Sadness, resizing dds files to improve performance appears to do little

[Drachasor]

Well, I resized all the DDS files in the game so they were half the original size (in one dimension, one quarter the area). I thought this would have the game take up less memory and improve the performance so I could run a large map (right now with 768 megs of ram I am stuck on standard).

Unfortunately this didn't seem to work. The amount of data Civ IV put in my virtual memory didn't change at all. There were slightly improvements in the game I was loading (1700AD, lots of improvements and cities all over, continents map). However, the game seemed to crash just as often as before. For those that don't know or haven't experienced this, it seems the game crashes when you exceed your system limits in this manner.

It's really pretty odd that this didn't help. I tried getting rid of the fpk files, unpacking them and putting them in the assets directory in the main civ IV folder, then removing all the DDS files from there. I thought perhaps it was still loading the original DDS files too (or something). This manuever didn't change the situation one iota.

I will say the game seemed to load slightly faster, and was a bit more responsive before crashes. The change wasn't great however, and if it doesn't let you play on a higher map setting then I don't see the point of reducing the graphics. The game was fine (not perfect, but good enough) on Standard maps, so I guess I am stuck with them until I upgrade my computer.

I know Stone-D did this and seemed to have success, but maybe he measures it differently than I do.

Anyhow, I thought I should mention my results to everyone. I wouldn't want anyone else wasting their time doing this.

-Drachasor

[rogerbacon]

What program did you use to edit the .dds files? I'm looking for a program to make some changes to the graphics in the game.

[Stone-D]

Thanks for the info, Drachasor.

I have indeed had some success. By using very low res textures, zooming out is now instantaneous and diplomatic screens show up with very little delay.

However, this all goes downhill the further into the game you get. There is still a difference, just not as noticeable. The biggest difference is memory usage - I've been monitoring usage levels with original textures, blue marble and my own low res versions, and page hits have dropped quite substantially.

To be honest, I no longer believe the slowdowns in the late game are due to game->texture->driver. I've recently had cause to turn debug loggin on, and my last freeze/crash was the result of an attempt in python to redraw the main screen. It was looping indefinitely and I had to end task. I'll be posting that elsewhere as a bug report.

Anyway, to save others the hassle, I'm in the middle of uploading my low res textures. I didn't do *all* of them, just the bigger ones, particularly the leaderheads.

[Diadem]

I think, sadly enough, that the game is just badly programmed.

Sure, it's pretty heavy on the graphics. But not that heavy. It's probably pretty complex by the end of the game, but this complexity is excuse to take 2-3 seconds to load a advisor screen, or enter a building into the production queue.

The performance problems in the game aren't graphics related as far as I can tell. Graphics don't change much during the game, but it gets slower and slower. Also I've seen no effect on performence of zooming out, or even changing screen resolution.

One of the slowest things in the game in my experience is adding a building to the building queue. When you want to queue 3 units late game, it takes several seconds for each click to be progressed. There's nothing graphical there! And I'd say there's hardly any math to be done by your processor either. I really do not understand why it's so slow...

The only explanation is bad programming.