YR slowdown

[pd]

Does anybody know actual reasons for YR slowing down on high-end systems?

I doubt it's the engine.
TS doesn't slow down either and RA2 should have an improved engine.

Got an AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1.5gigs of DDR RAM and a fat fat graphics card.
Still, the game runs like few years ago on an old 433MHz PC.

In the wishlist I read about multiple CD drives cause problems.
That suggests that CD checks (which are removed in TFD anyway) slow the thing down.
But that can't be everything...
does anybody know more?

[DCoder]

My game used to slowdown every five minutes when I was running it off a warezed CD, I could hear the CD spinning up and slowing down during those slowdowns, but not any more since I switched to an ISO of an uncracked version.

[pd]

I've been using an ISO (wow and it was completely legal since I created it myself ) for a long long time...

You mean the slowdowns on music change I suppose. Everytime the music changed, it had to read thememd.mix from the CD. You could copy it into your game directory to solve that.

Well, I am speaking on the slowdown that occurs later in the game, when there are plenty of units.
Especially Yuri causes such slowdowns.
Ever played against 7 brutal Yuris? Prepare for 10 FPS...

It *might* be the engine, yes, but I wouldn't know why.
On gamespeed 6, which is supposed to be unlimited framerate, it should run wonderfully on high-end machines, but it doesn't...

[DCoder]

I disabled the ingame music long ago, I prefer my Winamp, so I never even thought it could be a music-related delay...

Yuri AI lags mostly because of crappy Slave Miner configuration as far as I know, and bad AI coding in general. No wonder WW edited the Slave Miner in all the campaign maps, heh.

Aside from the Slave Miner, base placement routines suck, if the AI has no space to place a building it will start lagging really bad trying to find a spot for it instead of cancelling it and trying later, you can knockout a battle lab and watch a powerplant pop up in that spot immediately on smaller maps... Esp if the superweapons are on. Let's not forget AIBaseSpacing too.

[CNCM_BLITZ]

I am not much of an AI coder but couldn't you find some way to keep the AI from building to much? Like alimited number of factories and tech centers and a proper ration of powere plants to cooperate with it?

[pd]

the AI does only build one war factory, one tech center, and so on.
no need for limitations.
this is no thread for requesting/asking stuff.

I just want to know facts about what slows the game down.

AI is a good point. I doubt it's the slave miner (though it's especially Yuri that slows it all down...).
I might try to give Yuri a refinery and see whether that's better.
In what way was the slave miner modified in the campaigns?

[Bobingabout]

the CD drive bug was suposidly fixed in YR 1.001, also, with my laptop, because the drive has a really short period of inactivity to stop spinning, for battery reasons, when i first installed it, the game used to constantly spin the disk up and down, and the game used to pause while it was doing it.

anyway, the engine isn't as improved as it should be, thing railgun logic... the railgun was lagless in TS, but in YR, even on a good machine, 10 to 20 railgun units can really kill the performance. and we use it as a freeze weapon :S you can have hundreds of frostbites and freeze tanks no problem...

[AlliedG]

it lagged in TS too =p also there are work arounds mainly gamemates method.

[Bobingabout]

i use the so called "Lag-less" railguns, they arn't lagless, but do cause less lag.

[VK]

If units cannot move to destination. YR slowdown too.

[Blade]

Cannis believes some slow down is due to animations. I can't remember the specifics, but limit the number of animations called for things like debris and such seems to limit the problem. I'll have to look up discussions regarding it on C-Gen some time.

[Beowulf]

Isn't transparency on animations the biggest cause of lag?
I know you mentioned that in your read me for the fixed Meteor animations.

[Blade]

Yeah, transparency on animations where a lot are drawn at once lags the game like you wouldn't believe, but once they go, the game speed returns to normal. Also, railguns were never lagless in TS IIRC, its just that by default, the most on screen at any one time was two units per player.

[Renegade]

i use the so called "Lag-less" railguns, they arn't lagless, but do cause less lag.

You keep saying that, yet I never experienced lag with them...

[MadHQ]

basic tile 2kb. on a average map you can have a shit load of tiles lets say it has 10,000 basic tiles that's 20,000kb right there.

cliff tile 23kb (that's one of the largest ones) i would say about 100 cliff tiles. so that's 23,00kb right there.

The allied base when all build is about 5.86mb. The soviet base is about 9.2mb. And the Yuri base is about 9.76mb. so if you have all the 3 sides in one skirmish that's about 24.82 mb.

The GTNK vxl is about 39.5kb. lets just say 10 of those tanks are used that's 390.5kb

The GI shp is 181kb. say there's about 20 of them used, that's 3620kb.

Hell march 2 is about 4.75mb

Then there's all the other little sounds that get played in the background, along with the eva thing.

and then there lighting on most maps.

And then there's all the animations (not building animations, animations like explosions, and the little twinkels from the water and ore.)

and then every tile has to have blue/black background on each shp removed and placed over another tile. I'm sure that takes some kind of comp power.

then there's your timed objects that your game has to keep watch over. like AI stuff, ore stuff, triggers, build times, move times, animation time, list could go on forever!



So i dont think theres to much that any one can really do about it... its just how this game is.