Problem with tactical battles

from Elemental Forums

I haven't seen anyone else mention this before so maybe it's unique to my system.

In both LH and FE, during tactical battles my ranged units (archers, catapults or even heros) will sometimes pause 10 to 15 seconds before firing their projectiles.  It happens maybe 30 to 40% of the time.  It happens whether or not mods are enabled and no matter what faction I play.  Very annoying, especially when fighting stacks of 6 enemy armies when you can only fight one army per turn.  Really slows things down.

Any ideas?

8,905 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, I have it too, depending on settings. My theory is that attacks triggers new effects like sounds and animations that may not be available in RAM, so disk must be accessed, which is slower and causes a stutter. Some games precache effects they are about to be used when loading the battle map. I would certainly find it desirable to cache all the effects before playing the animation to provide smooth experience, but... you know. 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I have it too, but it is relatively rare - maybe one battle in 12-15 and in that battle it only happens once or twice. It happens on magic-staff and bow troops.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Its rare for me, but it happens when the projectile seems to have some sort of pathing threw an object, or hill, or something  -- i can't remember exactly.   There's probably some calculations for displaying it that are causing it to hang. 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Kamamura_CZ

I decided to give your theory a test and disabled all sounds in LH.  I started a new game and have had a few tactical battles since then.  So far no pauses when firing projectiles, but it's early yet.  I'll get back if the pauses recur.

Thanks all for the input.

If the developers are interested, and I'm sure they have plenty on their hands right now, I'd be happy to supply the specs for my machine to help them track this down.

 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, I wrote too soon.  Shortly after my last post I went back to the game and started having the annoying pauses with my ranged units in tactical battles. If anyone knows what is causing the problem or how I can avoid it, I'd sure like to hear from them.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

It does not have to be related to sounds specifically, on my main gaming uber-rig, I have no stuttering at all, while on laptop, I have it all the time. 

 

There are many assets required to display the fighting animations - animations themselves, textures, sound effects, and they can be stored on various media with different access speed - hdd, ram, VRAM. What is desirable in what situation may be different on every configuration, sometimes VRAM is just too small, and the video card bus slows down the process, sometimes there is not enough RAM and disk must be used frequently. Optimization is no easy task.