Lag on battlefields

[Paladin247]

I've been playing RS2 now since RS2.1a was released. It's the crack cocaine of mods. I mean I love this game especially my N&N legions to which I've become exceedingly attached. God bless you guys.

Over the course of play,however, I've encountered several battlefields, as I'm confident you have, that just generate intolerable lag. In my experience this seems to be independent of the number of forces on the field, the foliage resident or the climatic conditions.

I play with large but not huge unit sizes, but again the lag doesn't seem to be dependent on numbers on the field.

I have a top end CPU and graphics card; that's not a factor.

Probably this is an RTW bug about which we can do nothing.

Nevertheless, I thought that I would start this thread to document where these lag fests reside.

I'm in 733 AUC of my first campaign. Just had the second rebellion. Lost all of Spain, Egypt and Italy south of Genoa. Not to worry; I've disabled the $$ script and have two million sesterces; I think I'll be fine.

Rebel army beseiged Genoa and I counterattacked w/ the Xth legion. The rebel army was immediately SE of Genoa and once the battle started, it was unplayable due to enormous lag. Repeated twice w/no change. I've tried several of these horribly laggy battles before and no amount of gin allows me to play to completion. I finally had to auto resolve.

So I will just document these incidents in this thread as they occur in my campaign. Perhaps that will be of some use.

[Ybbon]

It should play smoothly irrespective of where in the campaign you are or the battle is. The normal suspects would be the graphics selections - using high detail especially on vegetation can cause problems but you'd sort of expect to see that through out the game not at one point. Have you checked the obvious stuff like background processes and looked at maybe GameBooster from IOBit?

What I am suspicious of is the disabling the script, it does restrict your money but it does a lot more than that, I'd suggest first enabling it, yeah you're going to lose money but that's the challenge, to recover from the rebellion - and then hanging the traitorous bastards from the highest walls as a lesson to all who would defy you - ahem, anyway, yes try with the script enabled first.

[Paladin247]

First, almost all my battles run fine, no lag at all. I'm playing on a very high end machine w/ a 2 gig video card also w/ the 4gig memory fix activated. Even w/ all this, foliage is set to medium. The battle after this one was played in a forest in a snow storm and ran fine with four armies. The battle above was in good weather, on a plain with some trees and two armies. I've just found that some locations are prone to lag.

I doubt the $ script has anything to do with battles running slow. It's on the campaign side not the battlefield side. And if it did then it would effect all not just the isolated field.

Anyway, I'll just keep reporting the ones I experience.

[Paladin247]

Had another one of these last night. Battlefield was WNW of Emporiae just outside the city. XIIth Fulminata and Italica Aux legions (3,000 men) vs. two armies of Roman Rebels (2600). Weather was clear; terrain was lightly to moderately wooded; season winter.

Lagged very badly from the beginning. The battle previous to this was NE of Alps, about equivalent in size, probably somewhat larger, but like above in light snow w/ no lag at all.

Fought three battles after this on different fields with fewer forces in various weather conditions with no lag.

[century x]

and then hanging the traitorous bastards from the highest walls as a lesson to all who would defy you - ahem, anyway, yes try with the script enabled first.

Went on a rant there... You have to hang those Rebel Scum

In regards to the random lag battles it does not mean its the battlefield. Remember that RTW runs better on a single core processor and those 4 GB's of RAM you have sorry to tell you does not mean anything to RTW. Due to that this game was released in 2004 it was built to run on single core processors which also means it only access's about 1 to 2 GB's of RAM MAX. The rest is not even recognize.

Maybe at those particular battles something is happening in the background of your computer that is sucking away the processor that you are unaware of and in other battles there is no lag maybe that means the processor is not doing something in the background.

[Paladin247]

Century X, thanks for the come back. I know about the one core limitations of RTW. The 4gb to which I referred is the 4gb patch that allows the program to access up to that much memory. It was somewhere on the RSII forum, but I just spent about 20 minutes trying to find the link and couldn't.

In any case, you may be right; next time I encounter this battlefield lag, I'll alt/tab out and check what's running in the background.

[century x]

Century X, thanks for the come back. I know about the one core limitations of RTW. The 4gb to which I referred is the 4gb patch that allows the program to access up to that much memory. It was somewhere on the RSII forum, but I just spent about 20 minutes trying to find the link and couldn't.

In any case, you may be right; next time I encounter this battlefield lag, I'll alt/tab out and check what's running in the background.

Let us know what happens. We must get you squared away so you can enjoy the mod even more

[Brusilov]

You should not find any place on TWC that has that patch - it's been deemed to be illegal as it modifies the exe which is simply not allowed here.

While a new PC with good graphics card can help the underlying game is from 2005 and it does not make use of more than one core and many of the features of recent cards are also wasted on the game engine.

The thing to do is to save before the battle and if it lags upload a compressed version here. Supply details of which game engine etc and someone else will be able to see if it lags for them as well.

[Paladin247]

Brusilov,

Thanks; good idea.

