Learning patience with the turn lag (GOTM 17 no spoilers)

[el_kalkylus]

Finally I get the game to work! I have been really stupid. Since I couldn't get the game to start on the second end of turn after waiting about 5 minutes, I pressed ctrl-alt-del and saw that civ3 was not responding. So I reinstalled everything, read through the readme text files carefully, contacted Cracker, I even uninstalled civ3 again and reinstalled it. I never got it to work...until today, 3 weeks later. I had done a minor change with the files, and started the game. I waited patiently for 6 minutes, and all of a sudden, it worked! After end of turn, I waited another 6 minutes, and it worked! I could play the game!

If I had only waited 6 minutes instead of 5 minutes in the beginning of mars... Impatience was the problem.

 

[Yndy]

On my PC the turn one lag was about 5 mins. After 2 mins of waiting I used Alt+Tab and start reading the Read-me to see what have I missed. It took about 5 minutes to re-read the text and I saw that I did everything by the book. When I Alt+ Tab back I was in turn two. Problem solved.

 

[el_kalkylus]

I didn't think the civ3 engine would keep on going when you alt-tab. Good to know.

This is pretty annoying. Waiting each turn takes 6 minutes, I have played 3 hours now and I am only at 2800 bc. There is no way I will keep playing to the end, so I might as well stop and wait for next gotm. It would have been fun to play though, at least QSC.

I hope "they" will not make a game like this again.

 

[BillChin]

Originally posted by el_kalkylus
I didn't think the civ3 engine would keep on going when you alt-tab. Good to know.

This is pretty annoying. Waiting each turn takes 6 minutes, I have played 3 hours now and I am only at 2800 bc. There is no way I will keep playing to the end, so I might as well stop and wait for next gotm. It would have been fun to play though, at least QSC.

The lag gets less and less, slowly but it is noticeable. My game started with 10 minutes per turn lag, down to six minutes around 10 AD and down to about three minutes by the Industrial Age.

I also thought the game had locked up and rebooted the machine twice before sitting through ten minutes to see the next turn. Running Internet Explorer did not seem to slow the game down much, and that was a common diversion during the long waits.
+ Bill

 

[Creepster]

I found that the delay helped my game out. It allowed me to better plan out my next move much better than I had been doing. For me the lag went away completelyby early AD.

 

[alamo]

A 6 minute lag!


Time for an upgrade!

I had a lag of about 24 sec, and I thought that was bad. It starts adding up. My game ended at 28 hours, around 1870AD. I would not play it again (except maybe the fun stuff at the start).

 

[planetfall]

Thank you for opening this thread. My lag between turns has been exceptionally long, i.e. about 3 minutes. This is not normal with PTW.

Yndy What did you change to decrease lag
time between turns?

---------

Opps, Yndy. I reread your note. You didn't have a solution. bummer. I guess this is the cost of having extra graphics.

It will be interesting to see if the PTW newest patch solves the turn problem. {assuming GOTM 18 will allow us to use the latest patch.

== PF

 

[hotrod0823]

I used the latest patch and it didn't decrease the lag. I managed to struggle through the QSC but gave up fighting the lag.

 

[Jurimax]

I hardly suffered lag at all. Perhaps a couple of seconds, but it's hardly noticeable. After a couple of turns, I could barely notice the lag...

Greetings

 

[Creepster]

I noticed a clear drop in the lag as I destroyed the fog. In other words if there is less fog than the PC has less to process so there should be less time between the turns for it to process.

 

[el_kalkylus]

10 minutes BillChin! That takes the price. You really should get a price for this.

 

[Yndy]

@ PF

My theory:

The non-moving barb units in the game cause the lag.

As there are no units with 0 movement points I guess cracker did not allowed the said units to move on any kind of tile to mimic (nice word) 0 movement units. I guess the AI takes its time to figure how to move those units every turn. Sadly (for the AI) it never succeeds but it never learns either.

 

[task48]

my system is a 900 mhz with 256 ram, and I've never noticed any lag, except turn 1 lag on huge maps... good computer, but by no means as strong as some that are available. One thing I always do before I start the game up is to check and be sure I dont have anything running in the background (ctr-alt-del) and then check my system resources. I used to race online a lot and everyone used a program called "end it all"- I dont have it now but it shuts stuff down for you automatically. I dont know if this will help, everyone's situation is usually different because everyone is set up differently..

 

[planetfall]

Yndy and Creepster,

I also noticed game returning to normal as poison fog was cleared. Maybe for future games Cracker needs to give the fog movement of 1. This could be an interesting variation.

== PF

 

[Phillip_martin]

Originally posted by task48
One thing I always do before I start the game up is to check and be sure I dont have anything running in the background (ctr-alt-del) and then check my system resources.

Good advice. I would always reccommend closing down any uneccessary functions prior to loading CIV3. I think some people get lulled into a false sense of security with CIV3 being a turn based game but it is still VERY resource hungry.

The only functions I have running is Paint and WordPad, everything else (sytem monitors, virus software, internet, etc) goes. My machine is the bare minimum for CIV3 - 450mhz PII which had a big la but not 5 to 10 minutes like some reports.

 

[planetfall]

Amen to Phillip's advice. At first with this game I tried having 123 and civ3 open. It was so slow on a 400Mhz 786MB system, I had to reduce my 123 file to just one sheet. Now that I have eliminated most of the fog, I have returned to standard play environment: game, paint, and 123.

I use paint to keep track of key resources and 123 to keep play notes. From time to time I will check system resources and if they have dropped to 50-60%, I will exit all and reboot to get back to the 70-80% free. It's like civ and/or windows has problems freeing up memory and the only way of recovering memory resources is to reboot. This is with a w98 system but I have heard many reports of latest, greatest XP, still having problems recapturing used memory.

== PF

 

[planetfall]

Final update-- This turn lag with PTW 1.14 is definitely system related.

400Mhz
512 Ram {thought I had more, but wrong}
Latency between turns: 5 minutes

2.3 Ghz
1024 Ram
Latency: less than 20 seconds

NB: even with the new machine, sometimes switching user will cause problems.

FYI: when PTW runs it uses about 173K.

== PF

 

[task48]

i had a magazine a while back that showed about 12 things you could do to reduce system drain using xp, basically turning off all the bells and whistles, could probably find it if i looked a while. W98 has served me pretty well so I havent tried to upgrade, yet.

 

[planetfall]

Task48,

I understand. W98 was fine for civ3. When PTW 1.14 came out I had to add more RAM because it locked up too much and was too slow.

After Crackers GOTM valueadds, I finally had to bite the bullet and upgrade. And yes I have turned off Instant Messenger as it is too annoying to get security warnings every few minutes. I haven't performance tuned the system yet, but expect to get more speed after doing some tuning.

Caution
If you get a new system and a flat monitor, think carefully. They are NOT as clear as the old monitors. It is like looking thru a crackerjack prism screen. Yes that cuts glare, but also muddies up the text and some graphics. I thought it was cool to have a 19" monitor with 19" of viewing area vs the 15" view area of the old 17" monitor. That was almost the same as a normal 21" monitor. The cost of lightness is sharp resolution.

-- PF