Issue with Clicking, Zooming, and Scrolling

[Der Zeitgeist]

ORIGINAL: Grim.Reaper

ORIGINAL: zakblood

as nothing seemed to work for you Grim.Reaper, only other suggestion is play as it is for now and hope as soon as the first patch comes out it makes it more playable, as plenty have managed to play it on a lot less resources than your spec / report has[:(]

not an option to play. as already stated, it’s an extreme chore to play under these conditions when every click takes many seconds and throws your mouse pointer in different places and if you attempt to change zoom at all it often locks up and if it does work, queues up the requests and then goes out of control. no way working through that is an acceptable or enjoyable experience.

i don’t often return games and i really want to play this one, but if not corrected in the patch, i’ll likely seek a refund. hopefully there is a possible resolution found especially since not just me with the issue.

I have the same problem with the mouse cursor getting shifted to a different part of the screen after clicking, although without any larger pauses or hangups.

CORRECTION: Actually, the mouse cursor jumping around might be intentional, as it seems to jump to the button the game thinks you will be most likely to press next. It's just kind of unusual.

[ralphtricky]

ORIGINAL: Der Zeitgeist

ORIGINAL: Grim.Reaper

ORIGINAL: zakblood

as nothing seemed to work for you Grim.Reaper, only other suggestion is play as it is for now and hope as soon as the first patch comes out it makes it more playable, as plenty have managed to play it on a lot less resources than your spec / report has[:(]

not an option to play. as already stated, it’s an extreme chore to play under these conditions when every click takes many seconds and throws your mouse pointer in different places and if you attempt to change zoom at all it often locks up and if it does work, queues up the requests and then goes out of control. no way working through that is an acceptable or enjoyable experience.

i don’t often return games and i really want to play this one, but if not corrected in the patch, i’ll likely seek a refund. hopefully there is a possible resolution found especially since not just me with the issue.

I have the same problem with the mouse cursor getting shifted to a different part of the screen after clicking, although without any larger pauses or hangups.

CORRECTION: Actually, the mouse cursor jumping around might be intentional, as it seems to jump to the button the game thinks you will be most likely to press next. It's just kind of unusual.

It tries to hop to the close button, then restore to where it was. I don't like a program moving the mouse in general but it helps a lot when playing. I hadn't thought about how annoying it might be if you weren't expecting it though. I'll see what I can do to make that an option in a future patch.

Ralph

[ralphtricky]

ORIGINAL: drwho

Doing some further diagnosing it actually looks like the game starts to turn sluggish around the middle of the PO's first turn. I can duplicate this with another scenario. I also notice that when I start for eg Komarow 1914 TOAW burns some 170Mb of RAM but this increases rapidly to 214Mb during the PO's first turn, might be normal but seems quite a lot of ram for just storing differences is equipment and supply etc which should not use that much?

It's also caching a lot of things for later use. It should top out eventually and stay pretty steady with the memory usage.

[ralphtricky]

ORIGINAL: drwho

I actually have this setup. I have the OS on my c:\ (which is a SSD) and I have TOAW installed on my d:\ (which is a SATA).

I'll give this a shot and check at what the I/O-performance (iowaits etc) looks like.

Can I also ask you to copy the files the program is installed to onto the C drive temporarily to see if that makes a difference? It doesn't care where it's installed to, just where the My Documents folder is.

Thanks,
Ralph

[derwho]

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky
Can I also ask you to copy the files the program is installed to onto the C drive temporarily to see if that makes a difference? It doesn't care where it's installed to, just where the My Documents folder is.

I'm doing a complete reinstall to my c:\ (SSD) and give it a go shortly. I also disabled my Kaspersky before the installation just in case. I now have my NVIDIA as my primary adapter.

[derwho]

ORIGINAL: drwho
I'm doing a complete reinstall to my c:\ (SSD) and give it a go shortly. I also disabled my Kaspersky before the installation just in case. I now have my NVIDIA as my primary adapter.

