lz14 said:
I don't know if this is related to 2D or 3D:
In civ 3, it takes a longgg time to load between turns, But, after the wait everything will run smoothly.
Civ 4 however, still takes a long time to load a turn, but after the load, it's still seems to be generating things dynamically and everything still lags and is choppy. It's no longer enjoyable to play.
I don't care how long I have to wait between turns, but I'd MUCH prefer after the loading everything runs good. So civ 4 is much worse than civ3 in that regard.
For Civ3, the duration of the turn in between was caused by bad programming. This has been drastically improved with Civ4, as one has to admit.
Nevertheless, Civ4 still has a problem with some kind of memory leak (talking about 1.52, as I am still having an old game to run). This becomes obvious when you are playing at a huge map in the later eras and let the machine run, while you are asleep. Memory usage may go up from ~75% to ~90% over the course of some hours.
Saving and reloading will help, as the memory usage then will be reduced to ~75% again. Additionally, after saving and reloading, the player's turns will run more smoothly.
romelus said:
i don't mind that civ4 uses a 3d engine, it's just that it isn't implemented well. there are lots of opportunities to cut the graphics requirement, such as dynamic texture (GTA) so that when the viewpoint is far from a city the buildings are not rendered at full detail - a waste because you can't see the difference. also civ4 seems to render all units on screen regardless of whether it's necessary. with a stack of 30 tanks it's really only necessary to render the top tank, but civ4 seems to render all 30 tanks
Bingo!
Lars_Domus said:
[...]The technical quality of the graphics is barely at the same level as games from half a decade ago, and on top of that everything looks cartoonish. Most of my "gamer"-friends' reaction to the screenshots from Civ IV-reviews was disapproving laughter, and these are the kind of people they were presumably targetting as potential buyers with the 3D-engine.[...]
Unfortunately, this is just true. Civ4's 3D graphics just s**** in comparison to other games. Even on decent machines, in the later eras of the game wonder movies like to stutter. Units stop their animation half way through or are just sliding like on skates.
And I'd guess, a P4 3.6GHz, FSB 800, 2 GB RAM (533) and a SLI-combo of 2 6600GS (and yes, a completely clean installation of Windows) is quite enough to fulfill the requirements and to exceed even the recommendations.
And the same effects happen at my other machine as well, although there they may be caused by lower specs (2.6 GHz, FSB800, 1.5GB RAM, ATI 9600 Sapphire and again a clean windows installation).
Not to mention that on both machines the mouse-overs happen to disappear occasionally. Very nice, if you are just in the diplo screen and want to check about your opponent's composition of diplo values.
ShadowDagger said:
If you complain because it runs slow on your computer then upgrade it. It is that simple. From the perspective of someone who has a highend computer, wouldn't you be pissed if your favorite game reverted to 2D graphics that you could play with your grandparents computer? The fact is that games are making progress.[...]
This is complete nonsense. Although some players indeed have machines lower or just reaching the requirements, a lot have much better systems with no better luck.
And although I don't own exactly a highend computer, I would have preferred to have an engine being able to handle huge maps with all 18 nations, up to the end (and with huge I don't refer to the handkerchiefs which now have been called 'huge').
What you are calling "progress" merely is eye-candy. Not that this would be a bad thing. But it is not the
game, which has improved, it is the
graphics.
And the term "improvement" may very well be discussed.
Instead, the engine keeps track on values which never have a noticeable effect for the player. It keeps track of rivers flowing from west to east or north to west. It calculates cultural input for each and every tile, obviously to calculate the decay after a city has been destroyed. It calculates individual values for diplomatics, yet the total doesn't mean anything, because it still is random. At least you cannot predict a nations behaviour from those figures. Two nations with a net of +12 in your favour act differently (these +12 are composed from different individual values). The one wouldn't sell a technology, the other wouldn't stop trading with a fourth nation - yet, they would happily start a war!
Come on! This is just plainly complete nonsense.
Seems like the developers had many different things in mind when they started the programming, and finally realized that they wouldn't reach any of their goals. So, they just stopped all those little calculations, cobbled it together the best way they could and forgot to clean up the mess.
conspiracy?... nah!) 
Seeya! 
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