Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: michaelm

ORIGINAL: RichardAckermann

I recently had a number of larger naval battles, and noticed sunken or sinking ships keep the animated smoke. With 10+ sunken ships, this slows my game down to a crawl and makes it, like, blocky.

Please remove the animation for eliminated ships. Since you can see the name and that it's gone, there should be no side effect except a speed up.

Hitting space or ESC will cause the animation to speed up if you not interested in the blow-by-blow action.

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

That delay sounds like the infamous Direct X calls getting stuck (see Wdolson's postings on this in the Win10 thread) which IIRC is related to having multiple processors. You could try the -Single processor switch, specifying 2 as the processor to use (1 is tied up by the O/S). See Wdolson's posts for exact switch info.

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

That delay sounds like the infamous Direct X calls getting stuck (see Wdolson's postings on this in the Win10 thread) which IIRC is related to having multiple processors. You could try the -Single processor switch, specifying 2 as the processor to use (1 is tied up by the O/S). See Wdolson's posts for exact switch info.

ORIGINAL: Lokasenna
With a 2002 computer, he doesn't have multiple cores.

I think the problem is that he is running on hardware that came out 2-3 years before WITP, and 7 years before AE.

What sticks out to me is that the graphics card only has 128MB of video memory. I'd bet almost anything that is what is causing the lag.

ORIGINAL: witpqs

ORIGINAL: michaelm

ORIGINAL: RichardAckermann

I recently had a number of larger naval battles, and noticed sunken or sinking ships keep the animated smoke. With 10+ sunken ships, this slows my game down to a crawl and makes it, like, blocky.

Please remove the animation for eliminated ships. Since you can see the name and that it's gone, there should be no side effect except a speed up.

Hitting space or ESC will cause the animation to speed up if you not interested in the blow-by-blow action.

I think it's the 'z' key, IIRC space bar does not speed it up.

ORIGINAL: michaelm

ORIGINAL: witpqs

ORIGINAL: michaelm



Hitting space or ESC will cause the animation to speed up if you not interested in the blow-by-blow action.

I think it's the 'z' key, IIRC space bar does not speed it up.

See even I get confused with all the options[:D]

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

ORIGINAL: michaelm

ORIGINAL: witpqs



I think it's the 'z' key, IIRC space bar does not speed it up.

See even I get confused with all the options[:D]

I just ran a turn and used the z key by itself when the Coastwatcher Search step came up. No change to the slow stepping through each base.
So I tried CTRL-z and everything flew by, including things I wanted to see in animation.
I tried to stop it with the ESC key but no dice. It did stop to show me the Combat Reports but continued at breakneck speed to the end of the turn otherwise.
Oh well - I didn't get any naval combats other than bombardments this turn so I can live with it.

A = Against AI
P = PBM
c-z = control-z
z = z
sb = space bar
"main messages" means messages outside of combat animations.
"animation messages" means messages during combat animations.
Y = Yes
N = No

Tested during resolution/replay, a mixture of Japan and Allies, no differences noted between sides.

A P
= =
Y Y c-z toggles main messages delay on/off.
Y N c-z toggles animation messages delay on/off.
Y Y z toggles main and animation messages delay on/off but only until the next animation begin/end.
Y - sb restores animation messages delay turned off by c-z.
N N sb restores animation messages delay turned off by z.

ORIGINAL: wdolson

The only thing that might stress a 2002 vintage computer is the RAM. One of the beta testers got the game to run on a 512 MB RAM Win 98 machine, but 1 GB is really the minimum, and I would really recommend 4 GB on a 32 bit Windows computer.

Bill

ORIGINAL: RichardAckermann

Thanks. I will take a look at it. I noticed my HD is quite loud with this game.

ORIGINAL: RichardAckermann

Thanks. I will take a look at it. I noticed my HD is quite loud with this game.

ORIGINAL: wdolson

The slow down problems have some relation to OS, but it's more hardware than anything else. If you can upgrade your memory, I'd recommend it. Crucial has a memory selection tool, you can enter information on your system, but it can scan your system too if you want:
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/systemscanner

Crucial is one of the most reliable brands out there. Additionally I've never had a problem with their recommendations, and I've installed a lot of memory. For an older system, the memory is probably going to be very cheap. You should be able to get at least to 2 GB, and most motherboards of that vintage could go to 4 GB. If the system doesn't have enough RAM, it swaps stuff out to disk which is a lot slower than RAM. If you have enough RAM to hold the entire program at once, you won't have to swap out to disk.

AE is very memory intensive, if I remember correctly, it takes about 350 MB to 400 MB of RAM. The OS also takes some memory, so 512 MB is marginal.

We were up to close to 1 GB of RAM at one point, we had to unload a bunch of images from memory and just load them as needed, but a lot of the art needs to remain in memory all the time. The database also needs to reside in memory and it takes up a lot of RAM. This is a very data intensive game.

Bill

ORIGINAL: RichardAckermann

Thanks. I will take a look at it. I noticed my HD is quite loud with this game.