Performance on lowend laptop

[Nux Mortis]

First, i am playing AE since release and had tons of fun, despite the steep learning curve. Best wargame i ever played. [&o]


So, when i am at my girl´s house, i am playing on her laptop, an old HP with a Pentium M and 512 MB Ram running Windows XP Professional. With so low RAM it is rather laggy to play, most notably when scrolling the map.
I often have to alt-tab too ( as she wants to look for emails and stuff), which brings the laptop to a grinding halt for a while.

So i did an extremely simple "mod":

I saw that the graphics are big 24bit bitmaps and just converted them all to 8bit (256 colors), i deleted all animation-stuff too, as i never look at them, but that´s optional. After converting the size is 1/10 to 1/2 of the originals depending on the bitmap (AE-installationsize is cut in half too).

This cut AE´s ram-usage and increased the performance on the laptop dramatically, especially when alt-tabbing. load times seem better too, but i didn´t measure them.
I can´t even see a difference in picture quality, but that is just me prolly.


Oh and and don´t mess with the transparent bitmaps (they have pink lines or borders), that will mess up graphics.


Now i have even more fun [:)]

[Kadota]

Yeah, but how'd you get your girlfriend to let you come over and play WitP right in front of her on her laptop?[:)]

[jazman]

ORIGINAL: Kadota

Yeah, but how'd you get your girlfriend to let you come over and play WitP right in front of her on her laptop?[:)]

Marry her. If she'll let you do that, she'll let you neglect a whole family, wife, kids, pets, house, car, everything. That's what you need.

[Nux Mortis]

I played around some more and found that i could convert even bitmaps with transparency. Only to 16bit color but that did cut file-size about 25% too.

The installation folder has now under 500MB and AE runs great on this old machine.