Slow?

[caravel]

Does anyone else find that the campaign map lags at certain times. I often find that it worsens randomly then gets better, but overall it steadily worsens. The position on the map that I'm viewing from has no bearing on this, I've tried all that. I also have shadows turned off. Quitting and starting up again seems to fix this, and everything is nice and smooth again... for a while. Memory leaks? Battles don't have this problem at all. They are predictably fast with small armies and slow with large armies or when large numbers of units are sallying through the gates or crossing a bridge. Nothing new there, it's the campaign map problem that is unusual.

Any input would be most welcome.

[Third spearman from the left]

Do you have windows defender on your PC?

[caravel]

Nope, the only background tasks running are AVG ones. I have a lot of unecessary services disabled also. It is a very fast and clean install of XP.

[redriver]

the only time me gettin' this is when a unit is out of moves and just shy of its target. then everythin' is slow and only way to get it back to smooth is to either move another unit like a spy or diplomat or even navy or wait thru the AI turn to finish...

[professorspatula]

How much ram you got? I remember when I had 512MB that there were still some memory leaks present in the latest version of RTW. With 1GB I don't really notice the leak now. You know if there's a leak that when you close down RTW and bring up the task manager (CTRL+ALT+DEL) that RTW refuses to disappear from the list for quite some time.

The only other time I've noticed lag on the campaign map is if I've had iTunes running in the background in the mode that displays all the CD covers. For some reason that makes everything run horrible.

[caravel]

the only time me gettin' this is when a unit is out of moves and just shy of its target. then everythin' is slow and only way to get it back to smooth is to either move another unit like a spy or diplomat or even navy or wait thru the AI turn to finish...

It may be related to that I hadn't noticed. I'll check that out thanks.

How much ram you got? I remember when I had 512MB that there were still some memory leaks present in the latest version of RTW. With 1GB I don't really notice the leak now. You know if there's a leak that when you close down RTW and bring up the task manager (CTRL+ALT+DEL) that RTW refuses to disappear from the list for quite some time.

I have 1GB and don't notice the RTW process hanging. I'll check it again though.

The only other time I've noticed lag on the campaign map is if I've had iTunes running in the background in the mode that displays all the CD covers. For some reason that makes everything run horrible.

Displaying images uses memory. Even if they're Jpeg images, decompression is necessary in order to display. At that point they're effectively bitmaps. I have nothing running in the background apart from AVG, and that doesn't have the resident shield installed.

[Third spearman from the left]

Ok that was my best guess, but just so people are aware windows defender can go crazy with your CPU usage just after start up. It can be even more annoying when your online as I found out when on BF2 and started to lag badly, because WD wanted run a process out of the blue. It also affected my RTW games and so I got rid of it.

[caravel]

the only time me gettin' this is when a unit is out of moves and just shy of its target. then everythin' is slow and only way to get it back to smooth is to either move another unit like a spy or diplomat or even navy or wait thru the AI turn to finish...

Well it looks like this is the problem after all. A driver update hasn't made much of a difference to this problem, there is a perceptible improvement in framerate on the campaign map overall but the lag returns when the scenario above occurs. Some kind of a bug then?

[redriver]

I think it's a bug because I didn't have it with earlier builds(patches)..

but if not everybody's gettin' it then could be related to OS. mine's w2k and it's an old low end p4 computer.. though 1mb DDR and GF4 128mb...

[General M]

My campaign is slow as well. Although yours sounds better than mine. Sometimes when I end the turn the whole game just shuts down for no reason!

[caravel]

I think it's a bug because I didn't have it with earlier builds(patches)..

but if not everybody's gettin' it then could be related to OS. mine's w2k and it's an old low end p4 computer.. though 1mb DDR and GF4 128mb...

We both have fairly low end machines, so this is possibly why we're noticing the slow down and others are not.

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

Hi Caravel,
My old clapped out PC seems to be lower specification than yours yet, I, fortunately and strangely, seem to be having no problems. My old PC's terrible specifications are:

AMD Athalon XP 1600+ 1.5Ghz
Nvidia Geforce 4 MX420 64MB
256MB DDR RAM
32GB Hard Drive

I experience a little bit, nothing too serious, it luckily is still playable, of nasty lag on the campaign map after a few hour's play, yet, restarting the game quickly solves the minor issue. Also my PC takes longer to load battles, up to twenty minutes, the longer I play for, yet, again, exiting and restarting the game always resolves it. I'm sorry I can't help you very well, yet, may I ask is there anything that could be causing my PC to be over-performing? Thanks!

[caravel]

Hi Caravel,
My old clapped out PC seems to be lower specification than yours yet, I, fortunately and strangely, seem to be having no problems. My old PC's terrible specifications are:

AMD Athalon XP 1600+ 1.5Ghz
Nvidia Geforce 4 MX420 64MB
256MB DDR RAM
32GB Hard Drive

I experience a little bit, nothing too serious, it luckily is still playable, of nasty lag on the campaign map after a few hour's play, yet, restarting the game quickly solves the minor issue. Also my PC takes longer to load battles, up to twenty minutes, the longer I play for, yet, again, exiting and restarting the game always resolves it. I'm sorry I can't help you very well, yet, may I ask is there anything that could be causing my PC to be over-performing? Thanks!

Windows XP I take it?

This is my spec:

Athlon XP (Thoroughbred B) 2400+
Gigabyte GA7VTXE+
ATI Radeon 9800 128MB AGP
1GB DDR266 SDRAM
20GB UDMA 100 5400RPM HDD (rubbish - quite literally. It's from an old PC that went in the junk. The replacement for my real HDD that is sadly no longer with us.)

It is strange that you have no campaign map lag with that spec, but then I really don't think the lag is hardware related in any way.

What resolution are you using on the campaign map? I'm using 1024*768*16bpp. Reducing to 800*600 doesn't make any difference either, the lag is the same.

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

I'm using 1024x786x32 with shadows. Perhaps my PC's higher performance could be due to the matter of my campaign map looking uglier compared to everybody else's map? My map, sadly and strangely, looks darker and less 3D.

[caravel]

I'm using 1024x786x32 with shadows. Perhaps my PC's higher performance could be due to the matter of my campaign map looking uglier compared to everybody else's map? My map, sadly and strangely, looks darker and less 3D.

Strange, I'm not sure why that would be. I have everything set as low as possible also, no shadows or anything else. It runs fine until I send an army to a location and it runs out of movement points, that's when it slows down horribly. I have an FPS counter enabled now and it's around 32FPS or more most of the time, though when the problem occurs it's down to 15FPS or less.

[Upxl]

I’m experiencing the exact same problem.
I found out that it was due to the amount of “multiple turns walks” I used.
So If an army/diplo/ spy,… is ordered to a destination that would take a certain amount of turns to arrive, my pc would get laggy on campaign map.
The more I used this option the laggy’er it got.

I blame my video card although my entire pc is pretty up to date.