AI bug (?) and slowdowns during borg explosions

posted on March 13th, 2009, 11:02 pm

Hm, heavy os...ok your definately right about the memory consumption of vista. It needs more than xp but hey, im running a system with 4GB here (3,3GB effectively) and with armada in memory there are still more than 50 % left. So i dont think thats vista's fault. At least not in terms of memory.

posted on March 14th, 2009, 12:46 am

what we found out so far is that only nvidia graphic cards are affected by the slowdowns. or so it seems atleast.

posted on March 14th, 2009, 2:21 am

Makes sense to me.  I'm running a NVidia card, and about 50% of the time, when a borg ship explodes, if it's on my screen, I may as well be paused for a second or two.  Up to 15 seconds is my record for a single explosion which was an Assimilation Matrix.  True record is being crashed by the lag causing an error that reset my video drivers when my 'bad mood' attack of 32 Serkas decloaked in firing range of a borg fleet.

posted on March 14th, 2009, 3:39 am

and dont expect too much of an improvement for Win7 either.
so get used to the heavier OS.

I have been using the beta and sure its more intensive than xp but its way better than vista

posted on March 14th, 2009, 8:50 am

Sorry guys, but its not an ATI - Nvidia problem.

On my ATI card (I had till last month ) were also these lags. And I think a Radeon X1800XT should be able to handle the game.
And I know other people with ATI cards (and not bad PCs) who have the same problems (even on XP).

[runaway]

posted on March 14th, 2009, 8:55 am

Last edited by runaway on March 14th, 2009, 9:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

what we found out so far is that only nvidia graphic cards are affected by the slowdowns. or so it seems atleast.

that is not correct 

i use a ATI HD4850 and a friend uses a HD4870 and we both have this slowdown when a borg ship explodes.
Maybe it's the Antialiasing Level.

I just wanted to test it with fraps...but the game crashed when e tried push the Game menu button during a Borg attack...and the bug report programm crashed to, so there is no bug report
Ok a was able to occur this Bug again.... --> bug report is on it's way
...hmm need the mail adress to send it in... ?!

posted on March 14th, 2009, 7:03 pm

that is not correct 

So back to the start with all our thinkings

posted on March 15th, 2009, 5:33 am

I'm running a nVidia 9800 GX2 card here on my Vista Ultimate 64-bit with 8 GB of RAM and a Quad Core. I don't think it's a RAM issue, I have atleast 4 GB for Armada to play around in before it hits the pagefile.

posted on March 15th, 2009, 2:39 pm

Is there already a solution for the AI bug any near by? I love 3.05, but just PvP. PVC sucks... what makes me inquisititve is the fact, that in the log of the game I have collected about 100k Dilithium/Tritanium, the AIs just about 7k. And they did just spend 4k of it.

We played 1 Fed, 1 Rom against 4 Dominion in Team on Hard.

posted on March 15th, 2009, 6:46 pm

I'm using an nvidia 7900 256mb card and I almost never have slowdown problems with Borg explosions 

posted on March 15th, 2009, 10:59 pm

it only appears on some system specs, we are still working on it, sems to be a native problem of Armada2, that just never showed up in Armada2, as their models and effects were much faster to draw

posted on March 16th, 2009, 2:16 am

This coming from a modeling perspective.

Its possible, based on what I have seen from the models ingame, that they could be very high poly count. If that is indeed the case, LOWER that count. Yes the models will suffer in detail and eye-candy, but it'll help with the explosion.

I say this because I currently model for a modding group for a game called X3 Reunion, and as some of you know the engine for that game is far more advanced than the one for this, but I was still told to have the ship at a certain poly count or lower.

Just a thought; I doubt its ram or a video card as I asked a friend to test this on his ATI POS, and the explosions lag on his machine to.

posted on March 16th, 2009, 8:16 am

Its possible, based on what I have seen from the models ingame, that they could be very high poly count. If that is indeed the case, LOWER that count. Yes the models will suffer in detail and eye-candy, but it'll help with the explosion.

it's just the explosions that are affected by the issue, as the armada engine switches to an alternate rendering method when breaking up models, which is quite ineffective and we cannot influence that a lot currently... we are still working on it

posted on April 8th, 2009, 8:45 am

Hm, heavy os...ok your definately right about the memory consumption of vista. It needs more than xp but hey, im running a system with 4GB here (3,3GB effectively) and with armada in memory there are still more than 50 % left. So i dont think thats vista's fault. At least not in terms of memory.

i feel you, iv got 8Gb ram in 64bit vista with a 9800 GTX+ 1Gb. and i have fleet ops running in the background with 22% usage. And i get slowdowns on borg explosions.

Its not vistas fault its as DOCa Cola said, the complexity of the modles breaking up is causing the slowdowns.