Unfortunately no change. I now have the game in

C:\Program Files (x86)\Matrix Games\The Operational Art of War IV

and the rest of the stuff at:

C:\Users\drwho\Documents\My Games\The Operational Art of War IV

The first turn of Cracow 1914 plays perfectly as Austria-Hungary, the PO does the Russian turn and immediately after this everything is very sluggish. Kaspersky disabled & NVIDIA as primary.

[ralphtricky]

Here's another thing to try.

In the documents/my games/the operational art of war iv folder, there is a file called opart 4.ini.

Can you please find the line labeled
nosound=N
and change that to
nosound = Y?

It completely disables the sound system.

Thanks,
Ralph

[zakblood]

ORIGINAL: drwho

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky
Can I also ask you to copy the files the program is installed to onto the C drive temporarily to see if that makes a difference? It doesn't care where it's installed to, just where the My Documents folder is.

I'm doing a complete reinstall to my c:\ (SSD) and give it a go shortly. I also disabled my Kaspersky before the installation just in case. I now have my NVIDIA as my primary adapter.

Kaspersky

disabling some doesn't work, better to add a file of folder to the safelist, sometimes called a while listed file etc in some programs

Code: Select all

https://support.kaspersky.com/11444

[derwho]

I did both: safelisted the both folders and set "nosound=Y" (not "nosound = Y" as ralphtricky suggested), no change. My turn plays well, PO runs it's turn (it actually gets a bit sluggish during the last 20% of the PO turn for the PO too and then the sluggishness spreads to me too.

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: zakblood

first patch will be out soon, so at least wait for that, then or open a tech support ticket and see if full staff support has any other idea's on what could or may be something else to try or do etc which may help, don't like to pass anyone on, but they do have a lot more experience than i do for sure, so you never know and there's nothing to lose

Yes its my plan to wait for the first patch, again I really want it to work so hate to give up. But so far I have seen nothing in the release notes suggesting it will be fixed therefore don't have high confidence. I completely realize this might not be an easy thing to diagnose and fix, but at the end of the day just need to have something that works, otherwise not sure what else I can do besides look to return.

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky

ORIGINAL: Der Zeitgeist

ORIGINAL: Grim.Reaper




not an option to play. as already stated, it’s an extreme chore to play under these conditions when every click takes many seconds and throws your mouse pointer in different places and if you attempt to change zoom at all it often locks up and if it does work, queues up the requests and then goes out of control. no way working through that is an acceptable or enjoyable experience.

i don’t often return games and i really want to play this one, but if not corrected in the patch, i’ll likely seek a refund. hopefully there is a possible resolution found especially since not just me with the issue.

I have the same problem with the mouse cursor getting shifted to a different part of the screen after clicking, although without any larger pauses or hangups.

CORRECTION: Actually, the mouse cursor jumping around might be intentional, as it seems to jump to the button the game thinks you will be most likely to press next. It's just kind of unusual.

It tries to hop to the close button, then restore to where it was. I don't like a program moving the mouse in general but it helps a lot when playing. I hadn't thought about how annoying it might be if you weren't expecting it though. I'll see what I can do to make that an option in a future patch.

Ralph

I would agree that if this is by design, not a big fan myself and would absolutely like to see an option. Really confusing to have a mouse cursor automatically jump since not a common thing in any game.

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: drwho

I did both: safelisted the both folders and set "nosound=Y" (not "nosound = Y" as ralphtricky suggested), no change. My turn plays well, PO runs it's turn (it actually gets a bit sluggish during the last 20% of the PO turn for the PO too and then the sluggishness spreads to me too.

I have also tried all the various things with no luck....

- Turned off all sound
- Turned off security software (and added to exclusion list)
- My game installed on single drive -- program and data directory both on c:\
- Uninstalled/closed other background software to confirm minimal things running
- etc.

[Grim.Reaper]

I know not potentially helpful or relevant because they are different versions, but again just fired up TOAW3 using the same scenario (Korea) and don't experience any of the issues described. No delays at all clicking on buttons, screens really popup fast, and although scrolling is different in the older version, it works without queuing up commands and going out of control. Also noticed the older version does not reposition your cursor after you make a selection which seems a lot better in my opinion (then the new design).

