Your barbarian settlements lag too much

[Poppis]

Why does everything have to be so difficult?

This should be the motto for life.

[Seljuq Prince]

That memory fix should be sticky Worked very well

[CanOmer]

This settlement lags too much:
(3-7 fps)


Lag is CPU related. When I pause the game it turns back to normal. Also it didn't lag before fights begin.

[romanius24]

Must be a pathfinding problem. Havent tested to see if lower unit numbers cause this too.

Those battles lag for me even when i have few units. Maybe this settlement type should be temporarily replaced with the previous level until a fix is found.
That hillfort is actually fun to attack.

[CanOmer]

Must be a pathfinding problem. Havent tested to see if lower unit numbers cause this too.

Those battles lag for me even when i have few units. Maybe this settlement type should be temporarily replaced with the previous level until a fix is found.
That hillfort is actually fun to attack.

Yes, I love these new settlement types but this one makes the battle unplayable. I have to do next battle auto-resolved on this type settlement.

[Roma_Victrix]

Thank you for backing me up on this, CanOmer! I would rep you for your post, but apparently I can't rep you again for a while.

[bob124]

Yeah this has been an issue for me as well. I have an overclocked GTX 980 Ti and still get lag in barbarian settlements (but not others as far as I've seen) so it's not something with my hardware.

[Gigantus]

I think it's a matter of reducing the resolution of the textures - the same issue came up when M2TW was released: siege battles lagged badly. Some of the textures in the data\blockset\textures folder may need to be resized.

[Dooz]

Thats a weird UI, how'd you get that?

If you mean the one from CanOmer's post, it's because he's playing with the option for "Minimal HUD". You can find it in the graphics options menu, or gameplay options, or somewhere around there. Can also make it so that they don't appear on screen unless you hover your mouse cursor to their position, then they slide out and become visible until you move cursor away. Or have them off completely. And can choose which of the elements to do any of these things with individually.

I think it's a matter of reducing the resolution of the textures - the same issue came up when M2TW was released: siege battles lagged badly. Some of the textures in the data\blockset\textures folder may need to be resized.

What about the fact that there isn't lag when paused, suggesting it's a pathfinding/AI/CPU issue rather than graphics/textures?

[Gigantus]

What about the fact that there isn't lag when paused, suggesting it's a pathfinding/AI/CPU issue rather than graphics/textures?

Speculation doesn't help - testing it will. I am no expert with GPUs but I would assume that pausing the game will majorly reduce the GPU load.

[Dooz]

Speculation doesn't help - testing it will. I am no expert with GPUs but I would assume that pausing the game will majorly reduce the GPU load.

Well let's not go speculating about that GPU load then.

How might we test this? Less units vs. more in the same settlement? Is that something that can be done in custom battles, or do we have to get lucky during campaigns to run across the ideal testing scenarios, one with only say one or two units on each side, one with fuller stacks... what if even one unit is enough to cause stuttering because of the previously speculated AI related issues? How can this be definitively figured out, anyone know? Maybe people on the team are already on it...

I gotta say, from personal anecdotal evidence, I've had a couple of battles in this settlement type during campaign. The one that had more enemy units lagged like crazy. The one that had fewer didn't lag at all or barely only at certain points. Take it for what it's worth.

[Gigantus]

That memory fix should be sticky Worked very well

It won't be a sticky as the application modifies the EXE (check hash value and 'last modified' stamp) and hence violates the ToS.

Well let's not go speculating about that GPU load then.

How might we test this? Less units vs. more in the same settlement? Is that something that can be done in custom battles, or do we have to get lucky during campaigns to run across the ideal testing scenarios, one with only say one or two units on each side, one with fuller stacks... what if even one unit is enough to cause stuttering because of the previously speculated AI related issues? How can this be definitively figured out, anyone know? Maybe people on the team are already on it...

I gotta say, from personal anecdotal evidence, I've had a couple of battles in this settlement type during campaign. The one that had more enemy units lagged like crazy. The one that had fewer didn't lag at all or barely only at certain points. Take it for what it's worth.

A simple way would be to resize the textures, found in the mods\EBII\data\blockset\textures folder, then repeat a previous siege battle. The files with 'barbarian' prefix woudl be a start - others would require knowledge of the actual model files and their referenced textures. Else one could resize every file above 5MB (which are a fair number).
Texture size obviously applies to unit models as well, there are a good number of 5MB textures around. In this case the variety of units would be a multiplier, not the number of of the same unit.

[Hummer]

Thats a weird UI, how'd you get that?

[Boogie Knight]

Is the RAM fix not removing the issue entirely? I hate to be a negative Nancy but as I only have 2gbs of RAM I'm actually hoping that fix won't work because this way, the issue itself will actually be tackled and I'll be able to play those settlements myself.

[Roma_Victrix]

Thanks for explaining things, Gigantus! Unfortunately I don't think I'm savvy enough to resize texture files. Hopefully someone will come along and see this thread before doing just that. I'm also intrigued by the fact that the variety of units could cause the game to lag more than if you had the same amount of troops but with far less variety (i.e. most units are the same type). If only I could afford to bring fifteen thorakitai units in each and every army stack as Koinon Hellenon!

[Gigantus]

The procedure to resize textures is time consuming, nothing else, did some for TATW a long time ago.

The procedure for creating those reduced textures:

• Create a folder to work in
• Download this converter and unzip it into that folder
• Make sure you have a Python version less then 2.7 installed, else install from the applicable download link

Windows x86 MSI Installer (2.6.6) - for 'regular' operating system
Windows X86-64 MSI Installer (2.6.6) - for 64 bit operating system

• Copy large texture files from EBII's data\blockset\textures folders (one folder at a time) into your working folder
• Run the 'convert_all_texture' file (you may have to associate the file with the python executable)
• Open the DDS file without mip maps, reduce the size to 1024*1024
• Save the DDS file in BC3\DTX5 format with mipmaps
• Run the 'convert_all_dds' file (you may have to associate the file with the python executable)
• Copy the new TEXTURE files back into their original folder
• Delete TEXTURE and DDS files in your working folder
• Rinse and repeat for subfolders

Note: it is advisable to make a back up copy of the data\blockset\textures folder in case something doesn't work the way it should.

[Roma_Victrix]

You make it sound easy enough, but I'd probably just screw it up. Hopefully someone who's competent and knows what they're doing can handle it.

[Gigantus]

We are looking for someone in the team that knows how to create macros in PhotoShop to open, resize and save the DDS files - bulk resizing in JPEG format even I can do in PhotoShop

[Gigantus]

I found a way to bulk resize and convert the settlement textures. Please test and post your findings in that thread.

[Roma_Victrix]

I found a way to bulk resize and convert the settlement textures. Please test and post your findings in that thread.

Thank you very much for putting in the effort and trying your best here, but sadly, for me at least, your fix does not work. I just started a random siege against a Greek city, not even a Barbarian one yet, and this is what the battle map looks like:



Somehow the textures got horribly corrupted. I'm glad that I backed up my blockset files! I had to delete your folder and paste the old blockset folder back into the main data folder to fix this. Hopefully you can figure out what went wrong here, but until then I'd advise others not to use this!