Very SSLLOOOWWW Turn Resolution

[Guest Madmatt]

I have seen some post by people indicating that they feel the game has locked up on them right after the AI 'planned' its moves and when the little blue bar moves on the interface screen right below the scenario name.

Last night, I also encounterd what I felt was a lockup. It was turn 17 in Reisburg and I was the Germans and basically trouncing the Amis where they stood. All the Shermans were brewed up and I had left most of my primary defensive positions and was assualting the last remnants of the American forces. I had just finished plotting my moves, Hit the GO button and the AI processed its move and then as the blue bar began to move (the little one at the bottom of the screen) the game appeared to hang.

Ok, my system specs:

Pentium 3 600

128 Mb pc100 Ram

Tnt 2 Ultra 64mb newest Det. drivers 353

Win 98 SE

250MB Perm. Swap File

UDMA 66 IBM 20Gb Drive

CM was the ONLY application, and I routinely use Freemem (mem. defrag proggy) to check memory states and to cleanup defragged memory.

Now, I decided to alt-tab back to my desktop and see if i could figure out what had happened. Taskmon did not show CM as 'not responding' so I knew the game wasn't hung (at least not yet) and freemem showed over 70MB's of memory not in use, so it wasn't leaking memory (A common application error which causes slowdowns and crashes).

At this point I switched back to the CM and noticed that sure enough the little blue bar had advanced slightly. So I waited...and waited and waitied, I went to dinner came back and heard gunfire coming from my computer room! After about 25 minutes of thinking the game had finnaly finished processing the turn and was playing it back! Now I don't know how many people have a system as fast as mine (It is actually overclocked to around 627mzh!) or who would sit back and just wait but I wanted to report this to you. Now I have tested this same 'autosave' file after several fresh reboots and it always takes a very long time (about 10-20 minutes to process!) No other turn has ever taken more than about 5 seconds MAX to process in the past.

Interesting still is the fact that once I finished that turn the next turn also took an extensive amount of time to process. Let me know, and when I get home from work I can e-mail this file to you (BTS, Fionn?) if you would like to take a gander. I guess also that this could serve as a watchout for others to just be patient (real patient) if it appears to hang during the order resolution phase, it may be just taking its sweet time!

Madmatt out, and just trying to help!

[This message has been edited by Madmatt (edited 11-05-99).]

[Justin Hoerter]

I've had this happen a little too. The first I thought it was a freeze as well. The second I noticed that the bar was actually moving. I let it go and the turn finally played. The following turn was slow only part way through, then it pick it for that and every subsequent turn. I've noticed sound effects randomly playing during turn calculation. It seemed that the frequency went up for slow turn resolution, but not certain! System specs:

P3 500

Diamond V770 ultra (TNT2 card w/ 32M)

128M system RAM

a few gig. free space on the drive (didn't notice a great deal of HD activity, sometimes nice for spotting memory leaks).

SB Live Value.

Please feel free to ask for more info. I might have a saved game. I did save one and replay and it continued to be slow, so let me know if you'd like the file to look at, seems reproducable.

Justin

[Guest JonS]

I've had exactly the same thing. On turns 28, 29 and 30 of Last Def. I gavve up in the end and requested a ceasefire. Can dig out the specs if you really want 'em (in short: sufficient), but my point is that this isn't (well "rare" isn't the right word 'cos 3 instances out of several billion games (probably by now ) is rare) unique.

JonS

------------------

Quo Fas et Vino du Femme

[Guest Big Time Software]

OK, what we need from you guys is the autosave.cmb file from a turn that does this. We saw this *once* before and we didn't get an autosave, so we couldn't track it down.

Send me the file to steve@battlefront.com

Thanks!

Steve

[Guest Madmatt]

Steve,

It's on its way!

Madmatt....

[guachi]

This happened to me, too.

I posted this in a thread titled 'Bizarre lockup' or something like that.

I determined that my movement orders to my halftracks was the problem.

I was retreating them out of the way of mortar fire. Adjusting the orders did the trick.

The file is on its way, Steve.

Jason

[-E]

I'm experiencing this right now in a large game using 1.05. Still need an autosave?

[Tiger]

This could be attributed to a memory leak. Sometimes when I am running CM scenario creator in the background while running my graphic proggy, the graphics proggy will just crash to windows with no error notice or anything. Of course this could be a leak in the graphics proggy.

One reason of the game running slowly could be temperature related. Check to see if your video board is cooling properly and then check the system as a whole.

-john

[This message has been edited by Tiger (edited 09-25-2000).]

[Bruno Weiss]

Right you are Tiger, and Matt. First, CM from what I can tell, is an app tasked with tracking a multitude of variables, and naturally the more variables (men, equipment, orders, movement, graphics, etc), that you toss at it, the more your taxing your system, whatever it is. So, never forget the basics of good PC health. Defrag often, daily if necessary. For those who track such things, you know that even one Windows bootup rearranges several megs worth of data. And, it helps to first turn off your virtual memory, reboot, then defrag, then turn VM back on and reboot. That way the system arranges your files without dodging the space on the HD that Windows uses for virtual memory to place the files in order.

