WAW Problem: Gamespeed is way to slow

[xwormwood]

After installing WAW i had little fun.

The game is suddenly unplayable SLOW.

It needs seconds to react (scrolling left or right).

It needs even more seconds to react on a mouseclick. Clicking on a unit works this way:

after clicking i HEAR the click, but nothing happens for about 5 or more seconds. Sounds always appear much faster than any map reaction

Settings: 1600x1200x32 (just like in SC2 1.07, which worked perfect without WAW).

My PC is surely not the newest one, but certainly not THAT slow to be responsible for this unplayable gamespeed:

Intel 3 ghz, 2 GB RAM, 256 MB Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition, lots of HD-Space, windows XP, latest directx installed etc. etc.

Some help would be very nice.

Thanks in advance.

Claus

edit : i just switched to a lower graphic resolution (1280x1024x32), game got not a bit faster through this

[ October 31, 2007, 11:37 AM: Message edited by: xwormwood ]

[Cantona66]

Hello, yes exactly the same happened to me, i have tried all kinds of things, it´s still unplyable slow.

[xwormwood]

I even installed the latest ATI drivers, but the gamespeed still didn't improve at least a tiny bit.

Nothing.

btw.: SC2 1.07 still runs perfect & smoothly, so it does something very right what WAW does very wrong...

[ October 31, 2007, 11:35 AM: Message edited by: xwormwood ]

[Hubert Cater]

xwormwood, can you try running the game in 16 bit mode? For example, you said you tried 1600x1200x32. Can you try 1600x1200x16 instead and see if that helps?

[Hubert Cater]

xwormwood, cantona66, seems as though there is possibly a bug with some of the ATI cards as this is the only card that appears to have an issue.

What our internal tests showed was that there was a problem whenever a certain threshold was reached in terms of video memory for some of these ATI cards. When we tested running the game in 16 bit mode, i.e. which lessens the amount of memory needed, it seemed to work fine and so this was the fix we generally provided for users to try. We discovered this because the only difference between WaW and SC2 in this regard is that WaW uses a bit more Video Memory due to the extra bitmaps used in game. It is a suspected bug in the cards since nothing has changed between games except the extra memory needed and it only occurs on a specific set of ATI cards.

This work around worked fine until Cantona66 reported that the game did speed up but unfortunately did not display properly in game when running at 16 bits.

I have attempted to contact ATI but have yet to hear back and if you have the chance I would also suggest filing a Technical Support error report with them to see if they can provide a solution. Here is the main link I have found:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

Note you will need to create an account and this can be done by clicking on the 'Sign In' text upper right hand corner.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

[xwormwood]

Hallo Maestro Cater.

Yes, changing to 16 bit did help, thank you so far. Even though WAW still seems to run a tiny bit slower thant SC2 in 32bit mode.

I am though not sure what i should write to the ATI support. "Game runs slow, please explain?"

They probably don't even know what exactly the game does with the graphic card and what not, or let me take it the other way: if they would ask,i wouldn't know what to tell them except that a game new on the market in version 1.0 doesn't run probably while every other game runs fine.

Sigh.

[ October 31, 2007, 11:35 AM: Message edited by: xwormwood ]

[Hubert Cater]

Another option to speed things up is to not run in windowed mode, i.e. select full screen mode in the SETTINGS dialog and this will help although it may still run a bit slower just due to the extra graphics like rail and road.

I understand about the tech support issue but if you get the chance it can't hurt since they might pay attention if they get enough tech support reports.

You could just mention the game by name and how it runs very slow and apparently as a result of the Video Card and the amount of video memory required. You could mention it is a DirectDraw application that runs using DirectX7.

Either way glad to see you got it working ok!

Hubert

[xwormwood]

Ok, i wrote a ticket at the ATI Support-page.

Even though i can't use the graphic resolution i am used to:

this games looks fantastic when it comes to new ideas & features. Good Job!

[Hubert Cater]

Thanks and glad you like the game

[SeaMonkey]

I'm running Vista with a Radeon 8600 card on a brand new Dell Vostro laptop and yes, the game is running slow.

I can get some improvement switching to lower resolutions and 16 bit colors but it still seems a bit slow and actually gets slower the longer I run in any mode.

Not a gamebreaker. I fired up a couple of the smaller campaigns, like Kursk and Uranus and it took a pretty good while for the AI to complete its turn.

Presently I'm testing hotseat playing both sides trying out all sorts of different mechanics, no CtDs yet.

[Primasprit]

I have the same problem with a ATI1650pro AGP. The game starts fine but gets slower and slower within minutes till the point it is unplayable.

WinXP, Athlon3000+, 1.5GB Ram, 256 MB VRam, 1680x1050 32bit.

Switching to 16 bit didn't help, newest driver didn't helped either nor installing the Omega Driver package.

I use a 2 monitor setup. Turning the second monitor off made run the game faster at last. However this only a workaround, not really a solution.

At the moment I am running the demo version but I really would like to buy the full game. But it is a bit too costly for me to buy and discover afterwards that it become unplayable.

I wouldn't expect any help from ATI in this case, I doubt that they care about DirecX7 anymore.

I hope a solution can be found.