Just something about the newer version that my system doesn't seem to play nice with.....going through screens and such in the older version just seems to move more efficiently for me.

[Splatsch]

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky
It tries to hop to the close button, then restore to where it was. I don't like a program moving the mouse in general but it helps a lot when playing. I hadn't thought about how annoying it might be if you weren't expecting it though. I'll see what I can do to make that an option in a future patch.

Ralph

I would personally appreciate a lot if it becomes optional [;)]

[budd]

On some window boxes when it snaps to the close button it doesn't work until you move it off the close button and then back in and click. I'll pay more attention to which dialog boxes it happens in.

[ralphtricky]

ORIGINAL: Grim.Reaper

I know not potentially helpful or relevant because they are different versions, but again just fired up TOAW3 using the same scenario (Korea) and don't experience any of the issues described. No delays at all clicking on buttons, screens really popup fast, and although scrolling is different in the older version, it works without queuing up commands and going out of control. Also noticed the older version does not reposition your cursor after you make a selection which seems a lot better in my opinion (then the new design).

Just something about the newer version that my system doesn't seem to play nice with.....going through screens and such in the older version just seems to move more efficiently for me.

Which is really weird. I'm using pretty much the exact same windows calls for III and IV.

I did run across this recent discussion about similar symptoms with Radeon cards.
https://community.amd.com/thread/218704

[ralphtricky]

I'm adding a flag for the patch. Once it's out if you put the following line in your opart 4.ini file it may help isolate what's going on.

TOAW 4 is more aggressive about putting textures into video memory so that graphics card can be used, it's a lot more efficient than the CPU. smallram forces those textures onto the CPU so it may run slower, but if there's a video driver issue, it may help.

Ralph

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky

I'm adding a flag for the patch. Once it's out if you put the following line in your opart 4.ini file it may help isolate what's going on.

TOAW 4 is more aggressive about putting textures into video memory so that graphics card can be used, it's a lot more efficient than the CPU. smallram forces those textures onto the CPU so it may run slower, but if there's a video driver issue, it may help.

Ralph

Thank you....if you wanted and there was a way, I would be more than happy to test it prior to official release to give you input. If so, just PM me or let me know how we might make that work unless the patch is being released today:)

[Grim.Reaper]

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky

ORIGINAL: Grim.Reaper

I know not potentially helpful or relevant because they are different versions, but again just fired up TOAW3 using the same scenario (Korea) and don't experience any of the issues described. No delays at all clicking on buttons, screens really popup fast, and although scrolling is different in the older version, it works without queuing up commands and going out of control. Also noticed the older version does not reposition your cursor after you make a selection which seems a lot better in my opinion (then the new design).

Just something about the newer version that my system doesn't seem to play nice with.....going through screens and such in the older version just seems to move more efficiently for me.

Which is really weird. I'm using pretty much the exact same windows calls for III and IV.

I did run across this recent discussion about similar symptoms with Radeon cards.
https://community.amd.com/thread/218704

Not sure myself...also based on that link, I would think that is referring to how the mouse would react with everything versus a specific game so I am thinking that isn't it....plus I have the very latest drivers installed. Also, I got the impression the lag being referenced was in movement which mine is more about mouse click and zooming in.

What's interesting is it even happens in the main menu to some degree...for example when you click on the New Game button and then the tutorial button, both of those have a second or two delay. However, if you click on the button where you choose the players (which side the AI is) and buttons in that row, that is very snappy and no issue. So not sure if that is a clue if the click logic is different between some buttons, maybe something to look at.

[ralphtricky]

The only commonality is that they both hit the disk, the new game to load all the scenario names, and the play to load all the graphics. I'd expect them to possibly have a slight delay. While playing though, everything should be in memory except when Zooming and Playing sound.

The logic is largely unchanged from TOAW 3, it's all old school for now. If the new flag doesn't work, I'm at a bit of a loss, especially since it seems to occur on a couple of machines with different video card vendors.