A Lie Revealed: Slowdown Bug

[theEntity]

Originally posted by notyoueither
I'm thinking that XP is the issue. The game would have been designed during the reign of ME (and 98). Makes sense that it works well under those two. In fact 98 and ME are very similar.

XP is a dog of a different colour. Many software vendors have had some problems adapting their software to it. All the Anit virus packages would be a case in point.

Hence my interest in which versions of M$ people are running.

Salve

I don't think its much of an operating system issue. I've been playing it on my AMD 750 / 384 MB RAM under Win2000, and on my notebook Intel 1.0 / 256 MB RAM under WinXP, and the worst delays I've had has been around 20 secs in the late game on large maps. I've never even noticed any slowdown when having taken enemy cities or closed city displays.

And btw. I think culture is a great game concept that really adds much to the enjoyment of this game

[notyoueither]

theEntity.

Hmmm. Well, there goes the XP theory. I think.

But the fact remains that some people are experiencing a problem. What's left? Video chipset vendors. The aspect of the moon as presented to certain geographical areas of the Earth. Alien death rays... Did they say that SMAC was a game?

I'd be willing to help out and test certain configurations, but I'd need something to go on. Maybe I'll throw XP on a system and load a saved game just to check. Can't hurt.

Salve

[notyoueither]

Aeson. Post a saved game where you get your worker bug.

JT. Same thing. Post a saved game where leaving the city screen causes a 10 second delay.

Salve

[GeneralTacticus]

I have never actually experienced late-game tedium, because whenever I get that far I always have to stop and quit, and then it takes forever to load the save files .

[Aeson]

I haven't played a "big" game since installing the 1.17f patch, at least not past the early Industrial age. I quickly edited up a railroaded map and ran my worker around, no delay whatsoever, even up to 50 spaces. Did they fix this in the patch? There wasn't anything else going on to slow things down though, so I'm not sure how valid this test was.

[Zouave]

I certainly do not think that culture needs to be removed, but ...

Has anybody else noticed the time it takes to found a new city after cultural boundaries are already well established? Like in the industrial age. The boundaries have to be redrawn, so it hangs for 10 seconds or so.

[player1]

Some parts of recent chat:

...
[Soren_Johnson_Firaxis] in previous civ games (including SMAC), the pathfinding was more heuristic, which is faster but not complete. Which is why it screwed up from time to time. We felt that computer were finally fast enough to handle pure pathfinding. I hope we were right.

...

[Soren_Johnson_Firaxis] we were tempted to limit map size depending on memory (the most improtant factor), but we didn't like restricting people. Still, it's a pseudo-restraint anyway, so perhaps we should have been more harsh.

...

[Soren_Johnson_Firaxis] ram is most important... then CPU.

...

[Soren_Johnson_Firaxis] especially CPU's with a good cache. I pity those trying to use the old celerons (of course, they are below our spec anyway)
...

[Soren_Johnson_Firaxis] yeah, I remember reading a post from a guy furious about game speed... turns out he was running a 256x256 map on a below spec machine. I was at a loss for words.

...

[Capt Dizle]

Does this mean I have to eat dirt?

[Capt Dizle]

I still think there are two separate problems and the culture problem is worse than the pathfinding.

[ACooper]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
Does this mean I have to eat dirt?

Yes. Just a little.

[player1]

I have no problem with playing standard maps with 8 civs.

I have 333Mhz Celeron, 64MB (pretty close to min. config)

Only long load times.
And music MUST be off (or else, game is unplayable).

Still huge and large maps are a little bit unplayable.

I guess extra 64MB would solve music problem and extra swapping.
But games will still be slow on huge & large maps.

P.S.
Using Windows 98.

[godinex]

The XP is a SH****T, i use ME and only get slow on GIGA MAPS.