[Rectunator]

Well it's not just you Paladin247. I encountered the lag problem just now and found this thread while looking for possible solutions for it. I feared that something in my installation had gone fubar or that my hardware was finally failing. I have now tried three times (by reloading a pre-battle save) to fight Carthaginian armies North/North-West/immediately West of Emporiae (the Roman starting settlement in Iberia and the wooded hills west of it) and every time I have encountered The Lag. The battles were my one full (~3000 men, huge units) army against two or three small Carthaginian armies (2 to 10 units). The battles dont lag when they start, though they arent as crispy and smooth as they normally are. Then BAM and WHAM when the first reinforcements arrive. The Lag hits when the notification about reinforcements appears. After that it's like someone jammed the game on 3x speed.

Edit:
Scratch that, went ahead of myself there since I played more battles and the result was the same in every one. The battles now lag more than they used to even before the reinforcements arrive. After that it's like I said, like someone jammed it on 3x speed without the speed part. The odd part is that I have now been playing this mod (with the same settings all the time, mind you) for a week. The largest battle on screen I had was my 6k against 5k and even that went smoothly. Now I lag like hell every time 200 extra men peek inside the map boundaries. It's not heat either (since you like to throw that one around). The highest I got was 48C (compared to the 60-62C max I've seen while playing new games)

I'm running an 3 year old rig with a Radeon 4870 1gb HD Golden sample GPU, Intel E8600 dual core (3,33gHz) CPU and 6gb of RAM (I know, it can only use 2gb, but at least the other programs wont hog it all). I got ~50% RAM usage and ~30% CPU usage when I checked during a battle. And this with shitton of other programs running.

Edit2:
Ok I fiddled with the settings (moving sliders all over the place) and the problem persists. In the latest battle I could play completely normally even after the first enemy reinforcements arrived (a small army), but the next one (a large one) caused The Lag again. I'm at my wits end with this. I supposed I could see if this is only a problem that happens in the Roman campaign.

[Latin Patton]

I've just experienced this myself with a battle between my Legio III Augusta and the Carthagianians. My legion was defending the town on Sardinia. The cartys were attacking with two ballistas, one army of elephants, two cav units, and the remainder consisting of infantry. Right from the get-go my screen started lagging and stuttering. The only units doing anything were the ballistas firing non-flaming projectiles and my non-AI re-inforcements arriving from one of the far corners. Similar to other reports, I seem to be running about 99% lag free with other battles. I have a beefy single core rig running Win XP, which is right in the RTW wheelhouse. There may be some elements within specific battlemap environments causing the performance hits, or possibly some combination with re-inforcements.

[Rectunator]

Well I just played a battle with ~30k infantry on it. It lagged a bit but was playable, unlike the first "The Lag" -game when those massive two 300 man armies reinforced the 200 enemies in front of me. I'd say it's definately the reinforcements. I still need to check if it now happens in other places too. If it does... well I quess I have to bet everything on my two nine star generals and auto-solve this of a campaign.

Edit:
Played another campaign game. 2k vs 2k + 3k Arverni in southern Gallia. Now I am playing yet another battle two grids south of Emporiae (or whatever the hell it's called). 3k vs 2k + 1k + 3k. The initial 2k, no lag. The 1k appears, sudden lag spike and some lag for a moment but it goes away as I kill the first 2k. Now the 3k appeared and it's pretty much unplayable. This combination is pretty odd, specific area on the map where the lag appears, the fact that it's reinforcements causing it and finally, that my game isnt sucking up more resources than it usually does during RTW.

EditEdit.
And the strangest thing? The lag now comes in spikes. ~5 seconds of lag and then ~5 seconds of normal gameplay. Ok which one of you rascals has backdooret his way into my comp and is playing with the speed setting? Because that's the only plausible explanation I have right now.

-- triple posts merged (Brusilov) - please use the EDIT button for updates

Ok, got something new. I turned on the option "unlimited men on the field" in preferences and continued playing as normal. Arverni besieged one of my cities with three armies. I had one near them to their rear and I attacked their central army while leaving my garrison to the AI. Every single army came to the field at the same time when I hit "start battle"... and no lag whatsoever, nada. Gonna see what happens in Emporiueaueuauööwhateverthehellthenamewas.

-- triple posts merged (Brusilov) - please use the EDIT button for updates

Fick Ja, I think I solved it. It's the "unlimited men on the battlefield = XXXX" -line in the preferences that solved it. I set it to true and got 0 lag spikes in battles played in exactly the same spots with the same compositions as before. I suggest you try it, provided that your rig can handle large numbers of combatants on the field (since reinforcements now arrive on time).

[Latin Patton]

Unfortunately, I always have unlimited men set to 'True'. I don't believe in delayed re-inforcements . What also differentiates the issue I saw is the fact that the lag appears from the very start of the battle and never quits. It doesn't matter how many men are left on the field. My observation seems more consistent with what Paladin reported. Fortunately, I have the save game file so I can replay that battle as much as needed. I'll do some more testing and report back.

[Brusilov]

It's just a guess but have you tried setting the preferences.txt file to 'read-only' once you've got the settings you want? That way it can never be changed until that setting has been reset.

It's only a long shot though.

[century x]

This sort of lag might be random bottle necks in either your RAM or video card.