How to remove/simplify "flames" effect? Unplayable lag.

[Deon]

If you don't want to swith the flames' animations completely off try the next action:

Go to /assets/xml/art/CIV4ArtDefines_Feature.xml, find there ARTDEFINE_FEATURE_FLAMES
and change
<ModelFile>Art/Terrain/Features/Flames/tribalvillage.nif</ModelFile>
to
<ModelFile>Art/Effects/cities_irradiated/fx_cities_iradiated.nif</ModelFile>

also don't forget to change <fScale> from high number (like 45) to 1.0.
It looks nice and glowing.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I tried the file Kael uploaded but it made no difference. I'm guessing that smoke doesn't affect framerate. I'm sure that dynamic lighting kills low budget videocards, Oblivion agrees ( I don't know if dynamic lighting is the proper definition actually. the "flicker" effect, you know. like, torches in oblivion for example. disabling the flickering there makes quite a lot of difference )

 

[onedreamer]

Flames are indeed a graphical hog, even the new flames that .33 introduced (they're better now than they were, but they can still be rough).

Actually for me they were much better before, now they are huge

 

[Nimbus]

I tried out Deons switch and it completely cured my screen lag whenever flames on hell terrain were present. Plus glowing misty orange above the burning sands actually looked kinda cool.

 

[Deon]

Also there can be a problem with actual scaling and displaying the result. The only way to check it is to make an animated fire without smoke with same effects. However if there's dynamic lighting really, it's mad. I don't think so. I mean, why do you want dynamic lights from something small inside an unimportant object like Village, Kael stated that this is just a resized version (45 times bigger 8|). However this may be the case. I mean, Firaxians didn't know that someone will use this rare effect in mass with a scale of 45 , so they hadn't optimized it.

 

[civ_king]

OMG i have 1/3 of the world on fire (im playing hyborem, 100AC) on a large map and there is this big splotch on the map that fries my computer

 

[Gelvan]

any word on this one? I always use the suggestion from Deon and it seems to work fine, but I don't know if the "vanilla 0.34" flames are still producing that much smoke and lag? do I still have to do this if I don't want smoke?

 

[zbelg]

I can't speak for everyone but I was pleasantly surprised by the new fire, one city was almost completely surrounded by flames and I had virtually no lag.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I had the same impression although it was only a one tile fire IIRC. still, the animation was running very smooth. did something got changed in 0.34? the smoke is still showing so that wasn't axed ..

 

[Sekerah]

I haven't encountered flames yet in this version but I've noticed that performance in general is greatly increased when compared to previous versions. It used to be if I tried to play with more than 5 civs and/or on a map size bigger than small then I would get wait times of 30+ seconds in between turns in the late game.

In this version I played a game as the Illians with 8 civs total and even in the late game the most I had to wait in between turns was about 10 seconds or so. Also returning to the main menu from in a game seems to go much quicker as well.

I'm not sure what changed but whatever it was good work FfH is much more fun when I can have a lot of civs and not have to worry about insane wait times.