City and Unit Textures/Lag Issue

**Legio XX Valeria Victrix** · December 12, 2006, 10:04 AM

I recently upped my texture quality to High, and loved the improved quality on the units that came with it. Unfortunately, this created an issue with lag (as it's prone to do...).

The question I have is this: it appears that when you increase texture quality it does so for both units and buildings. The problem I have is seige battles; field battles run fine at about 25-30 fps. When I fight in or near a city, it drop drastically to 2-4 fps.

Is there any way to decrease building textures (everything works fine on medium, I just love the high units textures), without having unit textures decrease in quality as well?

If not, are there any workarounds, or will I just have to get used to medium textures?

**Tao** · December 12, 2006, 10:45 AM

I think there's an option to set the texture detail of the buildings to low or high. That's all I can think of right now.

**Sammyboi** · December 12, 2006, 01:00 PM

Originally Posted by Tao

I think there's an option to set the texture detail of the buildings to low or high. That's all I can think of right now.

Yep, you can only access it via the options menu before you start playing and not 'on the fly' during a game though. In my experience it makes little difference though tbh.

**Legio XX Valeria Victrix** · December 12, 2006, 03:03 PM

Yeah, I tried that, and like Sammyboi, it made little to no difference. Fps was still 2-4 in seige battles.

Hopefully when the patch comes out, it will be possible to keep unit textures high and lower building textures through the preferences.txt file. Why they packed the goddamn preferences file I will never know...sigh.

**Trajan** · December 12, 2006, 06:28 PM

Originally Posted by Legio XX Valeria Victrix

Hopefully when the patch comes out, it will be possible to keep unit textures high and lower building textures through the preferences.txt file. Why they packed the goddamn preferences file I will never know...sigh.

There is no more preferences.txt file. It's been replaced with the "medieval2.preference.cfg" file. You can find it in your main M2TW folder. Just open it with notepad.

**Legio XX Valeria Victrix** · December 12, 2006, 07:36 PM

Lol, I keep figuring these things out just before someone responds. Thanks, though!

I guess there is no way to separate the two. Oh well, probably gonna have to live with the medium textures. Or get a new graphics card...hmmm.

**Sammyboi** · December 13, 2006, 06:33 PM

For some reason when I played today I was able to play an assault on a Citadel and an assault on a Large City with very little lag (I had to reduce unit quality to medium and effects to low, grass to none) where previously I'd have been stuck with 1 fps. I can't figure out why it's suddenly working, and I haven't yet had a chance to try it with a Huge City.

Nothing seems to have changed in the games settings at all. I did mess about with the power settings for my laptop this morning though, and think I might now be giving the GPU a better level of juice.

If I figure it out I'll report back, but for now I'm content to figure that it's some sort of gaming miracle

**Legio XX Valeria Victrix** · December 13, 2006, 11:21 PM

According to Lusted in the 3rd page of the Patch Readme thread, he mentions a possible bug where sometimes settlements or parts of settlements cause lag for some players.

I wonder if that's what this is...

**Sammyboi** · December 14, 2006, 04:40 AM

I've also noticed that foggy weather makes the problem a LOT worse. Try to avoid attacking unless you have nice, clear weather. Rain/wind seems to make little difference to archer fire in M2TW anyway.