Matrix Games Forums

Hi, I've finally started playing the Barbarossa scenario and immediately noticed that the program takes forever to process between phases (not impulses, but phases)--sometimes 5-10 minutes, and this is for a small scenario, with no AI.

I don't have my computer specs handy, but while it is not the latest and greatest it handles the other wargames I've played on it pretty well.

Can anyone confirm whether it takes so long for them as well?

Hi 76mm - no help to you I am afraid (although good for the game generally) but I can confirm that at the moment (touchwood) I have had no problems of this sort at all.

The only thing I have noticed is that sometimes (and only very occasionally) when the screen pans to a new section of the map, part of the last shown map stays in place. So you have part of Italy overlaid in Germany or whatever. This is cleared by moving the map around for a second or two.

But delays of any sort between phases - no none.

So is there any wait between phases at all for you?

ORIGINAL: 76mm

So is there any wait between phases at all for you?

warspite1

No - none at all.

Also just started 'Barbarossa', no delay between phases.

not good...maybe someone could move this to the tech support forum so I can try to diagnose?

It is pretty much unplayable for me right now.

Hey 76mm no delay for me either. FYI HP lap top 4-5 years old running Windows 7

ORIGINAL: 76mm

Hi, I've finally started playing the Barbarossa scenario and immediately noticed that the program takes forever to process between phases (not impulses, but phases)--sometimes 5-10 minutes, and this is for a small scenario, with no AI.

I don't have my computer specs handy, but while it is not the latest and greatest it handles the other wargames I've played on it pretty well.

Can anyone confirm whether it takes so long for them as well?

what is a phase

there are impulses and turns.

but don't know what you define as a phase

ORIGINAL: 76mm

Hi, I've finally started playing the Barbarossa scenario and immediately noticed that the program takes forever to process between phases (not impulses, but phases)--sometimes 5-10 minutes, and this is for a small scenario, with no AI.

I don't have my computer specs handy, but while it is not the latest and greatest it handles the other wargames I've played on it pretty well.

Can anyone confirm whether it takes so long for them as well?

I get by on my computer knowledge but just barely [:(] I played Barbarossa many times and the game speed is excellent on my computer, its a 7 year old Dell 3.5 mgs of memory, 2.9 cpu and a very old nvidia graphics card ge7800.

Knowing myself 76mm, I may not be understanding your question properly. There may be people here that can help you. Could you please be more specific as to where the problem is. You said phases, please give us a for instance.

Bo

I'm running this on a cheap i5, Win7, 4GB laptop and the phases have run quickly (seconds). Is another program running/updating in the background at the same time?

It takes only a few seconds between phases for me even playing GW. Maybe you have other programs open that are using a lot of system resources?

Try bringing up the Windows task manager with ctrl-alt-del and click on the Process tab. This will show you how much CPU usage is being used by any programs that are loaded. This may help identify the problem.

ORIGINAL: 76mm

Hi, I've finally started playing the Barbarossa scenario and immediately noticed that the program takes forever to process between phases (not impulses, but phases)--sometimes 5-10 minutes, and this is for a small scenario, with no AI.

I don't have my computer specs handy, but while it is not the latest and greatest it handles the other wargames I've played on it pretty well.

Can anyone confirm whether it takes so long for them as well?

How much memory (RAM) do you have available? Do you know how much is being used by MWIF and how much is still available? RAM (system memory) and CPU speed could affect the time required to recalculate supply on the fly.

But my best guess is the program is writing out automatically saved games to your disk. That shouldn't take any serious time - we've never encountered it in beta testing - never, not at all. Perhaps your disk is close to full and/or heavily fragmented? This is a shot-in-the-dark guess on my part, but it lines up well with the symptom you are reporting. This is easy to test, just turn off the Autosave feature using the Player Interface drop down menu. IF the problem goes away, then the cause is the unavailability of disk space.

ORIGINAL: michaelbaldur
what is a phase

there are impulses and turns.

but don't know what you define as a phase

?? the whole manual describes phases. They are what happen between presses of the green button on the main form.

Steve, you are right that it was connected with the auto-save, great catch for picking that up.

However, my disk is no where near full--actually the game is installed on a NAS, and I guess the game doesn't like the NAS for some reason. I stream HD video from the NAS to the same TV, so I don't think that network throughput is the issue.

I have a NAS as well and found that playing games directly from it casued issues when doing so. When I moved them to my local drive they worked fine.

This has nothing to do with the games code, it has to do with how Windows inteactes with NAS devices. So the only way to really solve the issue is to play the game from a local drive. Matrix allows you to install the game as many times as you want on as many differnt PCs as you need. So unless you are really short of local HD space, there is really no reason to play directly off a NAS.

ORIGINAL: Numdydar
...there is really no reason to play directly off a NAS.

Well the only reason I want to play off a NAS is that sometimes I like to play at the desk in my office and sometimes I like to play on the couch in front of the TV, and I'd like to be able to play the same game in both places without shifting files around.

This doesn't actually work very well, however, because I have different resolutions on my monitor and on my TV.

Numdydar, do you have any idea if it would work better if I ran the program from my local machine but saved the GAM file to the NAS?

The simple reason is that a NAS uses TCP/IP to communicate with your computer, which is much much slower than a SATA link between your RAM and a spinning disk. If you have a Solid state disk, these are that much faster again than HDD because there are no moving parts.

SATA transfers data at a rate of 1000-6000 megabits per second, compared with perhaps 100 megabits on a home network for a NAS (though likely to be less).

ORIGINAL: 6079SmithW
SATA transfers data at a rate of 1000-6000 megabits per second, compared with perhaps 100 megabits on a home network for a NAS (though likely to be less).

But I would have thought that if I can watch HD video over this same network, it would be able to handle the data transfers from this game?

Do you have your NAS arranged in a RAID-5 configuration (rather than a mirrored RAID)? This configuration, which is typical for a home NAS (and many business ones as well) for data protection, is fast at reads but slow at writes, because the data has to be striped across multiple disks.

I would consult the product documentation to see what the data transfer rates are supposed to be. Whatever they are, though, it will be slower to write to a network attached disk than a directly attached one.

OK, good to know. Actually my NAS is RAID 1, but still I guess the write speeds can be lower.