Laggy animations

[Streen15]

Hi there,

I'm running darthmod + some music mod. I've been noticing for a while now laggy animations. Sometimes the animations are laggy while in melee, other times just naturally they are laggy. My game in general is not laggy. I have nice frames per second - it's just the animations that are choppy.

Any ideas?

[Don in the North]

gonna need more info mate, what are your comp specs, what settings are you using(also are you aware there is an issue with saving graphics option with latest patch), are you using latest patch are you using latest darthmod, what is the name of the sound mod you are using, do you have any mods that are named patch_modnamehere.pack, have you tried verifying the games integrity via steam

[Earende]

Is it the battle is running smooth as normal but somehow the unit's animation is jerking like mad? If so, I have it as well.

[shadowdrummer46]

Ive been having some lag issues with battles as well as campaigns, and I even lowered the setting to minimum (unit size set at max, which I could do before with graphics at medium) and im running with a passable computer: dualcore at 2.0ghz, 1gb video card, 4gb ram.

Just thought id let you guys know you're not alone.

[Don in the North]

can you guys tell me if it happens in campaigns only or in custom battles, do you have it in vanilla?

[C-zom]

I have this too during very long battles and almost always if I fast forward too much. Its a memory leak of some kind and usually causes a crash after a couple minutes. Nothing we can do about it.

[Streen15]

I used to not have this problem - even with darthmod @ huge unit settings back in the day. Only in the recent month or so have i seen this.

Intel e6600 Dual-Core @ 2.4ghz
4gigs of ddr2800
9800GT

My comp runs it fine. Seems im not the only one having this issue. Ear explained it well. The unit's animations are jerking. My frames are fine. I haven't thought of the fast forwarding as a potential causer...ill have to test.

[El-Vi-Riachi]

I generally get this when having large battles with many units engaged in melee or with battles involving buildings.

[Ftmch]

I think that after the newer updates, the animations lag instead of the framerate, i'ts intentional I belive. I get this problem when there's a lot of melee going on in large battles.

[Don in the North]

can one of you guys try using this >> http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=238484

in conjunction with both darthmod and vanilla and tell me if the problem is still there?
the lag/jerkiness may be empires problem, and this 3gig enabler should give you a noticeable change, possibly eliminate the bug

[S-te-Fan]

Crick up your unit settings .

[Streen15]

Okay, I just followed the instructions on that page Don of Atheos. Going to run Empire and see if it makes a difference.

[Streen15]

I'm still noticing the laggy animations, albeit not as much as before. Although, this was an observation of only 2 or 3 battles. I'll keep testing over the course of the next days to see if it's an on and off thing...very annoying to witness this during the battle.

Slow-moing the battle almost always fixes the laggy animations, but then when i return to normal speed it's laggy again. I kind of doubt its a pc problem, as I am not having much lag at all. It's just the animations that are choppy...

[Versorger]

I have the problem as well and I shouldn't based on my pc specs. I did a bit of testing and disabled my 3rd and 4th core for Empire and just ran with 1 and 2 in the task manager and I hate to say it but there was a significant improvement in the laggy animations and horrible framerate that would sometimes occur, mostly in situations where my troops were in close proximity to each other or the enemy. The only thing I can think of is that even after the 1.3 patch improvements to performance that the game STILL is horribly optimized for multi core usage.

My suggestion would be to start the game, go into the task manager, right click on Empire.exe in the processes and select "Set Affinity" and change it to two of your cores if you have a Quad. If a dual core try 1 core and if that doesn't do anything or you only have a single core then you can always additionally set the priority of the program to a higher setting in the same menu but do it at your own risk as it may cause system instability not that it ever has for me.

Hopefully any of that helps somewhat, I used it to get me through battles that were completely unplayable. Honestly though I shouldn't hate my PC when playing this game and I do every time I load it up because it simply does not play on par with my sytem specs AT ALL.
Good luck!

[Streen15]

Some games are unplayable, that's for sure. I used to not have this issue at all, so I'm guessing they changed something to cause this. It really puts a damper on the 'Epic' feeling of having a lot of units on the field...

[Dziupski]

I am running DM CE 3.0 with patch 1.4 and I noticed the laggy graphics surprisingly on ...campaign map.
Especially when selecting a unit/agent/ship the game seems to slow down, which is strange as I dont really get a lag(unless I fast forward) in battles with thousands of troops and smoke. Never happened before the patch 1.4.

[Versorger]

Well I find it very stupid that CA decided to remove the ability to have SEPARATE graphical options for the campaign map and the battles. I think it would help to resolve at least a few of the issues and it's just plain lazy on their part because every other one of their games has had the option.

Other than that I agree that the laggy animations ruin the feel of the game, I've found some disturbing things since 1.4 though. Sometimes when it starts to lag extremely badly I will turn all of the graphical settings as low as I can and it will barely improve. There is something seriously wrong here, it cannot be the users pcs and it's certainly a major issue caused not even by graphical settings, maybe it's because I'm running windows 7 release client but somehow I doubt that.

[helmersen]

I have this aswell!!

[Ftmch]

The reason graphic settings doesn't improve the lag when lowered is probably because the lag is caused by the AMOUNT of troops, which is increased a lot in darthmod compared to vanilla.

[Streen15]

There seems to be a LOT of people having this issue then ... ...