ANSWERED - Have you fIXED the sluggishness/game slow down?

[john connor]

Sorry, Dave, got a bit confused reading through all the queries (I don't envy you...) - but are you saying you've already sorted the game slow down/sluggishness issues?

Peter

 

[john connor]

Oh. I see now you said this elsewhere:

OK folks I have some good news. I turned off the D2D drawing for the graphic primitives (lines, circles, rectangles and arcs) and also for Tasks. It's running much faster now. Whether this is acceptable or not I'll need your feedback. In theory this should be as fast as it was before under CO1.

I will endeavour to put out a new build this afternoon. It won't have the keyboard event fix ( ie spacebar and function keys not responding ) but it will have addressed both showstoppers (speed and message log) plus a swag of other minor issues.

So now I understand.

I'm curious - why did you use the D2D draw thing - what purpose did it have? (I mean, do we lose something also by your switching it off?)

Peter

 

[Dave 'Arjuna' O'Connor]

This was a decision taken by Miquel to implement the map overlays. he needed it for the transparency effects. Note that the map overlays only work when the game is paused. So they are not a contributor to game speed. I left D2D drawing in place for these. But Paul Scobell's research into D2D indicated that it was notoriously bad at redrawing objects on the fly. It was great for blitting stuff that was already drawn. Trouble is we need to redraw the icons several times a game minute and that meant crippling the speed. I thought I had turned off the D2D drawing of the icons and that was it. And I had but what I did not appreciate was that Miquel had also replaced the graphic primitive drawing with D2D versions and this was what was slowing things down. in fact probably the worst was the task icons.

So the final analysis is that we have reverted back to a more efficient system of drawing the things that need updating on the fly and we are using the power of D2D for the map overlays where we are paused.

 

[john connor]

Ok. Great.

When does this update get to us - do you know?

 

[Dave 'Arjuna' O'Connor]

That will be up to LNL. Hopefully early next week.

 

[Bazza42]

That will be up to LNL. Hopefully early next week.

Might it be useful to have a 'sticky' which gives the latest version of the game that is available (has gone through LnL installer process etc.) for download for those that are licensed. At the moment there appears to be no central point where this information can be found, although I stand to be corrected......