Mid-game hang-up

[Hotblack Desiato]

I don't know if anyone else has experienced the same problem I seem to be having, but I wanted to throw it out there in case you fellows may have some advice.

I played a couple (local) training games after installing the 1.3.4 version which then auto-updated to 1.3.5, and the game (w/ 3 AI) seems to hang-up or stutter the graphic frames for a few seconds when switching from storehouse to map and vice-versa around mid-game (rnds 5-7, roughly).

As soon as I have the opportunity I will uninstall and re-installed to see if that helps.

I'm running it on a:
ASUS Desktop PC CM1630
AMD Phenom II x4 830 Processor 2.8 GHz
6 GB ram
Windows 7
ATI Radeon 3000 Graphics

My thanks to you in advance,
Hotblack Desiato

[Chuckie Chuck]

Wow, normally I'd attribute it to a slow system, but this obviously is not the problem here.

I don't know if you know how to do this, but after to run mule, go into task manager, go to the process tab, and find mule.exe, right click go to Set Affinity...  Uncheck three of the processor cores so that only one core is dedicated to running the game.  My thought is that possibly the math being spread across 4 cores is causing a little system confusion.  It might be helpful to shut down any unneeded programs that take up extra system time too.  (Printer Toolboxes, Keyboard and Mouse add in apps, Weather Applications, Media Players (BIG ONE that tends to cause issues))

It's really hard to say on a system that advanced what is causing the glitch, but I have at times set mule to run on only one core on my dual core notebook pc and it does seem to help.  That core tends to dedicate more time to Mule and the other core does more work to carry everything else.  The thought is that if one core gets a sudden heavy load, and Mules instruction sets are being carried on that particular core, you might see a slow down.  I would set the affinity to run on your 4th core, uncheck the other 3.

If it works great.  If not, not sure what to say.  I'm not sure why it helps on my system, but it does.  What's annoying is I have to go into task manager and set that every time I run the game.  If I am not running anything else, I usually don't worry about it, but if I'm doing any kind of multi tasking, I'll take the time to do it.  It really seems to make a difference.

[Hotblack Desiato]

Thanks for the advice, Chuckie. Your take on it does makes sense.  I’ll give it a try.   Trust me, I was just as perplexed. I shutoff just about every program and shell running before trying the second game and could not fathom what would be causing the lag.  Does the computational load peak about mid-game, say rounds 6 & 7? 

[Chuckie Chuck]

It gets pretty heavy from then on out to the end of the game.  Development once the map is 3/4s developed takes serious CPU time for some reason.  I don't think the game engine is terribly efficient there.  The basic game code itself is because it's based on the orignal, but the engine that executes it is super demanding.  You'd think a game like this would run well on an older system, but it requires a decent GL capable video card because of the graphic engine they chose.  It nearly requires a dual core CPU.  I can run it on my single core 2.53 Pentium 4 with a Radeon 7200 graphics card, but development stage has serious frame rate issues after about round 4 on it.  The rest of the game does fine.

[Hotblack Desiato]

That helped a bit.  It's not perfect, as there's still a bit of a visual hiccup on round 6 (such as when exiting the storehouse there is a slight delay in bringing up the tile map, so when holding the arrow key upon exiting it looks like you teleport across half a plot or so).  But it's much better.  Thanks again.

[Chuckie Chuck]

You might want to tinker with the settings.txt file in the folder menu.

There are some things in there that control how the screen is redrawn by the video card.  I've tinkered with it on mine and made minor improvements that way.

It does sound like your video drivers may be an issue, and you might be able to change your OpenGL settings in the driver to work better with the game.  (Speed over quality should get you somewhere.  Even as fast as your system and vid card our, a cumbersome driver can create issues.)

[Hotblack Desiato]

I agree, it always appeared to me as a graphics issue, and it was a graphics issue.  I was finally able to set my OpenGL for triple buffering, once I ultimately found it; you know new computer and all... I must've mucked around in graphics settings several dozen times, but this time I actually found the tab it was hidden under (the veritable proverbial needle in the haystack).  Needless to say, it fixed the problem without having to shut down programs or isolating cpus for the java runtime.

Thanks again for your support!  You do the Mule community proud.