How strong of a system do you need to run pirates?

[Ninawindia]

I tried to install it on my tablet that has an actual keyboard, but every time I try to run it, it crashes.. It can run the normal xcom on OXCE+ but not pirates...

[Meridian]

2 GB RAM minimum, 3 GB recommended.

[LytaRyta]

^^  >o

so much? ?

i thought tha XPiratez (as whole UFO-XCOM at all) is mainly, basically, (almost) DOS -game, designed to run under ms-dos

(.. /and those very early Windows.. (3.11 - Win 95++, amybe...)

[Rince Wind]

Back then the game was about 11mb and did a lot less.

[Meridian]

You can run vanilla with less than 100 MB... just PirateZ needs that much.

[Dioxine]

OXC was never designed to run under DOS, it's a modern engine written in C.

[Martin]

Funny that modern engine is more memory intensive than the DOS one.

[Rince Wind]

Back then you had to look out for every kb, there is just no reason to go that extra mile anymore i guess.

[ohartenstein23]

Funny that modern engine is more memory intensive than the DOS one.

Not all that funny - since we know more RAM is available, we can do things that speed up the running of the game at the cost of more memory use.  Reading from/writing to disk can take a while compared to accessing something in RAM.

[Bloax]

The real fun is when you eat shitloads of RAM while doing things much slower. :--DDD

[Dioxine]

Wirth's Law.

[Yankes]

OXC was never designed to run under DOS, it's a modern engine written in C.

Blasphemy!! C++

And for more serious answers, folder of pirates contains 200MiB of compressed pictures, when you decompress them you get around 10 times more data == 2GiB.
Another thing is that engine is fully modable than increase requirements (hardcoding everything could made game smaller and faster).

Theoretically game could use less resources and loading things only on demand but you will need wait another 2 years for basic gameplay because game would be not finished yet.

[The Think Tank]

I tried to install it on my tablet that has an actual keyboard, but every time I try to run it, it crashes.. It can run the normal xcom on OXCE+ but not pirates...

I run X-Piratez on my mobile device (a Galaxy S6 Edge+) with little to no problems whatsoever, what device are you using, by chance?

[Blood Raven 117]

the game starts chugging on the bigger maps on my full desktop. Its a potatoe, but damn does it chug.

[Meridian]

the game starts chugging on the bigger maps on my full desktop. Its a potatoe, but damn does it chug.

The engine is not built for such big (especially tall) maps and for such long visibility distances.
Modders are aware of it, but willingly decided to use it in spite of suboptimal user experience.

1/ vanilla maps have height = 4, piratez maps can go up to height = 30... which is roughly linearly (8-times) slower
2/ vanilla maps have visibility limit = 20, piratez has limit = 40... which is much worse than linearly slower... I don't have exact numbers, but it can bring any CPU to its knees
3/ also tons of new features in OXCE+ (e.g. indicators, night vision, LOS checks, etc.) are slowing down rendering quite significantly... again I don't have exact numbers, but I would say it's about 50-100% slower in worst cases

All in all a tall map in piratez can easily render and animate 50x slower than a normal vanilla map.

PS: also, if you have FPS counter enabled, don't believe what you see... even if the game barely manages 5 fps, it will still show a lot more