Another (much more minor) problem

[Inigo Montoya]

I know the solution to this is somewhere, because I've seen it - but now that I need it, I can't find it (of course).

MTW starts up just fine now, plays intro and goes to main menu. I've played through all of the tutorials - even went back and re-ran all the battle tutorials consecutively, and everything did just fine. No lag/problems in game, all details turned up as high as they would go, huge units (which makes no difference in tutorial, I know, but I just wanted to type huge units).

The problem is that the game will sometimes lock up in the main menu screen. It never does this when I first start up, only after I've had it on for a while - and usually after I've left it sit on the main menu for a few minutes. Then I come back and it's locked up. This is a soft lock (CTRL-ALT-DEL will work) as opposed to the previous hard locks I was getting.

The fact that it only occurs after I've left the menus on-screen without doing anything for a while seems to suggest that it's a memory issue - I've got 320 MB.

If anyone knows where this problem and solution were originally reported, please tell me.

Thanks.

[Demon of Light]

Dropping it in the Apothocary again...

[Demon of Light]

topic title is: Inigo Montoya has ANOTHER question

[Kraellin]

k. thanks DoL.

whelp, sorry inigo, but you've used up your alotment of help. please insert another quarter before proceeding ;)

yeah, does sound like a resource thing and yeah, could be a memory leak. i know win98 had some doozies at one point. also wouldnt surprise me if the game did also. hard to plug those sometimes.

best i can offer is cut down on the resources you use. go back to normal size units, turn off fauna and smoke, turn your agp aperture down and your pci texture ram down. just cut back on everything. this wont prevent the memory leak, or prolly wont, but it shld extend how long it takes to crash things. one know bug is with the sb live card and TW games. that card is a very good card normally, but for some reason a lot of folks have had troubles with it. best to turn the hardware sound acceleration completely off. also, i once ran into a problem with those creative sb 16 emulator drivers for dos. might disable those as well. likely not the problem, but how often do you use dos sound? can always turn them back on if needed somewhere.

also, if you happen to be running the game on an xp machine somewhere, the same is somewhat true about xp, but for slightly different reasons. xp is just a freaking hog and runs, or tries to run just way too much stuff in the main loop. serious gamers need to disable a LOT of stuff in xp, for the most part. the difference tween xp and win98 on this is that win98 does have leaks, where xp just freaking uses everything up and leaves nothing to run your programs with and eventually will just tie up so much stuff that things start to jam and crash.

overall, one of the biggest problems windows has always had, and still does, is memory management and returning resources for use. xp is a bit better than previous o/s'es, but it still struggles with this.

frankly, we were somewhat better off with dos games. you've got to remember that no matter how much stuff you turn off, windows is ALWAYS running in the background. it does NOT suspend itself during game play. it's constantly running through its main loop looking for tasks. this is why almost all readme files include the advice of turning off everything except systray and explorer.

ok, you know a lot of this stuff, so just chalk a lot of what i just said up as 'for everyone's benefit' and i'll get off the soapbox now ;)

K.

[Inigo Montoya]

K -

I started testing out a bunch of setting, in-game and system. As I said, I'm pretty obsessive (although some of my friends call me anal). So I tweaked sound accel, mipmap settings, PCI memory usage, smoke, fauna - almost everything you mentioned.

And the Winner is....

PCI Texture Memory Size

which makes sense, given what each of us was theorizing, since this has a direct effect on system memory usage. However, it doesn't make sense when you consider that this is what the card uses to store textures in addition to the on-board memory of the card... Unless it uses this memory up first.

I basically cut it in half (from 39 to 20 MB) and cranked everything else up all the way, and the battles rolled along with very little lag. I was even able to have huge units (he he... I just wanted to type that again). I haven't been playing long enough to see if it has any adverse effects on this game - or on any of my other games.

Oh well, I just wanted to let you know the results of your suggestion - If anyone else has problems with lag and a PCI graphics card, you can tell them to play around with this setting first.

Thanks again for your help.

I