A Lie Revealed: Slowdown Bug

[ACooper]

Just to wanted to mention that just because something needs to be redrawn does not mean it has to be recalculated. The values would be stored for later retrieval.

To do it the way it was suggested would be absolutely stupid and I think we should all give the programmers more credit than that.

[Capt Dizle]

Aeson, do you see a long pause when the map is redrawn after you take or raze a city. You may not notice this with your computing power.

This kind of event triggers a recalc. It is longer in this case than when I exit a city screen because the map HAS to be redrawn, when I exit a city screen the routines are obvisouly being run but the delay is shorter because the map DOESN'T HAVE to be redrawn. This is the problem, they need to rework the code to take this constant routine out of the loop.

[Thrawn05]

I have to agree with DrFell that it is a redraw issue. If you look at the folder with all of the bitmaps, you can see that most screens have layer upon layer of bitmaps. The reason that scrolling on the map is not slow is because it is all redrawn when you leave what ever screen you were on before.

I personal would like culture to stay, it beats having a rival civ plant a few cities right next to your captial.

[Capt Dizle]

Cooper you always defend them. I am not calling them stupid, they just made a mistake. I used the "Lie Revealed" stuff just to draw attention to this. If I am mistaken let them go on record and I will eat dirt.

[Aeson]

You mean no delays at all on a Huge map with 100's of automated workers notyoueither? What are your system specs? I can't imagine ME being the "best" for anything..

I'm running Windows XP. Civ3 seems to run pretty well on my system. Other than a bug in 1.07f where it would crash to desktop when I tried to auto move a settler over a river, I haven't had any crashes at all.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
do you see a long pause when the map is redrawn after you take or raze a city. You may not notice this with your computing power.

Ah, so that's what you were talking about. That i have witnessed, and yes it is annoying. Sometimes the pause for me is 30 sec to a minute. So in this case, I concur with you Jimmytrick that it is a problem, but to scrap the whole system? a little harsh for me. And I have a 1.7ghz w/ 384 ram.

[Aeson]

No delays at all when razing a city or when cultural borders expand. It's just the unit movement that slows things down.

[ACooper]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
Cooper you always defend them. I am not calling them stupid, they just made a mistake. I used the "Lie Revealed" stuff just to draw attention to this. If I am mistaken let them go on record and I will eat dirt.

I defend what is right.

You are right that when a city is taken by another civ the culture values (and borders) have to be recalculated.

All I'm pointing out is that otherwise it would not need to be recalculated.


Of couse a MPG of you (or anyone else) eating dirt is always fun.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Aeson
You mean no delays at all on a Huge map with 100's of automated workers notyoueither? What are your system specs? I can't imagine ME being the "best" for anything..

I'm running Windows XP. Civ3 seems to run pretty well on my system. Other than a bug in 1.07f where it would crash to desktop when I tried to auto move a settler over a river, I haven't had any crashes at all.

I'm playing Marla's Word Map with 14 other civs. I'm in the industrial age already, and I clocked turn times to be about 25-ish seconds for me.

I'm Win98, P3 550MHz, 256MB 100MHz SDRAM, for your FYI. I guess i'm just lucky.

[Aeson]

I'm talking about the time needed for your own automated workers, when you have 100's of them. The time needed to process turns is usually only 10-30 seconds even in the late game for me.

[notyoueither]

Aeson.

OK. I never have 100s of automated workers. I'm too much of a control freak for that. Also, I am playing large maps with 12 civs.

However, I never notice any lag in moving workers or any other units.

Perhaps your bug is in the auto worker routines and it affects all workers when you have so many?

Salve

[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

[Aeson]

The delay happens whether or not the workers are automated for me. It almost always occurs when I am moving a worker more than ~30 spaces in a single turn. Anything under ~30 and the movement is almost instantaneous.

I usually keep control of my workers as well. I was using timing from automated workers as I can accurately state how long it takes them to complete their tasks. When manually setting the workers tasks, much of the lapsed time is from my decision making, and it's hard to keep track of the overall worker response time.

[notyoueither]

Hmmm. I'm commonly zipping workers 20 to 40 squares along rail. All instantaneous. I love that stack command... zip, 12 workers from point a to point b in 0.597 seconds.

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

[ICMB]

Hmm.

I've *never* seen the slowdowns that I've heard people complain about. It must be something specific to the system config that triggers it.

For what it's worth, I'm on Win2K. I play mostly on a 774mHz CPU with a GF2, and I've had huge maps where I have hundreds of units and never noticed any particular slowdown.

- ICMB