Will there always be lag?

Crappy programming; you can exceed the requirements by a lot and still have it crap out on you. :(

Being Civ player is suffering.

As a sidenote, what software do you use for recording these things?
 
limiting factor is single core 32bit program. no matter how many cores or ram u got, it is limited to 3gb/1 core.

Which is utterly comical and sad, given that the game wasn't coded to run well with those specs on a lot of its settings.
 
As a sidenote, what software do you use for recording these things?

Sorry, not my recording.

limiting factor is single core 32bit program. no matter how many cores or ram u got, it is limited to 3gb/1 core.

Is it really the RAM limit? :( It's still much faster than when the game came out, though. RAM speed?
 
In the late game my turn times alone are longer than this whole video.
On standard size maps.

Is it really the RAM limit? :( It's still much faster than when the game came out, though. RAM speed?

It's a technical limitation.
With this windows version, the computer is not able to use more RAM.
And that's not windows fault, it's the underlying informatics technology, which is not able to address more.
 
? Confusion.

I've never experienced civ lag. I've played to 2050 (and lost, but that's beyond the point) and didn't experience lag. Maybe one spike when I launched an intercontinental invasion, but that only lasted about half a minute. (Noble difficulty)
 
? Confusion.

I've never experienced civ lag. I've played to 2050 (and lost, but that's beyond the point) and didn't experience lag. Maybe one spike when I launched an intercontinental invasion, but that only lasted about half a minute. (Noble difficulty)

Give the AI 5x+ the number of units to individually consider and move, for each AI, and you'll see a different story.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqezQWhbMBM

There's a mod going on, and high settings, but even a modern computer still gets trashed and abused. :( What's the limiting factor? Besides programming? :D

In K-Mod, I've made massive speed improvements to the wait between turns. -- Most of the time saved does not come from any kind of computational bottleneck. Rather, the main cause was that there were heaps of AI actions which told the game to stop and wait before doing the next action. So there was just heap of 'dead time', where the game was doing absolutely nothing while you were waiting patiently for your next turn...

So with that in mind, I'd say that the bad programming is by far the biggest limiting factor in civ4 performance. Some of it can be improved (as I've done in K-Mod), but a lot of it cannot, because not all of it resides in the dll.
 
In K-Mod, I've made massive speed improvements to the wait between turns. -- Most of the time saved does not come from any kind of computational bottleneck. Rather, the main cause was that there were heaps of AI actions which told the game to stop and wait before doing the next action. So there was just heap of 'dead time', where the game was doing absolutely nothing while you were waiting patiently for your next turn...

So with that in mind, I'd say that the bad programming is by far the biggest limiting factor in civ4 performance. Some of it can be improved (as I've done in K-Mod), but a lot of it cannot, because not all of it resides in the dll.

Release the speed improvements independently, and get a mod to sticky it, STAT! :devil: :devil: :devil:

It's a technical limitation.
With this windows version, the computer is not able to use more RAM.
And that's not windows fault, it's the underlying informatics technology, which is not able to address more.

So, 64 bit windows would fix it? Does RAM or hard/ssd drive speed matter for this sort of thing?
 
So, 64 bit windows would fix it? Does RAM or hard/ssd drive speed matter for this sort of thing?

64 bit Windows might help a bit, but the problem is that Civ4 was made for 32bit, and that the limitation is therefore also additionally in Civ4 itself.
Firaxis would have to make a 64 bit version, that's the only thing which would really fix the problems.
 
Release the speed improvements independently, and get a mod to sticky it, STAT! :devil: :devil: :devil:

Well, I could do that - but rather than only the speed improvements, it might be better to include the usual "Unofficial Patch" bug fixes; and if those are going to be included, I might as well include all of the other bug-fixes that I've made; and of course, most people would appreciate it if BUG was included too... and if I'm including BUG, I might as well include all of the other UI improvements and bugfixes that I've made -- but why stop there? Wouldn't it be better to include the vastly superior AI that I've written? And the balance changes to culture spread, religion spread, and so on? ---

You can see what I'm getting at, right? K-Mod is about making "vanilla" BtS as good as possible without changing the overall flavour. I wouldn't really want to strip the other stuff out to release a stand-alone speed thing, because I reckon the whole of K-Mod is full of improvements that people are going to want.
 
I have never experienced lag in Civ4.

CoD4 is another story (I found myself shouting "Y U NO WORK, ******* SERVER?!" after getting an 8 killstreak with a Double-Tapped M4A1 Carbine and seeing the message "Connection Interrupted")
 
Well, I could do that - but rather than only the speed improvements, it might be better to include the usual "Unofficial Patch" bug fixes; and if those are going to be included, I might as well include all of the other bug-fixes that I've made; and of course, most people would appreciate it if BUG was included too... and if I'm including BUG, I might as well include all of the other UI improvements and bugfixes that I've made -- but why stop there? Wouldn't it be better to include the vastly superior AI that I've written? And the balance changes to culture spread, religion spread, and so on? ---

You can see what I'm getting at, right? K-Mod is about making "vanilla" BtS as good as possible without changing the overall flavour. I wouldn't really want to strip the other stuff out to release a stand-alone speed thing, because I reckon the whole of K-Mod is full of improvements that people are going to want.

You had me until UI improvement. I'm sure yours is in fact better, but what people are looking for is the identical to official version only runs better. The official version is the puzzle people are trying to solve and tinker with. Its the one people know everyone else is playing and can compare, talk about, get good at, etc.
 
You can see what I'm getting at, right? K-Mod is about making "vanilla" BtS as good as possible without changing the overall flavour. I wouldn't really want to strip the other stuff out to release a stand-alone speed thing, because I reckon the whole of K-Mod is full of improvements that people are going to want.

I appreciate the improvements, actually. But, I want multiplayer with friends who prefer vanilla, warts and all. Just the speed (and perhaps BUG) would be great. Their computers would appreciate the speed even more than mine. ;)
 
Yeah.. I do agree with you two that a lot of people would appreciate a mod with only the speed improvements. The argument I put forward was not a particularly strong one. When I first starting making K-Mod I actually didn't want to change the game much either. My original intention was just to use the Better AI mod, and with a small buff to serfdom - and leave everything else as it was in vanilla. So I can certainly empathize with people would want something as close to the unmodded game as possible.

What happened though is that I discovered that the Better AI mod actually wasn't much good*, and game mechanics, which I had previously assumed to be well thought-out and carefully balanced, turned out to be buggy and no where near as well-planned as I had assumed. So I started changing stuff...

Anyway, the upshot is that I have no desire to make a stand-alone speed improvement mod. I'd feel like I was wasting time fixing problems in an inferior product -- problems that I've already fixed anyway. I don't want to do that. -- And then if I make new speed improvements or bug fixes, I don't want to have to port them to the dud version as well as the good version. Sorry. (But anyone else is free to use the stuff from K-Mod to do it them-self.)

Motivation is the limiting resource in pretty much everything I do in my life. I just can't afford to spend what little I have on stuff like that.

(* The Better AI mod had a lot of good stuff in it, and some framework for even more good stuff. But it's unfinished features and its bugs basically resulted in AI that wasn't really any stronger than the original AI.)
 
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