[Ghengis Brom]

The only slow-down I've encountered is loading saved game with a huge map. I have not experienced any slow downs during game play. Here are my specs;

366mhz Celeron running Windows 98
160MB RAM
16MB ATI Graphics card

The only problem I have is the game occasionally causing Fatal Protection Faults but all of the games I have loaded do that from time to time.

[Ghengis Brom]

Originally posted by player1
I have no problem with playing standard maps with 8 civs.

I have 333Mhz Celeron, 64MB (pretty close to min. config)

Only long load times.
And music MUST be off (or else, game is unplayable).

Still huge and large maps are a little bit unplayable.

I guess extra 64MB would solve music problem and extra swapping.
But games will still be slow on huge & large maps.

P.S.
Using Windows 98.

I had problems playing with the music on before the patches but it seems to be fixed now. I also have 160MB RAM so you may want to get at least another 32MB.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Thrawn05.

Do you ever get 5 or 10 second delays coming out of city screens?

Does moving a worker ever take 10 seconds or so?

Do you use automated workers? How many?

Salve

Sorry for the late reply, so here goes.

1: Fives seconds usally, but that goes not just for the city view, but for advisors, civiliopedia, diplomatic screen, etc...

2: Before railroads, there does seem to be some sort of a drop in the FPS in the unit movement animations, but nothing that would drive me nuts.

3: I usualy automate my workers (five or ten I don't however), and that takes up the bulk of 25-ish seconds for my turn. On a huge map like Marla's World Map, I tend to make about forty workers during the industrial age to get my railroads up asap. Other wise about 2 workers for every 3 cities I have.


I guess i've been lucky, must be the fact that I turned off the music.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by player1
I have no problem with playing standard maps with 8 civs.

I have 333Mhz Celeron, 64MB (pretty close to min. config)

Only long load times.
And music MUST be off (or else, game is unplayable).

Still huge and large maps are a little bit unplayable.

I guess extra 64MB would solve music problem and extra swapping.
But games will still be slow on huge & large maps.

P.S.
Using Windows 98.

I'm surprised a Celeron works well for you. Celerons are below system requirements I believe, since you would need a P2 or higher, because of a cache memory sizes (exclude AMDs). The extra 64MB will not solve the music problem. Momery has little to do with the music since it's in mp3 format, which means it spends most of it's time in the CPU getting decoded. I have a P3 550Mhz w/ 256MB of RAM, and the music slows my computer to a crawl even on standard maps.

[Kaak]

and here i sit, thinking that the slowdown was because of poor, slopy coding, like brian reynolds said it was in the beginning...

[Willem]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
You can have borders without culture, what do you need culture for?

Well sorry you don't like the game, but it seems to me that you're in the minority when it comes to culture. Aside from a couple of malcontents, who would probably complain just for the hell of it anyway, I haven't read anyone mention that they didn't like the concept. So if you don't like it, please leave quietly so you don''t disturb the vast majority of us who don't have any problems with it.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Kaak
and here i sit, thinking that the slowdown was because of poor, slopy coding, like brian reynolds said it was in the beginning...

Well, it may still be. When I saw the code for AvP:GE, I had a heart attack looking at all the #define commands and countless structs. Granted it worked, but very hard to read. I wouldn't mind taking a look under the hood of Civ3. I do hope within a couple of years, firaxis would release it, that would make for some awsome modding.

[Grumbold]

I've never experienced slowdowns. When I raze a city it pauses but big deal, its busy creating lots of new slaves ..uh.. workers for me and calculating border effects. Its not like that happens ten times every turn.

Additional slowness has to come from running too large a map for your computer specs. I suppose its quite possible that the home PC computer hasn't been marketed yet that is powerful enough to seamlessly run the large/populous maps. Mine is significantly below the current standard and runs normal maps acceptably well. I don't think we should ask for more. Having a map/player number that can't yet be run perfectly could just be seen as building in features that will be more useful 18 months post release. I just wish they had made more effort to get the screens to be able to display them all properly instead of this 8 of 16 fudge.