Lag/frame drops

[bobwwd]

So I downloaded this mod (latest version) and played it a while. It's nice but I have a problem that bothers me so much, everytime I select an unit, open a city screen or click unit to move somewhere the game freezes for 0.3-0.5 seconds or so.
Also alt-tabbing back to game freezes it for few seconds.

My CPU is i7 4770k, GPU is GTX 760 with 2GB VRAM, 8GB RAM, I don't have an SSD harddisk.

What's causing this? Too much stuff in the mod or? Is there a way to get rid of this?

I searched through google but I don't find any topics related to this

 

[tmv]

Not having an SSD can certainly give you problems with this mod, but there are a few pieces of information you didn't include:

• What is your OS (including 32bit or 64bit)?
• How large is your HDD and how much free space do you have? Is your HDD defragmented?
• How large is your pagefile? Is it set to a fixed size?
• How large is the map in your game? How many AI civs?
• How far have you got in your game when you have these problems?
• Do you play fullscreen?
• Do you have anything running in the background that uses a lot of CPU capacity / RAM?

Aside from that and certainly when you don't have an SSD I would strongly recommend not to ALT-TAB!

 

[bobwwd]

I have Win7 64bit
Civ4 is installed on secondary HDD (not external), C: drive where windows is has 50GB free, Civ4 HDD has 680GB free. Drives are not defragmented (or are? Not sure which is the word defragmented or fragmented, but they are "fine" as in shows 0%)
Pagefile is dynamic, should it be fixed size?
It happens probably on any map size / AI count, I've tried Huge with 18 civs, standard with 6 civs and few others and it doesn't make a difference. The game runs smoothly otherwise.
The freezes are already on the first turn.
I play fullscreen, I tried windowed, no difference.
I have only Civ4 running with Windows' own processes, no AV or such running in background.

I also tried Rise of Mankind and few other mods but they work fine.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Have you went to the Main BtS screen and after selecting Advanced click the Graphics tab and maybe try some different settings in it?

Also If you have the original BtS CDs re-install the Directx 9.0b or c that it has. Newer Vid cards with newer Directx versions (like Directx11) sometime overwrites some of the older version files. Re-installing the Directx that came with the game corrects the unecessary overwriting but should not bother the newer version.

I have had win 7 64 and I now have win 10 64. I have my graphic settings in game (BtS) at medium and with a GTX 550 ti 1GB vid card have not had any stutter.

Good Luck

JosEPh

 

[bobwwd]

Might be that I would need an SSD for C2C because I hear the HDD reading the disk everytime the freeze happens. I rarely hear it read the disk that much in normal games.

Oh well, maye some day in the future when I buy SDD I can play this mod hehe. Unless something else is causing it

 

[JosEPh_II]

Might be that I would need an SSD for C2C because I hear the HDD reading the disk everytime the freeze happens. I rarely hear it read the disk that much in normal games.

Oh well, maye some day in the future when I buy SDD I can play this mod hehe. Unless something else is causing it

Neither ThunderBrd nor I have SSDs in our computers. We Test, Mod, and play fine without one.

Another suggestion with a question (or 2) 1st. Do you "Let windows" handle your Performance Settings? And what is the size of your Paging File?

JosEPh

 

[bobwwd]

Neither ThunderBrd nor I have SSDs in our computers. We Test, Mod, and play fine without one.

Another suggestion with a question (or 2) 1st. Do you "Let windows" handle your Performance Settings? And what is the size of your Paging File?

JosEPh

Windows doesn't handle my performance settings automatically (actually I need to double check that). My paging file is now fixed and is 8192MB on both C: drive (where windows is installed) and E: drive (where Civ4 is installed).

I tried changing values in Civ4 ini files, no difference. I disabled/enabled VSync in Nvidia control panel, no difference. I set prerender limit in Nvidia control panel to 1 from 3/automatic, no difference.

I installed DX9c, no difference.

I played on lowest/highest graphics settings, no difference. Messed around with the BUG menu, no difference.