Cheers

Norbert

[Hubert Cater]

Primasprit,

For multiple monitors and DirectX7 it is a little tricky. DirectX7 only runs well in multiple monitors when the application is in a windowed mode. You can try running the game in Windowed mode, i.e. not Full Screen, but when the game is not run in full screen the application is not optimized for speed. So what this means is that it should work better in Windowed mode but not necessarily as fast as it could if you were running it on a single monitor in Full Screen mode as you already noticed.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

[Hubert Cater]

SeaMonkey,

Do you mean slow wrt to the AI or wrt how quickly the game responds to your own input, i.e. clicking on buttons, moving units etc.?

Hubert

[Primasprit]

Originally posted by Hubert Cater:

Primasprit,

For multiple monitors and DirectX7 it is a little tricky. DirectX7 only runs well in multiple monitors when the application is in a windowed mode. You can try running the game in Windowed mode, i.e. not Full Screen, but when the game is not run in full screen the application is not optimized for speed. So what this means is that it should work better in Windowed mode but not necessarily as fast as it could if you were running it on a single monitor in Full Screen mode as you already noticed.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

Thanks for the answer. Runs fine with the second monitor turned off, no slow down.

Cheers

Norbert

[gravyface1]

Didn't realize that there was already a thread for this issue:

Noticing that the scrolling through the snow-effected Russian portion of the map is very sluggish in contrast to the North Atlantic or even North African regions so one can only assume its the number of sprites(?) used for the snow effect. My comp is by no means a screamer, but should more than enough for WaW:

Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT (256MB RAM)

Dell 2005FPW 22" LCD monitor (native 1680x1050)

WaW settings:

Tried 1680x1050x16 but didn't seem to help much.

1280x1024x16 was slightly better.

Running full-screen mode.

Can the BMPs be optimized? Some of them seem ginormous, but that's BMPs for you.

[gravyface1]

Ok, I compressed weather_sprites.bmp with RLE compression (using Adobe Photoshop CS2) and reduced the size from 25.0 KB to 7.52 KB, loaded up WaW and noticed an improvement. Just to be sure that I wasn't losing my mind, I renamed weather_sprites.bmp to weather_sprites.foo and WaW crashed with "failed to initialize weather..." yadda yadda so I'm pretty sure it's being called by the game. I could crunch through all of the BMPs in a batch; I bet I could reduce the BMP footprint by a fairly large degree.

[gravyface1]

Alright, crunched down the Bitmaps directory from 49MB to 21MB using Imagemagick on my Linux box; game seems a tad quicker, but not as much as I was hoping for. The Interfaces folder's .BMPs were already RLE compressed it seems; file size was the same.

[pzgndr]

Interesting. If compressing the bitmaps helps speed up the game, Hubert could update all the files. Whatever works.

[SeaMonkey]

Yeah Hubert...slow to user inputs, selecting and moving seems to have a delay.

I'm still working with the Vista settings and have made some progress. I'll try to be more specific as I get a little more experience.

No need for you to investigate yet unless you have other similar occurrences being reported in Vista.

My old machine seems to run it fine, which is W2000pro OS.

[gravyface1]

I've also updated my NVIDIA drivers; no improvements. Currently digging into 2D graphics optimization settings (if there are any; I set the slider to "performance" instead of "quality" but that didn't help either).

[Hubert Cater]

Reducing the memory size of the bitmaps actually has no affect in game if your bit depth is > 256 colours.

The reason for this is the way DirectX loads the bitmaps into memory and it basically loads them at the current bit depth of your system. So for example if you have a bitmap reduced to 256 colours it will be loaded not at 256 colours but rather at 32 bits if your system is currently running at 32 bits.

This is infact one of the reasons we introduced the 16 bit option, as it seems to help some systems that run with lower video memory or with those that seem to have some speed issues. At 16 bits you are using half the video memory and it in most cases improves game play speed when it comes to scrolling etc.

The reason some of the bitmaps are already reduced to 256 colours is that it helps reducing the packaging but not all were reduced as they simply would not look very good without the millions of colours. For example, most of the splash screens are at high bit depths to ensure the quality of the image.

[gravyface1]

I figured you had a reason, Hubert.

What would make it faster? Are there any other optimizations you could do?

[Hubert Cater]

It all comes down to how many layers you are using in the 2-D environment and unfortunately now with WaW there are, off the top of my head, at least 3 more layers, i.e. roads, rail and the weather effects.

To speed things up you could do any or all of the following:

* Run in 16 bit mode

* Run in Full Screen mode

* Run in a smaller resolution mode

* Run without National Colours (this is a layer as well)

* Play using the Military Icons since in this mode there are no mirroring calculations to see how the 3-D units must face in game

In the future I would like to maybe have the game use Direct3D instead of DirectDraw which is a 2D mode. Even though the game looks 2D you can use the 3D mode and this should speed things up since most cards now have accelerators for 3D environments. The only reason I have held off from this is that it gets a little more complicated to program in 3D and it of course requires a reworking of the graphics code which is no small task considering all the time needed for everything else.

[Hubert Cater]

Forgot there is a text layer as well

[gravyface1]

Do you need to have different layers for the weather/transportation type (road or rail) or could there be a different tile for each terrain type + weather (rain or snow or sandstorm or clear) + transportation (rail or road or clear)? I'm not sure how that would be beneficial vs. layers, if layers are indeed the bottleneck.