Graphics Hangup- Ships shooting in slow motion

It happens to me also when mooving ships..

when it happens is when you have lots of ships Stacked (grouped) together.. the more you have in a stack/group the slower they move.. I think it also depends on how many ships (sprites) total are in the game (both yours and the AI's) as the ships data has to be updated and if there are gaps (IE the ships in the stacks arn't created in order one after the other) then it has to search the ships stacks (in programming terms) to find which ships are which and then update that particular ships data.. the same I dare say would go for firing

mind you i'm talking about some stacks being up to about 20 ships .. a perfect example is when you find a hord of corvets.. it tqakes forever for the stack of ships to move.. even one at a time..

To get around this and make it at least a little quicker have another panel open above the main map.. eg: the Diplomacy screen or planet production or like them.... this means that the program doesn't need to update the main map till you view it again.. another speed up would be to disable ships and paths in the mini map.. although this doesn't speed thing up as much.. to get the game running as fast as it can then (with respect to this) do both in conjunction with each other.. Also in prefs disable follow ships, see ai battles, etc... etc... the more you have turned on the slower things will run

Hope this Helps

There is no hardware acceleration for 2D graphics, so everything is done in software.  If there are a lot of different images (like lots of ships) on the screen, you will notice a slowdown. 

Sound can also affect the ship battles.  You may want to check out the sticky thread about problems with sound.

Cari.. I was wondering.. if the ships are stacked are all their inages updated when the stack moves..

I'm asking this because when I have only 1 stack and 1 planet on the screen the ships still move slower the bigger the stack

Or is it as I summised.. in my prevous reply

Yes, that is the case J.T.Qwerk.  I had to do it that way because of the way that the hit detection code works (the hit detection was dependant on the graphics). 

In Gal Civ 2, the graphic objects will be separate from the data objects, so we could re-write the entire 3D engine and not break any of the data. Or re-write the data without breaking the 3D engine.

I have been having this problem for quite some time. And it happens on about 90% of the battles. It can be as simple as a battle between a star fighter and a corvette. One ship will start to fire, then the first explosion starts and things slow way down. I noticed that if I alt-tabbed to any other window and then right back to galciv that the explosion would immediate pick back up and the battle would resume. If I don't tab out of galciv, the graphic could take minutes to complete a single explosion. I have upgraded a great many times and am currently on the latest release - 1.22.101. I am running under XP SP1 on a DELL p4 2.6GHZ machine with 1G or RAM using the standard on-board graphics ports. System reports the graphics controller to be Intel 82865G w/ 96MB of dedicated memory.

I asked this sometime earlier as well. I too see the problem from time to time. I've seen it take in upwards of 10 minutes for a ship to shoot and the enemy to blow-up while using a very high-end fast PC! Very annoying!!!

I was also seeing slow downs for stacks of ships to move. This was real bad on my old AMD 7 CPU.

What I did was buy a very high-end fast PC, custom built (it was time to do so anyway). The slow movement of stacks was greatly reduced, but I still witness it from time to time. In posting about this earlier, I was told more memory would help. I have 1024 MB currently for Windows 2000, which I thought would have been way more than enough (?). I've yet to get more ram (other more pressing expenses). Somehow I doubt more ram will solve the slow motion explosion problem.

The slow motion explosion thing... that can be by-passed if you are seeing serious time delays - go into the game menu and turn off: "Explosions" and "Show AI Battles." Annoying to do that if you like seeing it the explosions, but you may have no choice.

I "Hear what you are saying," CariElf, but with a modern high-end fast PC, I still find it very strange or odd that early in the game when there are not that many ships in the game that this slow motion explosion thing even happens at all? (mods "on" or not doesn't seem to matter). I have to wonder if something else is also going on in an adverse way to cause it.... I have always noticed that after the explosion ends, the game engine was rushing to show me another screen announcement or another battle (probably means nothing).

I'm not PC geek kind of guy, but due to what others have posted in other threads --- so I find it strange that with all the advances in AGP and DirectX and Vedio Cards (in general), that it is impossible to do some of the graphic processing in the hardware mode like other 2D games currently do (Settlers IV and Master Of Orion II are some examples). But some folks are saying 2D vedio processing is impossible now in AGP or otherwise in state-of-the-art vedio cards - strikes me as a huge technological step backwards for games designed in 2D, which is still a very effective presentation for some concept designs. And why does the newest DirectX version still have hardware tests for Direct Draw if it is impossible to use it??? What about PCIE? Will that technology (I hear will eventually replace AGP) permit 2D hardware processing (if coded to it)? What am I misunderstanding here?

Battles of one by one take minutes

It's not a sound problem. It's grafics. Switch off ship battles and AI ship battles and you don't have the problem amy more.

Disable hardware acceleration for DirectDarw/Direct3d in display properties tab. And all Ok.

sorry for my bad English.

Thanks, I'll try that... you mean on the graphic card display in "Properties?" I had it turned off in the DirectX panel, but there was no effect.... completely forgot the adapter card window had a selection for 3D (but it needs to be "On" for other software).

Look this:
http://xpilgrim.fromru.com/q1.gif

Myself, I'm using Radeon X700... so from the picture, yes, if you're refering to the graphics card - in Russian (it looks like), but I see what you mean

On the Radeon, my only option is to select 3D or OpenGL when using 3D, I can put the slider to "Performance" or closer to "Quality." The card is a high end card, and neither setting made a difference last night while I played the game; and the "slow motion" happenned in both graphic card options during one of my battles between two ships. I haven't tried OpenGL setting. My card also has a slider to stop all hardware acceleration ("None" to "Full" in the "Troubleshooting Window"); will try that next.... but as other posters have said, the game doesn't use hardware acceleration - so turning it off doesn't make sense, but I will try it.

This tuning completely decide problem with _very_ slow ship battles on my PC (amd 2600&Geforce Ti 4600 OS Win2k or WinXp. Galactic Civilizations - Altarian Prophecy 1.52b.013). In game : map 28x28, 7 races, ShowAIShipBattles=1, ShowShipBattles=1)

Hardware acceleration for Direct Draw in this tuning defines how windows display graphics information (using overlay, etc.).

This seems to be a more general problem than I thought.

I thought that it is an Intel problem but now I realize that Nvidia Ti4600 and ATI X700 are affected as well. (:(

Thus it's not an Intel but a Stardock issue. Since GC2 has new grafics I hope that this part of the code will definitely not make it into the successor :notsure:

An aside, it also has been mentioned in another thread that addittional ram memory will help reduce the problem. I haven't tried this yet, but certainly have room to expand.

That's nonsence. This computer has 2 GByte and still has the problem.

And remember it's one ship against one ship, e.g. Starfighter against Defender and it takes minutes on a 3.2 GHz machine with 2 GByte
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I had this problem way back at release. Worked through it with Cari for a while (even got several modified versions of the program itself) but it never really went away. So I just disabled battle display and moved on

Now I just cross my fingers that I don't find a similar problem after I get my hands on GC2 today (just hope it runs so I can take piles of screenies :D)

So much for the ram thing, lol.... I thought it was Cari that mentioned that in the older thread I'm thinking about. I forget. Oh well.

Tell us what you think of GCII when you get a chance