will fix them.

An issue with Java on Linux:

keylistener in Linux (KDE at least) works different: when you hold down a key, keyPressed and keyReleased events are continuosly triggered one after other, when what is expected is keypressed status until the key is released, when a keyReleased event should occur.
This is due the Linux keyboard management, Java just takes what the O.S. gives.
Workaround: disable the key repeat, in Linux's Control Center|Keyboard.

We will only directly support Windows 98 Second Edition.

Java & Java 3D

Pernica is currently based on Java 1.4.2 and Java 3D version 1.3.1. We recommend the Open GL version of Java 3D for all machines. Note: do not install both versions of Java 3D.

The Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.4.2 can be downloaded from Sun at: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

We are working out the bugs with Java 1.5. If you do decide to use Java 1.5.x make sure you use 1.5.0_04 or later as they finally fixed a major performance issue that had been plaguing Java 1.5.

Java 3D version 1.3.1 can be downloaded from Sun at: http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/download.html

Legal note: Due to legal reasons (there are some countries to which Java may not legally be exported) we can not directly provide a copy of Java on our website. If you live in the USA and wish to order a copy of Pernica on CD we can provide Pernica, Java and Java 3D on that CD (please send $35 to cover our costs).