Windows and graphics card have the latest drivers and updates

Framerate drops to 0-4 when the frame skip happens

The game doesn't actually freeze, it just skips frames. Like when I set unit to move to a different square the frame stops and when rendering continues the unit is half way going to the next square. And it doesn't matter if I use mouse/cursor or keyboard to move/do stuff

I also noticed this issue is also present when I play Rise of Mankind mod, but it's so "small" that's it's almost unnoticeable. Then I tried Fall from Heaven 2 mod and that doesn't have it at all, or it's so "small" that I don't see it. Vanilla game doesn't have it at all. I can notice it in Rise of Mankind by selecting an unit and holding the F button (fortify) and scrolling the screen with mouse, if the scrolling is smooth it's not present but if the scrolling is not smooth it's present. Unit moving (only if I move them), city screens, some city screen buttons (not all), pressing Fortify or Heal on keyboard or from the panel ingame, some interface buttons, all those and some others cause the frame skip.

Out of ideas here heh

I watched some youtube Let's Plays of C2C and I noticed some people have the same issue but the frameskips are way shorter

I'm gonna de-fragment disks just incase (although it shows 0%) and disable few windows services to see if it makes any difference.

EDIT: Nope, nothing worked.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I played on lowest/highest graphics settings, no difference.

This included Medium? And did you have anti-laising(sp?) Off or on one of the other settings.

I think there is a Config setting that deals with framerate. But I don't recall which one at the moment. I think its the Config for BtS. Use Notepad to Open a config file, if you didn't know.

EDIT: CIV4Config has many settings concerning Framerate. You may want to go thru them.

What Resolution do you use? Maybe it's too high for this old 32bit engine that runs BtS? If its above 1920x 1080 maybe take it below this setting.

JosEPh

 

[bobwwd]

I tried medium too, didn't help.
I always play 1920x1080, I tried these settings and restarted Civ, didn't help:


I did also edit the framerate settings in the config but didn't help either

It made no difference, the frameskips take the same time as before

I'm gonna re-install Civ4 and see if that helps. That's one thing I haven't tried yet, maybe some files are corrupt or something... because now that I think about it I did have some problems when I was patching from 3.13 to 3.17 to 3.19 but don't remember what happened

It has to be something with the Civ, because all of my other games work fine. Civ's the only one that doesn't work right (with mods)

Use Notepad to Open a config file, if you didn't know.

I'm an IT guy and (C++) programmer so yeah I did know hehe

EDIT: Re-installing Civ4 and patching to 3.19 didn't help. Btw, are some of the animals supposed to have missing attack animations, etc?

 

[JosEPh_II]

I tried medium too, didn't help.
I always play 1920x1080, I tried these settings and restarted Civ, didn't help:


I did also edit the framerate settings in the config but didn't help either

It made no difference, the frameskips take the same time as before

I'm gonna re-install Civ4 and see if that helps. That's one thing I haven't tried yet, maybe some files are corrupt or something... because now that I think about it I did have some problems when I was patching from 3.13 to 3.17 to 3.19 but don't remember what happened

It has to be something with the Civ, because all of my other games work fine. Civ's the only one that doesn't work right (with mods)


I'm an IT guy and (C++) programmer so yeah I did know hehe

EDIT: Re-installing Civ4 and patching to 3.19 didn't help. Btw, are some of the animals supposed to have missing attack animations, etc?

If you are a C++ progman then you are Way above me! And yes the animals are going thru a transition right now and graphics are not caught up yet. If you can name/post specific ones that would help. Could be oversight.

Ummm...Looking for a demanding hobby? We could use another Programmer, even part time. If even remotely interested then PM ThunderBrd.

JosEPh

 

[bobwwd]

I'm gonna test later if it makes any difference playing from an external HDD or from an USB drive. Gonna try also if my other PC has the same issue, which has way lower specs and different parts than this PC.. and has Windows Vista. I'm also gonna install Microsoft's Virtual Machine, install Windows XP (or Win7) and Civ4 on it.. I'm really curious what's causing the frameskips..

