Major Slowdown During Hidden Movement Of Enemies During Tactical Game

[Spleenman]

Hi all, first I want to say how great it was to find this place. I had given up playing Apoc for so long now (4+ years, since I got my XP machine... ) and amd glad to at least get into the game. However, I've run into a pretty major snag. First the basics, my machine is damn fine, AMD 64 3500+, 2gigs of ddr400 dual channel mem, ati x850xt platinum, blah blah, pretty decent machine all in all.

 

Anyway, I have tried playing Apoc using this guide, as well as Dosbox with D-fend. The game runs great with sound until I get into the hidden movement phase of tactical combat and then it takes 30+ seconds to update 1 single frame! I've played around with almost every setting I can think of, both with the batch filed and in D-fend, and nothing works. I even tried that Speedset utility to avail (I even set it pretty dang high, like +100.) Anyone got any ideas?

 

Thanks for yer time in reading this, and no great loss if this doesn't get fixed. Maybe I'll look into installing Win98 on my second drive and just dual boot... wonder if I can do that without reinstalling WinXP... hmmm...

 

Edit: Little additional info... this seems to happen only when I use incendiary grenades. Usually, towards the beginning of the game, I like to raid the Cult and burn the living crap out of their two bases with incendiaries (since the more damage you do, the less money they have) and put em in the red, financially. Maybe it doesn't really affect the game that much, but it sure is fun. Anyway, seems if you use those grenades then you run into the problem I'm talking about where the hidden movement stage takes AGES. AI malfunction? To many animated sprites?

Edited August 4, 2006 by Spleenman

[Steelion]

That's happened to me before, but it's pn;y happened twice, both of which times I was not using incindiary. The worst poart is when you spot an enemy during this phase. I left when that happened, came back about half an hour later, and he was STILL moving.

[Spleenman]

That's happened to me before, but it's pn;y happened twice, both of which times I was not using incindiary. The worst poart is when you spot an enemy during this phase. I left when that happened, came back about half an hour later, and he was STILL moving.

 

Ya, that's when it did it for me. But only when I went crazy with the incendiaries. Using other area affects like smoke/gas it doesn't do it. Very odd. I also noticed that occasionally I get slowdowns whenever the "Yes/No" confirmation box pops up, like when saving. I'm wondering if it's a memory leak or something. *shrug* I'm still happy I just got it working. Now if I could only get the APCs in MW3 to stop bouncing....

[[NKF]]

These freezes actually happen a lot more if you are using an older computer and playing in turn based. They happened at 'any' time, and didn't have to have any special conditions. Really hacked me off, I can tell you, and put me off playing turn based.

 

In my case, it happened quite a number of times on my old pentium 133 with 16 megs ram. On this system, under pure dos, it ran real-time combat perfectly, and runs turn-based fine until the occasional moment where it grinds to a halt during the off-turn for no apparent reason.

 

In fact, it often outright went into a critical state and almost never came out of it. I've actually noticed this happening a lot of with a number of turn based games on older computers, like Fallout 2 and Jagged Alliance 2 (JA2 being the nastiest of the three games). On much faster computers with more resources like memory and hard drive space they run fine.

 

I'm guessing the game's logic is stuck on a problem and is unable to get out of it, or is in an endless loop. Or perhaps it's in a critical state where it can't do anything on account of wanting resources that cannot be released on acount of the second process holding a resource that the first process wants - or something like that. Perhaps some processes are too fast while others are too slow and things are just not syncing up properly? Oh forget it - Apocalypse wasn't multithreaded, as far as I can remember, and I'm scaring away the regulars.

 

Anyway, when this happens, I find it easier to just to do a hard reset (from the mains, if your power button is software rigged) and reload the game. It takes much less time.

 

- NKF

Edited August 7, 2006 by NKF