Old "Slowing Down Late" Issue...

[necxelos]

What is official solution to this issue? Because having slowdown on relatively small map (Highlands Lake from the vault) and only me vs Easy AI (I was only testing some units) is kind of a joke... After about 30 minutes of playing (gametime about an 1 hour, cause I was speeding up boring parts) I've seen no difference between speed 0 and speed 10 not to mention annoying lag-like stuttering (game runing slower-faster-slower-faster-wait-superfast (rinse & repeat).

On the internet I found this fixes/ideas/reasons (all this are paraphrases of "what people say out there"):
- Core Maximizer suggestion, because the game can't handle amount of data processed lategame (too many objects in game),
- Large Adress Aware suggestion, because the game can't use more then 2GB of RAM even if You have a lot more,
- Duncane AI suggestion, because the game issue orders to dead units so for every army I kill there is the same army marching at my CPU,
- New CPU suggestion which suck, because I have Dual 2.6 GHZ and there's no way I will buy new PC when mine handles BF3 or UT3 on maximum (both offline and online) maximum,

Soo... What should I do exactly? Don't play with generic AI and use only Sorian AI's? Or use some of the web advices? Or maybe something different entirely?

[Ze_PilOt]

- Sorian is faster.
- Core Maximizer does nothing.
- FAF has the large adress aware flag (but it doesn't do anything on a x64 OS).

You can see your sim speed in the score area :
+2/+0 for example, means that you want the game at +2, but it's currently running at +0.

+0 cannot be considered as a slowdown as it's the normal speed.

[SomeoneAUS]

End of the day the only real solution is more speed on the main CPU core

[Ze_PilOt]

I wasn't aware of duncane AI, I will check the code and possibly integrate it in the next patch.

[necxelos]

1) So RAM is out of the question right?
2) Superior research skills on Your service Btw. Duncane seem to work with Sorian well and it's creator itself says that he intended to make them work even in the same game.
3) +0 can be considered as a slowdown if game starts to stutter/lag on speed +0, although it wasn't THAT bad for me luckily. On the web though there reports of people being forced to play on -3/-4 to have game speed at the same level as data processing speed.
4) What is this adress aware flag? I have Win 7 64 BIT because having less then 4GB RAM is a suicide this days (and if I had money I'd switch to at least 16GB).

[necxelos]

1) So RAM is out of the question right?
2) Superior research skills on Your service Btw. Duncane seem to work with Sorian well and it's creator itself says that he intended to make them work even in the same game.
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=23929
Download link in the topic works although I cant promise it will for long.
3) +0 can be considered as a slowdown if game starts to stutter/lag on speed +0, although it wasn't THAT bad for me luckily. On the web though there reports of people being forced to play on -3/-4 to have game speed at the same level as data processing speed.
4) What is this adress aware flag? I have Win 7 64 BIT because having less then 4GB RAM is a suicide this days (and if I had money I'd switch to at least 16GB).[/quote]

[Plasma_Wolf]

Stuttering or lag comes from internet connection issues or from a low framerate. The latter will never do anything to the actual game speed. The first will of course cause the game to pause for a moment so that all players can catch up with the data transfer. This comes after the game speed because this lag is not affected by the cpu. Therefore we don't actually include lag in what the game speed is.

Since you got this:

I've seen no difference between speed 0 and speed 10 not to mention annoying lag-like stuttering (game runing slower-faster-slower-faster-wait-superfast (rinse & repeat).

I'd like to know when you get it. Are you having a big battle? If so, then the game speed will obviously go down because the cpu has to make many more calculations. Does the stuttering stop if you zoom out, or when the battle is over, or when you go to a quiet area of the map? Then your graphics card can't keep up with the display of all the missiles and lasers and whatever else you have.

The next bit has something about the engine limitations, as I understood them when I read about it for the first time. I'm not sure if it's correct, but I think it is

If you go into negative with the game speed, then your cpu is being overwhelmed by the amount of calculations it has to make. A better cpu will deal with this problem but only up to a point. This has to do with some engine limitations of SupCom. All the units' data gets stored and the game is actually checking if these units have orders or not. Destroyed units don't have orders and destroyed and reclaimed units are certainly not having anything to do, so these are just uselessly cluttering up the cpu. So getting a better cpu will delay the problem but as the battles become longer and more units are getting destroyed, the problem will just come back.

On your question of how much RAM you need. I think that 4GB is more than enough. If I were to have a go at a 1v1 game with an AI for an hour, then I'd be really bored and the computer wouldn't have much of a problem. So you're probably fine with RAM. I would think that RAM also gets filled up with useless data after a while, but I'm not sure how badly it will affect the game if that gets filled up. Anyway, I've got 4 GB RAM and some AMD Phenom II (4 cores) of which I don't know the cpu speed, but it's more than enough to handle longer games.

That raises the question, what are your computer stats and do you have big background programs running while you're playing?

[necxelos]

a) I play offline, so connection is out of the question,
b) I have Dual 2,6 GHZ, 4GB RAM fixed at 667, and some new Radeon with 1GB RAM on it and all the newest shaders and stuff,
c) Stuttering happens without any battle. Game just started to slow-down/speed-up after whole map was more or less filled with stuff. I believe it is the same as normal slowing down problem I just probably have better eyes and see it as constantly changing game speed with small one-tenth-or-so second pauses as well. In the end game just plays slower and make it impossible to use the speed up button cause it changes nothing (just raises the amplitude of speeding-up and slowing-down).

I'll check if Sorian AI have that issue (I hope there is "easy mode" with Sorian because right now I'm just testing and don't want to bother with actually fighting the enemy).

[Resin_Smoker]

3 thoughts on this subject...

One - add timers to corpses so that they're auto removed if left out too long and if it's past a preset point in the game.

Two - ensure that all units, projectiles and effects have "self.Trash" defined. Entities without this end up floating around in the sim even thought they long since died or performed their function. (Memory leaks) In most cases, this shouldn't be a problem but it is possible for this the happen. Unfortunately there's no real way to know without walking through all the game scripts to verify that trash is being handled correctly. If I recall DMS addressed most of the memory leaks. (Domino jump in any time)

Three - The games AI shouldn't be an issue in player vs player matches at all. Hence I don't think this will get the attention your hoping for. The FAF contributors have their hands full with just PvP...

Resin

[prodromos]

I can perfectly feel you, if you can't buy a new proc, but a replay slowing down after an hour and not running at x10 speed
should be the least of your concerns.
You should basically be concerned if you can run the aforementioned game at 0 sim speed after an hour.

.. and you don't give any specs; a dual at 2.6ghz, seriously?
My tablet's proc is quad and 2.3 ghz, but I can't expect it to run supcom, at all.