Mods to speed load time

[Sivodsi]

I once tried some of the high-res cmmos terrain mods but I found that loading the game seemed to take forever (I'm on a PIII 850 dell laptop with 384 RAM) so I changed it back. What I have now is a good looking mix of stock and custom bits, but if I play a large scenario it still takes ages to load each turn. For example, I timed the Ferdinand Skirmish scenario and a single move took about 15 minutes.

My question is this: what mods do you use to ensure that the game loads more quickly? Does using a low-res steppes mod make an appreciable difference? Have others noticed a big difference in time to load between using stock and hi-res infantry or AFVs?

Those on high-spec machines, how long does it take you to load a huge scenario?

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Sivodsi:

For example, I timed the Ferdinand Skirmish scenario and a single move took about 15 minutes.

Yow! Are you saying that it takes that long after you hit Go? I don't think that has much to do with mods. All the graphic stuff gets loaded when you start the scenario, before you start actual play. The calculations between the turns (the blue progress graph) has to do with what the units are doing and reacting to. The time needed to perform those calculations goes up dramatically with the number of units. You may need to get a faster machine or confine yourself to more modest sized scenarios.

Michael

[Pzman]

I think he means the 3D graphics load screen.

[ July 30, 2003, 02:38 AM: Message edited by: Panzerman ]

[Michael Emrys]

If so, that is outrageously slow.

Michael

[RooT]

Wow that is insainly slow. Sounds like to me that one of two other things is the problem.

1. Not running a decant 3d graffics card.

2. Running tons of junk in the background.

What graffics card are you using ?

If you have tongs of stuff running in the background you might wanna turn as much of it off as possible. If the problem is with running apps in the background I think youl find that your computer runs better and faster nomatter what aplication you are trying to use, If remove unecissary apps from the start up menue.

[IntelWeenie]

Depending on how your laptop's configured (I'm not that familiar with Dells), this sounds like it may may be b/c of Intel's "speed step" that they use on laptop processors. It detects when it's using a battery and actually slows down the processor (making a 850MHz CPU run at, say, about 500MHz) to conserve power. This is fine for stuff like word processing and email, but anything CPU-intensive chokes because of it. Processing the turns is very CPU-intensive, obviously. There's a free program out there (don't have a link for it at the moment, sorry) called "CPUSpeed" that will give you a real-time view of what speed your processor is running at.

I've tried running CMBB and CMBO on a brand new IBM laptop just for kicks. It has a 2 GHz Mobile Pentium 4 (Centrino), 256MB RAM and a 16MB ATI Mobility video card. CMBO works OK, but CMBB is noticeably slow on it, whether plugged in or not. I haven't tried any big battles on it, though.

[Guest PondScum]

I would bet that 99 times out of 100 the bottleneck for scenario/turn load time is your disk. If you're loading a scenario for the first time, CMBB has to load every bitmap for every unit and terrain type you can see. If you're loading a turn, it also has to load the bitmaps for all the opposing units you see that turn, all the explosions that happen, and all the WAV files.

That's a lot of files, and every one of them is going to require the disk to do at least one head seek, and that takes time.

Loading them could be pig-slow for a number of reasons:

(1) Your disk is naturally pig-slow: a 4200rpm laptop disk with a bad seek time, for example.

(2) Your disk is misconfigured so it just SEEMS pig-slow: using PIO instead of DMA mode, for example.

(3) Your disk is fragmented to hell.

#3 is easy to fix by running a defragmenter. #2 is a little trickier - go look at the properties of the disk in the hardware manager. #1 is hardest of all