What's up with the lag?

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My comp is:

P4 1.3Ghz
Riva TNT2 model 64, 32 megs of ram
512 megs of ram
Windows XP home, SP 2 installed
directx 9
both game patches installed

this meets and even exceeds the recommended game requirements. Even so, the game is laggy as HELL , even with all the eye candy turned off, at 1024 x 768. It just takes ages to scroll the screen and the cursor... let's just not talk about that. WTF is up?

Please people, SAVE ME!


P.S. could this have anything to do with page file? right now its at 1060.

[ September 25, 2004, 06:20: Message edited by: Beren ]

 

im using a lower res and its STILL laggy. not to mention that hommlet sucks ass, im losing interest fast :/

 

I have a p4 3ghz, hyperthreaded, with a gig of ram and the game is still sluggish at times. It's especially sluggish when pathfinding further away from the party and scrolling is smooth but glitches every now and then. I take it this engine, while beautiful looking, is not optimized very well. It's not really a matter of graphics, but of something is very wrong with th code and the developers just never bothered to fix the inefficiency, because it's so bad that no fast processor is going to cure it. Granted the game is far from now playable. It's very smooth almost all the time for me (like 85 frames per second it looks easy), but it's so easy to tell when the game just stops for a bit. For some reason, it also lags when you press "ESC" to get the Load/Save/Exit menu. I just don't understand why. It's not like I don't understand programming, I'm a software engineer. I think the framework they built the game on eventually screwed them over because it had some inefficienct abstractions built into it and it was probably too late in the project to fix the design, so they just patched where they could and left it.

 

apparently this sums up the whole game. i wouldn't have minded waiting for this thing a year longer if they took the time to iron out all the damn kinks.

 

I'll try running the game on my athlon 64 3400+, radeon 9800 pro, and 1gig of corsair ram as soon as I get my "good" comp back.

for now:

 

awright ill keep at it its just really annoying

 

Meh, my computer is freshly built and a speed demon, and my AMD 3400+ and 1gb Corsair XMS still has lag in ToEE. It's a problem with the engine.

The worst problem happened just today, and was partly my fault, but still: I had beaten the Balor and was heading up the dungeon to to bring the orb to destroy it, and everytime I got by the minotaur room the game would crash to desktop. Then, when I went to load a game to go around the room, I hit tutorial by accident and it overwrote my save game, and my most recent manual save was before the Balor fight.

 

It's definately not spyware, I just installed windows yesturday. It's not like my game lags every 5 seconds, I just know when it will lag and when it won't. For the most part, the game is very smooth.

If I move the map around my guys (but not to far), it's very fast. All character actions, dialog options, inventory stuff is very fast. If I click to my guys only a few meters (like in game meters I guess), it's still fast. If I scroll the map with the mouse and click to move my guys, it lags. The further away, the slower it is.

The reason for this is because when you click to move your guys, an algorithm is used to figure out the best path from the start point to the end point. This algorithm is run for every party member. Now, the alogirthm they used stinks, but there is one very easy way to make it better - just thread it. You see, the path algorithm is running within the same thread, so everything (like game screen rendering) is halted until the algorithm finishes it's work. If they had executed this in an asynchronous thread, the rest of the game would continue to be very smooth and could still function as the algorithm did it's work. It's very important to use asynchronous programming, especially in places where the operation takes longer than 300 milliseconds.

This approach is not only for games, but for windows applications as well. When you press "OK" on a dialog box, it most likely starts up a new thread and does all the processing on the information that you wrote inside that dialog box. If it did not, windows would not be able to render the window while the processing is happening, causing you to not move the window around or still see it when you multitask. This is the same problem when you press "ESC" to get the main menu within the game.

So you see, this is not a matter of processing speed, but it's a matter of poor program design.