But I have a hunch it's somehow HDD or GPU related

Ummm...Looking for a demanding hobby? We could use another Programmer, even part time. If even remotely interested then PM ThunderBrd.

Haha, depends what sort of programming. I'm pretty busy usually so I'll think about it

 

[JosEPh_II]

<snip>

Haha, depends what sort of programming. I'm pretty busy usually so I'll think about it

Mostly helping ThunderBrd confirm his coding is correct. And any helpful insights or hints/observations on how to make it more efficient.

JosEPh

 

[bobwwd]

Mostly helping ThunderBrd confirm his coding is correct. And any helpful insights or hints/observations on how to make it more efficient.

JosEPh

Sounds good, I can do that. Is it C++ language or Python or which? (never modded anything for Civ4 so no idea which language the mods use) I have mostly experience with C++, Fortran, Java and ActionScript (in that order). Haven't used other languages that much but I'm a quick learner haha

Anyway... Testing now Civ4 on my other PC. After that I'll install it on a virtual PC with Windows XP. If it works normally on the virtual PC then Civ4 is somehow conflicting with my Win7, if it doesn't work on the virtual PC then it's hardware related issue

 

[Toffer90]

The dll is c++ code, we also have quite a few python files. Any initiative from your part would be very appreciated either you choose to familiarize yourself with the dll, python or both.
At the moment we only have one c++ programmer (Thunderbird) and one python programmer (DancingHoskuld). there are others that come and go but these are the two steadfast ones at the moment.

Me and Sparth mostly work on graphics and XML. Joseph is our quality control and does a bit of this and that in XML. StrategyOnly is "the boss" who started C2C, he is mostly retired, but often voice his opinion, and we usually follow it.

Hope to hear more from you in the future. ^^

 

[bobwwd]

I'll check out the DLL structure when I have some time, I've been trying to "fix" Civ4 the past few days

I have also some modeling/animation experience with Blender. (I work on my random Unreal Engine 4 project occasionally, programming C++ since the source is open source and creating models/animations for it)

I've been interested with Civ4's 32bit 4GB RAM limit, if it would be possible to make a "hack" for it to store memory in another app. Like some modders did for Skyrim or whatever game it was to use more than 4GB RAM on 32bit app with the help of another app. Haven't looked in to that but would help my massive 34 player games on "vanilla" game...

 

[Toffer90]

Do pay heed that we as modders have no access to the .exe source code, so there are things we just cannot change about the game and limits we can't get around. The dll however is a huge amount of code that probably still holds great potential for improvements.

 

[bobwwd]

Do pay heed that we as modders have no access to the .exe source code, so there are things we just cannot change about the game and limits we can't get around. The dll however is a huge amount of code that probably still holds great potential for improvements.

Yeah I know no access to the .exe source.

I took a quick look at the CvGameCoreDLL sources located at Civ4/CvGameCoreDLL folder. Is that the same for BtS or BtS DLL has different sources?
However, at first glance seems pretty straightforward C++ code. I've seen more complex

 

[Toffer90]

BtS dll have different sources as do the C2C dll.

C2C sources:
Civ4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Caveman2Cosmos\Sources

 

[bobwwd]

BtS dll have different sources as do the C2C dll.

C2C sources:
Civ4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Caveman2Cosmos\Sources

Ah alright, thanks. Gonna take a look while my slow another PC is copying Civ4...

Don't wanna go too much off-topic here.. trying to get rid of frameskips in Civ hehe. Well.. in modded Civ

 

[Toffer90]

Ah alright, thanks. Gonna take a look while my slow another PC is copying Civ4...

Don't wanna go too much off-topic here.. trying to get rid of frameskips in Civ hehe. Well.. in modded Civ

I don't think there is much to be done about the frame skip, although it does sound somewhat worse in your case than I've experienced myself.

Have you tried rolling back to an older graphic driver, or perhaps make sure you have the latest version?