SMAC running excessively slow!

Bagman · November 15, 2003, 18:01

I've got a pentium 3 500+mzh machine, whenever I run SMAC to the point that I have about 7 supply crawlers on the screen, the game runs so slow to the point it's hard to move the screen around.

I have it set to normal zoom mode.

This happens as well on my 400 mzh machine on 800x600.

My guess is the game is rendering all those supply crawler voxels on a continual basis that it renders the game to a crawl.

This shouldn't be happening - not for a game that was designed to run on a p1 200.

Is there a way to delete the supply crawler voxel and replace it with something easier to render? My hunch is something is wrong with the SMAC graphic code, since Tiberium Sun also used voxels, and had a lot more than just 7 on the screen for fast running.

Or is there a way to shrink the voxel size, but keep the map size intact? (This would be a godsend, since I often have a really hard time telling what I put underneath those crawlers, and if there's a road there or not.)

Jamski · November 16, 2003, 09:48

Eh? The game shouldn't be having trouble rendering voxels, because voxels are pre-rendered, aren't they? I suggest that the problem is the calculations involved in having 7+ crawlers. I have never had a problem with this though. Perhaps you have another programm using up CPU at the same time?

-Jam

gwillybj · November 16, 2003, 18:26

My PC has a 266MHz AMD K6-2 with 32MB RAM and I see things slow down some (but not annoyingly) when there are several units in view. I've always blamed it on having only 2MB video RAM, not the old processor.

johndmuller · November 17, 2003, 03:29

There are some settings in the 'preferences' that can reduce the amount of animation that goes on, but 7 crawlers does not sound excessive enough to make a significant difference in performance, so I suspect something else. IMhO, it is more likely that you are running Win95/98... and the resources are depleted, the quantity of memory in your system is marginal or otherwise being locked up in another application, or that some software component or driver - like the DirectX module - iis inappropriate or not ugraded sufficiently(, or one of the previously mentioned items).