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I Am Jeff
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New Jersey
Feb 2002
time: 00:19
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not sure if this was mentioned, but if you goto start then run, then type msconfig. Goto the startup tab. Uncheck everything you dont need. Keep however systray, explorer, and your virus scanner. There is no ned for real tray and that other stuff. This way ur cpu just does not start with these things, so you dont have to use ctrl+alt+del all the time.
It seems that every program has something to add to startup.
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asleepathewheel
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listening too long to one song
Mar 2002
time: 00:19
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quote:
Originally posted by I Am Jeff
not sure if this was mentioned, but if you goto start then run, then type msconfig. Goto the startup tab. Uncheck everything you dont need. Keep however systray, explorer, and your virus scanner. There is no ned for real tray and that other stuff. This way ur cpu just does not start with these things, so you dont have to use ctrl+alt+del all the time.
It seems that every program has something to add to startup. |
how true. especially sucks when you buy a pc from a company like dell or gateway. all sorts of crap running in the background that you have no idea what it is.
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The Viceroy
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tu mumbai se, mai Bombay se
Nov 2000
time: 05:19
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Ohh don't get me started on Startup programs .. ahhhgh ... Like ACooper, I keep my PC (and everybody I happen to know) clean and clear of all these additional drains on resources , and nobody I know has an issue with running Civ3 .. and slowness..
My PC is a P4, 2Ghz 256Mb .. and on 256x256 map I have just noticed a small pause creep in for V1.21f .. nothing to drastic, and the same for each turn .. ancient to modern. (must be compressed saves)
There is no need to keep your explorer running on NT/2000/XP .. kill it off .. (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, select processes and kill Explorer.exe) if you want it back, (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, FILE ->NewTask and type explorer).
Beware of SETI !!! a wonderful program indeed, but if your like me, and you have it set to run all the time, you will loose 20Mb of Ram .. not a problem on my PC, but if you have 64-128Mb .. a must to remove it.
I think its time that games manufacturors start putting disclaimers regards to poor performance on badly maintained PC's .. give me & ACooper more work
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Shadowlord
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850 Athlon MHz computer, 64 MB ram.
The only thing that starts up on my computer when the computer starts is my antivirus, and I close that before I load Civ.
When I start Civ, I have only two things in the ctrl-alt-del task list: Explorer and Systray.
And I have over 1.5 GB free hard drive space.
Yet, half the time when I start Civ, all the units have blue instead of their normal color (well, depends on the unit. Some have red instead of blue, etc. It's wierd.) - and they flicker the normal color occasionally.... And the tech screen looks really messed up... Why?!?
I have the windows color set to 16 bit, because it was doing this ALL THE TIME when I had it on 32 bit... But only in 1.16f and higher. It didn't do it in the unpatched game. *grr*.
And I do notice slowdowns in large games in the late game, but it's not that bad when I have friend animations off and only leave enemy anims on.
I don't mind the slowdowns, I can do something else while that's going. But my computer is better than the recommended specs - No, not the minimum specs (300 Mhz 32 MB ram), the RECOMMENDED specs (500 MHz 64 MB ram)! - And yet, the game does NOT WORK RIGHT!
WHY!?
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Shadowlord
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(I'm getting sick of having to reboot 3 times before I can play Civ....)
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Shadowlord
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(Oh yeah, and "Civilization3" crashes about 5 seconds after I exit the game.)
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Capt Dizle
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The issue is the mental bottleneck at Firaxis when they departed from their previous sound policy of writing software designed to include as many people as possible and not just the tech heads.
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twistedx
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St Louis, MO
Apr 2002
time: 23:19
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quote:
Originally posted by jimmytrick
Poor design or poor coding. One or the other or both. Unacceptable. If I were running Firaxis and they brought me something like this to release I would see that they learn to respect people of moderate means by long stints in the unemployment line. |
I have to agree with this one... Civ3 is a TURN BASED strategy game. Keeping that in mind, think about other games strategy games you've played (assuming TBS games aren't the only you play) like the Command & Conquer genre, Age of Empires, etc. They work in real time, and do a pretty good job of it, without the 45 sec to 2 min lag between moves that you see in Civ3.
I really have no clue what is taking so much in the way of resources in the games. Civ3 isn't graphic intensive or anything, as the units mainly just sit there until you move them, so it isn't the heavy-duty graphics causing slowdowns like you get in other real time games. Note that graphic rendering is what primarily causes games to need so much horsepower these days. Some might argue that it is the AI learning routes or developing its strategy -- again, you don't see that kind of significant slowdown on real time games.
