Campaign Map Trade Graphics

[Kaveros]

First of all, I want to say I've been playing Stainless Steel for about a week now and I absolutely love it. It has revived my interest in Medieval 2.

I do have a question though. As much as I love the new graphics used for the trade ships and caravans on the roads, when there is a lot of trade in a given region, all the ships and wagons tend to kill my frame rate. I particularly noticed it around the British Isles and the north coast of modern day France. (I used the console to max out the settlements and install uber-governors, then watched the trains of ships and wagons march across the map.) So I am wondering, is there a way to reduce the numbers of ships and wagons being used at any given time to represent trade traffic on the campaign map? I am hoping I can just edit an .ini file somewhere.

[HolyDevil]

hmm i also have some slow framerate in the mid map of europe (mostly becouse of the forest, i presume) but the ships/caravans have never been mentioned to reduce the framerate to such extent...

try to reduce shadows, usually thats the main cause for FPS reduction

[Kaveros]

I already have the shdaows disabled, and yes those did make a big difference. But I am sure now that my framerate issues on the campaign map are as a result of heavy trade traffic. I can load a campaign and as soon as the loading is done and the game is started, my framerate is fine. It does drop somewhat in areas with dense forests but is still quite acceptable, even with fog of war turned off. But after a minute or two as the trade traffic starts to fill the roads and seas, the framerate drops quite significantly. It makes little difference if I zoom in or out. If I move the camera to an area of the map that either has vary little trade or is shrouded by the fog of war, the framerate returns to normal. It's still a playable framerate with the trade traffic, just annoying. Also, I can run battles in 1440x900, all details level high, vsync shadows and bloom off, no antialiasing, and bilinear texture blending and still have a smooth framerate. Also I can run vanilla Medieval 2 with its dinky little trade ships and wagons and no framerate issues.

I am hoping very much that buried in some .ini or .cfg file somewhere is a line I can edit to reduce the amount of ships and wagons drawn at any given time, as I believe that will cure my campaign map framerate issue. I really hope it's not a "trade traffic or no trade traffic" toggle. I'd hate to give up those beautiful ships and wagons entirely.

[Navajo Joe]

Kaveros,

I found this on Page 2 of this forum, have a look see if any of this helps you.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=345648

[Kaveros]

That was interesting.

So my only option would be to remove Stainless Steel's ships and wagons textures and use the default vanilla ones? That would be a shame. I suppose I could do that if there were no other option. I may have to decide if I am annoyed more by the sluggish framerate or vanilla's ugly ships and wagons.

I also saw some information on having large numbers of agents and characters on the campaign map, but that has never been much of an issue for me. I had a savegame that was around turn 70 or 80 and had so many agents on the map, it was almost solid strings of agents from England to the Middle East, and even with that there is only a noticeable framerate issue when there are massive amounts of ships and wagons.