Your barbarian settlements lag too much

[rovert]

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!

Thats just the new greek design based on Achaikos Retardios

[Roma_Victrix]

Thats just the new greek design based on Achaikos Retardios

Ah yes, Achaikos Retardios, the most famous derp who ever derped in ancient Greece. His architectural genius even outstrips that of Apollodorus of Damascus, designer of Trajan's Column, Trajan's Market, Trajan's Bridge, and the Pantheon in Rome. The actor Rob Schneider is a brave and bold visionary artist for his modern-day interpretation of the life of Achaikos Retardios.

[achilles-91]

Those are great news Gigantus!

[Gigantus]

I will have to ask a 'skinner' what happened there, it could be that a file did not have a square layout - then when forcing a square lay out the 'allocation' got shifted. I'll come back on this.

[QKuhlmann]

Hi Gigantus,
I also experienced a very laggy large barbarian city in siege battles, so I tried your updated fix. Good news is, that the siege battle was not laggy anymore, performance was completely smooth. But there was obivously something wrong with the roads and rivers around the settlement, as you can see in the attched images. For instance, as battle started, the units whith ladders and rams were standing inside the river.

[Gigantus]

Great to hear that the resize helped in performance!

I did not change anything in the lay out of the map - only resized the building textures. I think this is an issue from which side you attacked the settlement on the strat map, I believe the river is part of the layout and not caused by the position the settlement has on the start map, eg next to a river.

[romanius24]

Thats just how the settlement looks. I like that river around the walls.
The forest does cause some problems with siege engine pathfinding though.

[Roma_Victrix]

I just made a response in your download thread, Gigantus. My overall assessment of your latest download: it's helpful, but still not enough.

[Gigantus]

The polygon issue is an impact I can't do anything about - it's not just a simple reducing operation, it's IWTE stuff as well. The team is aware of it and hopefully something can be done about it.

[Roma_Victrix]

In the meantime, is there some other settlement model that can be used instead? From someother M2TW mod? Third Age Total War mods like MOS have some "Barbarian" style settlements, but not at the city level (which then become generic Northern European cities from vanilla M2TW). I can't really remember: does De Bello Mundi have barbarian cities? Perhaps someone could release a small submod for EB II using those, if that's the case.

I'm almost done conquering the entire Mediterranean as Koinon Hellenon. Only a few more patches of coastline to snatch from my enemies and then it's mare nostrum (or however you say that in Greek instead of Latin). However, I'm not expanding eastward, I'm expanding westward and to the north, meaning that I'm coming into contact with Celtic factions, which by this point have almost nothing but cities (very few large towns left). That means nearly each and every siege from here on out is going to take 2 to 3 hours (!!!) just to complete, thanks to the lag. This is not acceptable. There has to be some other way. Otherwise I'm simply going to stop playing this mod...until the problem is fixed. Sieges are way more important and frequent than field battles, for that matter, as they should be given historical reality.

[Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ]

I have nothing to contribute to this thread, so how about a joke?

Upon meeting with Caesar, Vercingetorix exclaimed: "What are you Romans doing here in Gaul? This is our land!"
"Your barbarian settlements lag too much," - Caesar replied, "therefore they must be conquered and replaced with proper roman settlements."

[Roma_Victrix]

I have nothing to contribute to this thread, so how about a joke?

Upon meeting with Caesar, Vercingetorix exclaimed: "What are you Romans doing here in Gaul? This is our land!"
"Your barbarian settlements lag too much," - Caesar replied, "therefore they must be conquered and replaced with proper roman settlements."

The Siege of Alesia lagged way too much for Caesar's tastes.

[Dooz]

Welp, I've seen for myself a number of times now how it doesn't lag one moment and lags the next based on unit movement rather than camera placement or anything else. I moved the camera all around the gates and walls and interior and exterior and everywhere, smooth as silk. Battle gets going, units start moving, and only at certain moments, even with camera zoomed all the way out and not pointing into or around the settlement at all, there suddenly exists lag. My money's on not a graphical issue, despite the team's conclusion that it is. Caesar save us!

[Roma_Victrix]

Welp, I've seen for myself a number of times now how it doesn't lag one moment and lags the next based on unit movement rather than camera placement or anything else. I moved the camera all around the gates and walls and interior and exterior and everywhere, smooth as silk. Battle gets going, units start moving, and only at certain moments, even with camera zoomed all the way out and not pointing into or around the settlement at all, there suddenly exists lag. My money's on not a graphical issue, despite the team's conclusion that it is. Caesar save us!

Well yeah, to be honest the initial part of the battle always plays fine. It's only when the fighting starts on the walls, and troops start fighting at the gates, do you see any lag at all. When you get closer to the city square the lag gets unbearable. I'm going to try at the very least to take up the advice on the previous page about bringing overall less unit types in my army, to see if that helps anything. Unfortunately I have no control over what the enemy decides to bring to the battle, though.

[Rad]

I just had a taste of this... I am not feeling well.

[Roma_Victrix]

HUGE, GIRTHY, PULSATING UPDATE!



It's a big one. A lot of my various graphics settings in the advanced options menu are kicked down, but I still have my unit detail on high due to several models in the game looking incredibly funky, incorrect, and even skeletal or partially visible if you have them on "medium" unit detail. For the longest time I also had my texture quality on high, because the buildings and soldiers and horses all look better that way (i.e. more detailed, more realistic when you zoom in for a closer look at them). However, I decided just for testing purposes to kick the texture quality down to medium while still having the unit detail set on high. I played a siege against a Celtic barbarian large city and VOILA! Almost no lag at all! No more lag! There was just a little bit of lag when the fighting happened at one of the gates, but it was nowhere near as severe as before and didn't cripple my frame rates per second and game speed to an unbearable crawl.

In summary, keep your unit detail settings on HIGH, but keep your texture quality set to MEDIUM. Also, make sure your filtering is set on bilinear. The latter generally helps with everything.

[Roma_Victrix]

SMALL, LIMP, DEFLATED UPDATE!

Well, perhaps everyone should just go ahead and ignore my previous post (I'm thinking about redacting it), because I just played another Barbarian city siege that was just as bad as anything I've experienced before, even though I had my settings on medium texture quality! WTF? Mind you, both sides had big armies and I had a bit of variation to my troops and so did they, but big whoopdie doo. On medium texture quality honestly everything should run as smooth as silk on my machine. Honestly, every other type of siege and battle plays just fine. Seriously, you guys, hold off on releasing v. 2.2c until you have fixed this issue in its entirety. It is not worth releasing another version of this game until you have fixed this problem. Otherwise a fourth or a third of all the settlements on the campaign map are going to behave this way, seeing how roughly a fourth (or third) of the entire map is covered with Barbarian factions and they all build cities eventually.

[xHolyCrusader]

The lag is not texture related. Even vanilla M2TW settlements use more and higher res textures than the barbarian city, so changing your graphics settings wont help here..
Ive been working on this the past couple days but so far nothing fixed it, seems youll have to play with the lag forever and ever.

[Roma_Victrix]

The lag is not texture related. Even vanilla M2TW settlements use more and higher res textures than the barbarian city, so changing your graphics settings wont help here..
Ive been working on this the past couple days but so far nothing fixed it, seems youll have to play with the lag forever and ever.

Surely there is some solution? Can you guys offer an alternative settlement download for Barbarian cities on the battle map? How about making all of them look like the Barbarian large town? Which does not lag nearly as much as the city model. How about using Barbarian settlements from other M2TW mods, with their permission?