Siege lag when facing buildings

[userfri3ndly]

I'm having this dilemma with big sieges, when the camera is facing the city, the animation gets very choppy and laggy. When turning away and facing my own troops or a close angle, animation goes back to being smooth.

Specs:
Intel Core2Duo 2.66GHz
1 GB RAM DDR2
Geforce 7600 GT 256 MB DDR2
31 GB free HD space

addn'l info:
1.3 patch Kingdoms
Retrofit Mod

I first tried setting unit, texture, grass, shadow, and vegetation to low, but the animation was still crappy, then I put building on low, still crappy, everything else high except building, same thing. Basically, I really think the culprit is the structures, because when facing the troops and not viewing the city animation is really smooth at the high settings (default). Then again, for some strange reason I only have this problem with Large and Huge Cities but not in Citadels and Fortresses, so maybe it's not a graphic problem but a bug somewhere?

Wacha think?

edit: could there be some kind of fix to reduce the view distance so I wouldn't have to render the buildings that's far away? I'm guessing the problem is the staggering amount of buildings in the Huge and Large Cities.

[SSJPabs]

I am not sure how much it will help you but here: Reduced city textures. The person has since disappeared and no one has updated it for 1.3, it worked wonders for me on 1.2 especially if I use shader 1.

Specs:
Semprion 3100+, 1.8Ghz
1 GB Corsair RAM DDR2
ATI Sapphire x1650 Pro

I also had a problem with lag on the maps and needed to uninstall and reinstall my video drivers, so you might try that.

[userfri3ndly]

um, if I have the 1.3 patch, will that mod cause problems with my game? I'm thinking that could probably solve the problem, since basically everything EXCEPT the buildings run very smoothly at the high settings.

btw, I notice the lag gets more severe around the town plaza part of the huge cities. Using shader 1, I was able to play in tolerable choppiness up until I reached the plaza. This is so frustrating, before the huge cities came everything was smooth and clear.

[SSJPabs]

The mod requires an io file switch to work, I have not personally tested it yet with 1.3, and know little about modding. However 1.3 is a Compatibility patch ONLY, that is, it enables you to play multiplayer against someone with Kingdoms with no other changes to the original game. As such, the models of the cities are the same, so I don't think it would cause problems. After installing it in 1.2 I was able to play on everything high with shader 1 and you have a better system than me. You can also play it with other mods as long as the mod has an io file switch.

I would really recommend you uninstall and the reinstall your graphic card drivers also.

EDIT: I am beginning testing of it this afternoon. Will update here if I can get it to work in Vanilla 1.3 without crashes.
EDIT2: It seems to work for me in both shader 1 and shader 2 in Vanilla 1.3. Going to work on getting it to function with the retro mod, as again, that mod doesn't change any city/castle models, however it goes to the Kingdoms.exe so I'm not sure what effect that would have as the mod works with the original M2 game. I assume I need to create an io file switch for the retro-mod... yikes.

FINAL EDIT: I created an io file switch for the Retrofit mod and tested it out with a Portuguese siege of Zaragosa since you can attack it in 2 turns.... if you start up the Retro fit mod with the IO file switch, then you can use reduced city textures on the RetroFit mod! The left is regular Retrofit, the right is Retrofit after installing the RCT mod and running Retrofit from the io file switch. As you can see it really reduces the textures, settings for that one were "low" building textures, with all other settings running on "HIGH" using shader 1 at 1024x768. Settings were the same for both shots.

The Proof

One word of caution: I got an unspecified error when I tried to run the Retrofit without the IO file switch, HOWEVER, I tried it several times after that and got no errors.

[userfri3ndly]

hey, thanks for all that effort.

Okay, I only have one problem now. Sorry, I'm new to this, what's an io_file switch? I downloaded the reduced textures mod, but since retrofit didn't have the io file switch, the author instructs to add it manually to the .bat, which I have no idea how to do.

edit: I found your thread asking how to do io file switches. Studying it now. Thanks again. Good luck with Venice

edit2: if it's not too much of a bother, what do the buildings look like from afar?

[SSJPabs]

Final Final Update: Well I went and did some testing after dinner. Showing my ignorance at modding, I realized it works for Kingdoms as well. Because the models for the buildings are all taken from the Grand Campaign files which have been resized, in Kingdoms the buildings are also less textured. Unless there are Kingdoms Only unique buildings (such as the Teutonic castles) all others should run at the lower textures. Alternately there may be an error if you go into a battle with Kingdoms only buildings. If there is, just run the Kingdoms campaign normally (from the launcher) and it should be fine. There isn't a problem.

To create the io file switch open Notepad, type the following line:

kingdoms.exe --features.mod=mods/retrofit --io.file_first

Then choose to save it as Retrofit.bat and make sure "Save as type" box that pops up in windows is set to "all files." Then drag it into the M2 Total War folder and if you click it, you will run the Retrofit mod from the switch. I have already made io switches for all 4 kingdoms campaigns. If you want to do so, just swap out the names like in that thread I made a while back then just click on the right campaign. So far I've only tested it with the Crusades but it should work with all of them. As you can see in the images the buildings look almost normal from a distance but only get blotchy in close ups. Myself I prefer the performance I get from this mod over the look of the buildings--I'd rather the units look nice, and the AAR images should get a little better. The only reason I'm doing all this work is because I got tired of waiting for someone else to do it and decided to figure it out myself now, heh.

Picture of Reduced City Textures:
Image 1
Image 2

[userfri3ndly]

The mod works great! Everything runs smoothly now at Shader 2, Bloom Reflections and everything at High except Buildings. I almost couldn't see the difference at first, the reduced textures are really good. I can't believe that some insignificant detail as building texture bogged down the entire game. Maybe they should have optimized texture processing for buildings.

That's kinda Crusader-y of you, how your helping was altruistic but fueled by personal desires. Anyway, thanks a lot, this really solved my problem.