Without having access to the code, the best I can do is speculate that there is a single-threaded engine that decides unit movements and strategy. Real time games are multi-threaded in that respect... You don't see the AI in Age of Empires taking two minutes to figure out where to individually move its units because the multi-threaded engine allows calculations for many units at the same time. Also, real time games tend to re-use routes it discovers; I don't believe that to be the case with Civ3. To sum things up, by comparing it to other strategy games, you can call it inefficient code without being a "Firaxis sucks" groupie. 
-- twistedx
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Capt Dizle
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Firaxis is capable of good work. Gettysburg, for example was a nice game.
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dr.charm
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Well, I've noticed, at the periphery of my empire, that the AI engages in a cycle of 'activate/fortify' with AFAICT *all* of it's units *each* turn. That *has* to slow things down when you're talking about hundreds of AI units on large maps.
Cheers,
Dr. Charm
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wervdon
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Im pretty sure its both the path finding and the culture 
Culture because in late games for me on larger maps if I found a city or raze one (or abandon now), there is a noticable 3 second or so lag. I can only assume the same happens between turns if the AI does so. However, this probally isn't too big of a deal because I can't notice any lag at all when a culture radius expands, and how often are cities being added/destroyed/changing hands in the late game. In most of my games, its at least far from every turn. This could also easily be attributed to the trade networks though and not culture, and in fact, maybe more likely since Ive only seen it with adding/removing cities from an empire. There's also a good chance that the trade networks use a variant (hopefully a variant since you only need a path not the shortest one) of the path finding.
About pathfinding..... It could probally be improved alot by assuming the ocean/sea/coastal tile shortest paths won't change throughout the entire game (no roads/railroads). Then when a game starts, just compute a series of evenly spaced waypoints (10 or so tiles apart), and the shortest path between any two waypoints and save that. Then movement on the sea would boil down to move from start to closest waypoint, move from waypoint to waypoint closest to destination, move to destination. Its a little less efficient (closer waypoints make it more efficient but use more mem), but assuming the pathfinding doesnt look at the whole world to move 10 spaces it should be alot faster. Course, I could be a moron and they are already using waypoints rather than trying to compute the paths directly. Something similar could be used on land, but it'd be more annoying to players (since moving out of the way obviously would waste turns), and be subject to changes due to roads/rails. However, on most maps, the land situation could be helped by breaking the map up into continents for the pathfinding routine. Afterall, why does the world size matter when most of the time you want to move over land from point a to b using a land unit that only has a few hundred possible tiles it can move to anyways. For all intent and purposes the world for that land unit isn't going to be 120x120, it's going to be more like 20x10 (or whatever the continent size is)
The other issue is yes, the ai does still seem to have a need to expend all the movement points it has on non defending units. In my last game this was readily obvious when the chinese had a small city on an island with me that controlled 4 tiles of the island (the city square plus 3 around it, their culture border never expanded and mine met with it). THey had 2 or 3 calvary stationed in the city, and everyturn id watch them all move in a circle along that cities small borders. If they are going to let the ai see the whole map, then they might as well take advantage of that assumption and kill stupid patrols.
PS:
Im running a athlon 900 with 512 megs Performance tends to start lagging for me (within acceptable levels) once a larger world fills up. Typical waits though are no more than 6-10 seconds a turn max if im playing the large map size. For huge, its probally more like 15-20 seconds a turn.
EDIT: Few more pathfinding speedups that can be used
First, they probally already have every unit remember the path its going to take. Thats a pretty large use of memory though. Assuming 1 byte per tile remembered on a path and the largest map size (256x256, I think), thats 64x256 max possible tiles to remember. Or 16k mem per unit for path remembering. (64 because only half the horizontal tiles are used and the map wraps in that direction so worst case your halfway around the world) This could be cut down using the waypoint system mentioned above though on the ocean though, and except on true pangeas, a land unit isn't going to be moving that far unassisted anyways.
Secondly, there could be a path cache. Since most calls to the pathfinder will tend to be repetive in a given turn (especially with stack movement, surely with stack movement they only make 1 call to the pathfinder already). They can simply remember the start/destination and path computed for every call made to the pathfinder on that turn, and if a second identical call is made skip right to the shortest path we already found. Since the ai probally doesn't use stack movement, that should help out a good bit with large ai unit stacks.
Last edited by wervdon on 24-04-2002 at 14:30
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23-04-2002 09:25
Startup programs.
Are there similar problems with XP?
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