Hi Res. vs. Low Res. Mods -- How much difference in speed?

[Mudfrost]

How much difference in speed to you find between using high res. mods vs. low res. mods?

Now that I've got the full version of CM, and am able to load in the large scenarios, I finally noticed a slow down when scrolling. I know about the in-game options I can adjust but I'm going greedily for both gameplay and eye candy.

I'm currently using high res grass, pavement, Shermans, DD's new uniforms (sweet), and maybe one or two other small mods. Am I right to assume the grass will cause the biggest slow down?

My system basics:

Pentium II-350

Voodoo III w/16 megs

64 megs RAM

2 gigs free on the hard drive

--defragged, all new drivers, approx. 86% system resources

Thanks for your input.

Mudfrost

[Forever Babra]

Hi res terrain mods (buildings excepted) can cause a slowdown. I've never heard of anyone complaining of slowdowns from vehicles or buildings.

[Old Dog]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mudfrost:

Am I right to assume the grass will cause the biggest slow down?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yep Several of the best "dark-side" grasses are available in low res - give one a try. At 16 meg on your vid, not sure a high res grass will load anyway.

-Old Dog

Visit Old Dog's CM Central The CM Photo Gallery!

[Chupacabra]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Old Dog:

At 16 meg on your vid, not sure a high res grass will load anyway.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

It will run, but it might make the game sluggish. I'm using an 8mb card and I was using hi-res grass for a while. Worked fine, it was just slower than I wanted to deal with. Looked nice though.

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[Mudfrost]

UPDATE:

[Mudfrost]

Oops, sorry about the double post--fingers went haywire.

UPDATE:

I loaded in a number of "medium, large," and even a "huge" scenarios, and I don't experience the stutter I'd gotten before on the "All or Nothing" scenario. It seems this scenario is the problem. Not that there's a problem with the scenario, I just think it's the weather effects (rain and thunder) that are bogging me down.

Which brings me to my next question:

If I turn off the weather effects, do I have to reload the game in order for the new condidtions to take effect? I swear, I turned them off but noticed little difference.

Hey, if this one scenario is my only problem--and it ain't much of one--I have no complaints.

Bring on the hi-res!

Mudfrost

[Maximus]

Turning off weather does nothing but remove the visuals of the weather. The behind-the-scenes calculations are still there.

Ambient sounds can also slow things down.

[Mudfrost]

Maximus,

While that makes perfect sense, I see no difference when I shut off the ambient sounds. Could they still be running in the background as well?

Mudfrost

[Spook]

To earlier computers with less powerful video cards, I think that the choice of grass tile sets will be a big factor to "slowdown."

I priorhand had a PentII-400 with 128meg RAM and a 16-meg video card, Mudfrost. Whenever I used hi-res grass, I would usually get a major slowdown.

What I mean by hi-res is for the grass tile sets where each grass texture file is 768k in size. Grass texture files that are "lo-res" to me are the ones at 193k, although BTS has a grass set which is 49k per file as an even lower resolution option.

And, of course, for larger maps with lots of trees and buildings, slowdown is an inevitability too. Magua's (& BTS's) building textures are comparably lo-res while "Panzertruppen" Maddox's are hi-res, if that's of any guidance to you.

[This message has been edited by Spook (edited 01-09-2001).]

[Freak]

Another way to reduce slowdown is to dismable smoke graphics. When I am on my old G3 266 in large scenarios I either disable it or reduce the smoke.

[Mr. Clark]

I have nearly the EXACT same setup! Only difference is an AMD K6-2 @380 mhz and 80 mb ram.

I only really get slowdown if I use a Hi-Res grass mod, or if I'm playing on SNOW (no idea why) or if I'm playing with weather effects on.

I also shut down ambient sounds, because my sound card is virtually nothing, and thus pulls the processor alot.

[Olle Petersson]

There is a true difference in speed once you get down to 4MB or less on video RAM.

I've made a set of terrain mods especially for those (like me, until very recently) with very low end graphics cards.

The tricks I've used to reduce file size (the only parameter that matters) are:

- Single pixel textures for basic grass. (<< 100 byte each now.)

- Reduced number of pixels and colours for the basic tree-clad areas and road tiles. (Like 32x32x16 instead of 64x64x16700000.)

- Buildings and some of the other terrain textures, like hedges and walls, are reduced to 256 colours.

I've made this for both summer and winter textures. The winter textures, and some of the other ones that are rarely used for QBs (since I usually play QBs), are less refined with lots of pink around the edges of overlay terrain.

Anyway, all of the above (about 200 bmps), plus two 800x600 screenshots, are available within a single 1.5 MB zip-file.

Send me a mail (ollpe@hotmail.com) if you want them, since they're unavailable at any web-site sofar.

(Kump wanted Hi-Res only, and CMHQ doesn't accept(?) mods with pink edges. Removing the pink edges will probably take a lot more time than all other work I've done with them, unless I find some quick and dirty way to do it...)

Cheers

Olle

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