Troubleshooting Komi...


Sound Problems
--------------

Sound is by far my greatest problem in making Komi work properly. Under KDE, I often experience a segmentation fault. This seems to have something to do with the artsd sound system on KDE, which allows different applications to play sound at the same time, but seems to give grief to SDL, the media library which Komi uses.

Turning of the sound system in KDE and shutting down all other sound-using apps may possibly solve the problem, as might allowing the KDE sound system to timeout (which by default it does after a minute of inactivity).

But these are rather drastic steps. Komi can be played without sound, although the experience is not as enjoyable. Simply invoke komi like so from the command line:

  komi --nosound

I do wonder if this problem with KDE is just me though - for me it seems to affect even well known SDL games like frozen-bubble. YMMV. There does not appear to be a segfault under GNOME. I normally use Fluxbox myself, anyway. :-)

Music can be disabled with:

  komi --nomusic


Speed Problems
--------------

The game may be too fast or too slow. You can adjust the speed by clicking on the speed bar in the title screen.

If things are too slow even on the fastest setting, as a last resort, try doing:

  komi --fastdraw
  
The "fastdraw" option is experimental but should update only those parts of the screen that need updating. It forces stars to be off.

The game runs fine on my computer, yet runs really slowly on a supposedly faster machine that I also have access to. The speed difference is about 400 percent. After investigation, this seems to have something to do with the second machine having hyperthreading and runnning in SMP mode. If you're running Komi on a hyperthreaded machine, I want to hear about your results.


Jerkiness
---------

Unfortunately, it seems that some speeds are better than others in terms of how "jerky" the motion of objects on the screen is - I suspect this has something to do with the refresh rate of the monitor. Some experimentation with the speed setting may be necessary.

To assist you in this, as of version 1.03, you can get a rough idea of what framerate Komi is running at by running it like so:

  komi --gfxdetails

This will print (to stdout) the framerate that the last level ran at upon its completion. Ideally, you probably want to set the speed of the game so that the framerate is close to (or possibly just below) your monitor's refresh rate. For example, my monitor runs at 85 Hz (refreshes 85 times per second) and, happily, I can get the speed of Komi to be about 83 frames per second.


Keys
----

For now, the keys can be edited only by modifying keys.h and recompiling. Expect a more friendly way in a future release. Maybe...


Difficulty
----------

Komi is a hard game. :-)

Certainly when played at a proper speed... still, there's no shame in reducing the speed a bit, or even all the way down to its lowest setting. This is probably more fun when the shuffle option is used, otherwise you'll get all the easier levels first, which may be quite boring at low speeds.


Installation and data files
---------------------------

The directory where Komi finds its data files is set at compile time. By default, it's /usr/local/share/komidata/ but you can change this to be whatever you like by altering the Makefile, which may be useful if you don't have root access and can't do "sudo make install".

You can also temporarily specify the directory by passing Komi an argument at launch, like:

  komi --path /home/bob/komidata/

Note that the slash at the end is mandatory.


Other Problems?
---------------

Other problems? Please email me at acrossman@users.sourceforge.net