fast slow fast slow slow ...

[lee]

Hi,

what is it that makes the game run fast, then slow, then fast in between and then slow slow slow so that it becomes unplayable?

[ElimiNator]

You mean it gets choppy? Could be your video settings, your video card, or (if your playing over network) your network card.

[lee]

It's none of that --- the game pauses in between as if the AI is thinking.

[ElimiNator]

Hmmm, this never happens for me. I thing it must be choppiness.

[lee]

Hm, what do you call choppiness? It's like the game is paused, then it runs faster to catch up and eventually pauses again. When that happens too much, it becomes unplayable.

[Omega]

Which engine? Original Glest is no longer used, as all work is on the Glest Advanced Engine and MegaGlest.

[ultifd]

Unless you have an integrated graphics card, or you don't have enough ram; this is probably lag. At least it sounds like it.

[lee]

Which engine? Original Glest is no longer used, as all work is on the Glest Advanced Engine and MegaGlest.

Megaglest

[lee]

Unless you have an integrated graphics card, or you don't have enough ram; this is probably lag. At least it sounds like it.

Sure it's some sort of lag. The question is what causes it. With two players, CPU load goes to 100% on two cores with two players when it's lagging. Is 8GB RAM not enough?

[John.d.h]

It's none of that --- the game pauses in between as if the AI is thinking.

That's actually pretty much what is happening.  It slows down when large numbers of units are processing orders, pathfinding, etc.

[Omega]

Which engine? Original Glest is no longer used, as all work is on the Glest Advanced Engine and MegaGlest.

Megaglest

As per the above, this thread shall be moved to the MG board.

[Gabbe]

Unless you have an integrated graphics card, or you don't have enough ram; this is probably lag. At least it sounds like it.

Sure it's some sort of lag. The question is what causes it. With two players, CPU load goes to 100% on two cores with two players when it's lagging. Is 8GB RAM not enough?

WHat CPU do you have? Eventually your entire PC specs list

[Omega]

The graphics card is one of the most important that we'd need to know, and be sure the driver is up to date, as outdated drivers can have bugs which can cause lag, crashes, rendering issues and the ilk.

Generally, nice-to-have information would be:

• CPU, the brand, make, and clock speed (eg: Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 @ 2.2 GHz)
• Graphics card, the brand, make, and dedicated graphics memory, if any (eg: AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4650 with 1GB memory)
• RAM available (eg: 4 GB DDR3)
• The values for "intensive" settings in the game such as the resolution, windowed/fullscreen, shadows, 3D textures, filtering, unit particle systems, etc. These are the things that can most commonly be intensive on your computer and should be toned down if they are impacting your gameplay).
• You mentioned two players, is this one human, one CPU; or is it two human players on a network? If the latter, what kind of connection is it? LAN vs internet game?
• Does this apply to GAE and vanilla Glest too?

[TotalNoob]

I suppose he meant this lag when large amount of units start to move in the same time. It does not have to be the players units. Also AI moves lots of units especially when it notices enemy.

When I think of it from the programmers point of view I see one way to get over with this. Pathfinder should have it's own thread and return the computed path to the main thread as soon as it computes it. So it would be like this:

Code: [Select]

void mainThreadLoopWhenPlayingWithOthers() {
 normalGameStuff();
 sendPathRequestsToThePathFinderThread();
 receiveAsMuchAsPossibleFromThePathFinderThread();
}
The thing is that the main loop might receive the rest of the results from the PathFinder thread during the next loop, not necessarily during the same loop. Sure this may cause the issue that some units will start the journey faster than others but maybe it won't be that bad?

[tomreyn]

Lee: please also make sure you have the latest release version of MegaGlest installed. To date this is 3.5.2.