lags during big battles in towns

[lead341]

Hallo,

I just wanted to report a problem and maybe get some feedback: when I attack a large town with a large army inside - in the beginning the battle/animations run very smooth. But after about the third round it starts lagging and it gets worse after every round. It appears as if the CPU had problems to calculate the amount of damage or sth. like that (the lags occur during attacks).

greetings lead

[Trubador]

Same here. Same with most others I've read too.

[Paradox]

im usually OK with town battles, what really screws my system over is a town battle with Inferno, all that flash fire effects draggs my game down to a sluggish fps its unbearable...i actually avoid attacking inferno towns and go for the other non laggy ai battles...hah

[lead341]

Thanks for the replies.
So I guess it is a game - issue and waiting for the next patch could deliver a solution. Maybe changing one certain variable in the config-files might improve this, but I don´t know which one. (I managed to solve the fps-drops during spells by disabling "dynamic lights).

lead

[Rapier]

It's a memory leak in the battle coding. It doens't really matter how large the armies are, it's based on how long the fight takes. In the final fight of C3M5 is when I had it worst (seeing as how that's probably the longest fight in the game), I attacked before the second week though so the armies weren't exactly large.

[Gus]

yup, problem of lag in Sieges. Possibly in any battle, but they have not lasted nearly as long as some sieges in my experience, so i can't really tell. They should try and fix this asap, cause when it kicks in, it is a real pain o.O

[lead341]

@ Rapier: thanks for the info. But this "memory leak" - is it related to the computer-hardware (i.e. you need more memory), or is it exclusively a game problem which ought to be patched?

My system:

Athlon 64 4000+
2 GB Corsair Ram
Geforce 7900 GT 256 MB
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

[DuRieL]

It's a memory leak in the battle coding. It doens't really matter how large the armies are, it's based on how long the fight takes. In the final fight of C3M5 is when I had it worst (seeing as how that's probably the longest fight in the game), I attacked before the second week though so the armies weren't exactly large.

I second this, and it's the only thing causing considerable slowdown for me. I'm not sure if the patch addressed this problem, however...

I've heard about animation speed making a difference here, as in higher speed -> poorer performance, though I find that strange, since anim. speeds on higher essentially make the combat take less time. Anyways, if anyone wants to see if lowering anim. speeds helps, better do it before combat.

Also, I think the problem is NOT hardware-dependant, and can/should be patched.

[sisko]

It's a memory leak in the battle coding. It doens't really matter how large the armies are, it's based on how long the fight takes. In the final fight of C3M5 is when I had it worst (seeing as how that's probably the longest fight in the game), I attacked before the second week though so the armies weren't exactly large.

I second this, and it's the only thing causing considerable slowdown for me. I'm not sure if the patch addressed this problem, however...

I've heard about animation speed making a difference here, as in higher speed -> poorer performance, though I find that strange, since anim. speeds on higher essentially make the combat take less time. Anyways, if anyone wants to see if lowering anim. speeds helps, better do it before combat.

Also, I think the problem is NOT hardware-dependant, and can/should be patched.

The patch didn't adress it, since i did that battle after i installed the patch.
What was worse was that i ended up with only skeleton archers (enough) with no shots left, and my catapult was broken before any hole in the wall.
Only thing i could do was to use that spell that gives you mana when the creature is damaged, then raise 114 skeletons and kill some beasts, all with just my hero. ( so thats 3 turns already, lucky for me it killed less than i raised.) For some reason it didn't attack me outside of the castle, and it was "basically"an easy fight, if it wasn't for the lags that took so long. The whole battle was close to an hour. And then, well, don't want to spoil, let's just say i went to bed very late and had a headache next early morning.

[lead341]

so far I couldn´t find a way do undo the lags during battles. It appears to be independent of performance of the pc (we even tried with a sli system and Athlon FX 56). However, I found out that restarting the computer (or the game..I don´t know if there is a difference) "delayed" the occurence of the lags during battles - so it got a bit better. But still it is no perfect solutions.
For further ideas I would be grateful.

lead

[Ari]

It's a memory leak in the battle coding. It doens't really matter how large the armies are, it's based on how long the fight takes. In the final fight of C3M5 is when I had it worst (seeing as how that's probably the longest fight in the game), I attacked before the second week though so the armies weren't exactly large.

That's the first time I'd seen that lag, actually. The strange part is that the animations themselves seem to go at normal speed. The lag is before each one plays. Luckily for me, it's unlikely I'm going to see a battle that long all that often (damn that was a long battle).

[lead341]

Yes, the animations are perfect..it just lags before something "happens". But anyway..I find it strange that you experienced it so late. I have those problems since the fight against Gilrean (2.campaign, third mission). Maybe there are some adjustments which can be done...I will try to find it out on my pc.

[Ari]

Perhaps the severity is related to ram or card quality. I have a gig of ram and an nvidea GeForce 6800 (512 mb, I think).

[MrSteamTank]

This game has terrible terrible optimization. Absolutely terrible. Not your system's fault as it's definitely the game's problem. I had a 128 mb video card and I couldn't play on the lowest settings at 640 by 480.

Now I upgraded to a 512 mb radeon 1600X pro(I can play oblivion on max settings and I only get slight slowdown on battles with 10 guys+) and it still bogs down when I zoom out any sort of half decent amount. I have an amd athlon 64 3500+ with 1 gig of dual channel ram so yeah it definitely is not a very finished game.

[Psychobabble]

As far as I can tell, this is the only place in the game with a memory leak. It's definately there, though.

[DaemianLucifer]

I didnt have noticable problems,except for few fireballs.And that was just rarely.

[DuRieL]

Something just hit me; what if we just save the battle - using theGryphon's combat-dial mod - and then load it after restarting comp./HoMM? I'm pretty sure that the slowdown is gone in the loaded version...

It isn't a proper fix really, but for anyone suffering a prolonged combat[read: lagfest] - might prove useful.

Has anyone determined if anim. speeds make a difference here?

[Raistlynn]

I've come across lagging all over the place. Long battles for sure, But I find during hotseat game with my wife, if ither one of us move the adventure map around to see the resorces or chest hiding behind trees the the game slowly starts to lag for the one who moved the map. The other turn is fine but every round after the move will get more lagging till finealyy we have to quit and start a new game. even saveing the game off shutting down and rebooting the system does nothing. If I load the game that started to lag it will pick up where we left off and get wirse.

[lead341]

what´s the gryphons combat dial mod?

[DuRieL]

what´s the gryphons combat dial mod?

It's this nifty mod one crazy cracker decided to come up with.
Get it from "here".