Second, the more memory you have the better. You simply can't have too much memory. I run 256 megs on a PentIII 733 Coppermine, and I use a Memory tracking/defrag utility. I can sit there and literally watch Windows chew up memory and refuse to give it back. Internet Explorer being the worst offender. One little look at the net can cost you dozens of megs worth of RAM, and worse, it can knock down your system resources (two different things). And the browser doesn't give them back either when you exit. Even with 256 megs, there are occasions when my system has less than 40 megs in reserve, depending upon what I've used. Using a memory utility (not a memory manager like Qemm, but a defrag utility like Memturbo or something), will allow you to keep track of such things. More importantly, it allows you to defrag your memory and recapture it prior to running up a memory intensive application like a game, and thus saving you from having to boot prior to initiating the app. Or, the other rule would just be to boot before executing CM and do not run anything else before you do.

While on the subject,(and being a flight sim veteran totally dependent upon frame rates and therefore system speed), this suggestion is the most important of all. Make sure you kill all those extranious background apps. Do a ctl-alt-del, and look at what is in the background running. You should strive to have nothing more than "Explorer", and "Systray", and that's it. Those two are mandatory system apps, anything else is eating away at your system resources and stealing it from the app you want to run, like CM. Background utilities are the "usual suspect", with regard to system freezes, slow responses, and slow frame rates. Remove anything else except explorer and systray.

Then, as Tiger has suggested, make sure your overall PC house cleaning is in shape. Pop the top boys, clean the thing out periodically. The dust that collects in there, (this is particularly true of smokers, shame on ya), is a system killer that helps produce heat. Heat causes system freezes, ages chips, slows down fans, which in turn causes more heat. Use compressed air cans to free the dust and get it out.

Now, this one might be controversial, but I do it just fine, but be careful, and I ain't responsible if you blow up your system. You can also get out the carpet sweeper, attach a "plastic" nozzel to the hose with a thin opening at the end, and suck the dust out of the nooks and crannies. (Don't go sucking wires, chips, and keycaps off the keyboard into the sweeper, and don't for crying out loud, use any metal attachment inside the PC, just plastic).

This Public Service Announcement was brought to you by the ASPCA. American Society for Prevention of Crudy Abacus

------------------

"Wer zuerst schiesst hat mehr von Leben"

Moto-(3./JG11 "Graf")

Bruno "Stachel" Weiss

[This message has been edited by Bruno Weiss (edited 09-25-2000).]

[Pham911]

I'm getting a similar, out of the blue(never happened before) experience when trying to play the new scenario Seven Roads to Hell. I pick allies, hit go at the setup screen, and the "Computer Thinking" box appears and just sits there. No bar appears in it, and the game looks hung. After reading Matt's comments I tested it again and found that CM isn't actually locked up (no "not responding" message in task manager). Is this the same problem? I've left it on for a while like that and it never seems to do anything at all.

Happens every time I try the scenario, and I've never had this occur before.

[Guest Madmatt]

Well, my ogininal experience with this occured almost a year ago (check the date of the first post!) with an early beta demo build. I have not seen this occur since.

I have not seen this new Scenario, how large is it? If it is a big one it is not uncommon for CM to take 10-15 minutes to plot it's AI turn.

Many factor such as over all amount of units and vehicle count can slow down this processing.

Also mainting a *clean* system while playing (no other apps running) is benificial.

Madmatt

[Abbott]

Here is a small FREEWARE program I have been using daily since version 1 (about a year). It works in Windows and frees up available RAM . When CM starts to slow down I (Esc) to desktop, click my short cut to “Rambooster” that is on my taskbar. There is a definite performance increase upon returning to CM. http://www.saunalahti.fi/~borg/rambooster/

(My system Specs. PIII 600, 192 megs. ram, Diamond Viper V770 32 megs. Windows98 2nd. Edition)

[Bruno Weiss]

Ditto Abbott, that is the one I use also. You can also set it so that it doesn't do any monitoring and thus hang in the background using resources (though it doesn't use much), and just boost the memory manually. Either way, it's an excellant utility.

------------------

"Wer zuerst schiesst hat mehr von Leben"

Moto-(3./JG11 "Graf")

Bruno "Stachel" Weiss

[Holdit]

I've had a lockup during Bucholz Station. The computer thinking progress bar just never got going (totally psyched out by my superior tactics, no doubt). I quit and restarted the game and the same thing happened as soon as I hit the GO button. A few days later I went back to it and got the same result ("Why didn't I finish that one? Oh, now I remember..."), so I deleted the saved file. That's the only lockup I ever had with CM and it was odd that it happened at exactly the same point in a particular scenario, so I suppose it's just one of those things.