Matrix Games Forums

...for HTTR?

danke sir

I had played most of the small to medium RDOA scenarios while I was overseas on a PIII/600MHz (intel) with a G400 Max (32Mb?) and performance was acceptable for me. I would tend to think even if one's machine cannot play the largest scenarios that there is still fun to be had. I have often had games where you couldn't play the biggest scenarios and or run with the max video options, but you can still have fun with what you can play.

With regards to getting better performance out of HTTR:

(1) Highlighting units on the screen is resource intensive. Thus, if you have many units continuously highlighted, it will run significantly slower. This is a function the requirements of the path drawing for all the highlighted units. In practice, it is sometimes useful to highlight a lot of units, but only momentarily as opposed to extended periods.

(2) There is a map anti-aliasing options. (It makes lines smoother.) I understand that it eats up some additional CPU cycles. Personally, I never use it, since I find that it makes map text (place labels) fuzzy.

(3) Scenarios with more units on the map consume more CPU resources.

(4) I have never tried this, but you could try this and/or ask Dave if playing at a lower resolution would make the game faster. I play at 1024x768, but you could go down to 800x600. I kind of suspect that it won't, since unlike flight sims no matter what portion of the map you display and at what zoom level I don't notice any changes in simulation speed.

(5) The most obvious manifestation of performance problems would be some slowness of map scrolling speed. This might also be addressed by play style. Pause the game to issue orders so that CPU is not being consumed by simulating at the same time. Use the map mini window to rapidly jump from one area to another as opposed to scrolling the big window. The only other manifestation of performance is the ratio of simulated time versus real time. So, if you run out of CPU cycles running the game at MAX speed may not simulate at the same rate as when you have spare CPU cycles.

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Personal benchmark: I have run the final build of HTTR on a P4/2.53GHz (Intel), Win XP Pro (1024Mb RAM), and GeForce Ti 4600, and have been totally satisfied with the game performance. (This includes playing the largest included scenarios.)

As far as personal benchmark goes, I play AA:RDoA on an AMD Duron 800Mhz, 128 MB RAM and TNT2 video card. All goes fine, until the largest scenario (Juggernaut and the bigger campaigns come to mind).
Ratio between real and simulated time becomes barely sustainable at some points.
I never experience slowness in map scrolling though. The interface is always responsive enough.

My understanding is that computing power plays the bigger role. The computer has to constantly assess situation, calculate pathes, check LOS. For each unit. These are not trivial computing tasks.

JeF.