Big games run very slow

[Comrade Maethor]

Sometimes I want to see an epic battle, so what do I do? I go onto setons clutch, put on all adaptive a.i's and let them go ham (I have A.I allies). But 15 minutes into the game and suddenly, why is my spy plane going so slolw? For all of you wondering, as long as your computer has big guns, a big game will slow down the game to a painfuly slow and boaring game

[OutsidR]

The game is very cpu intensive. A lot of graphics going on, enough to make any gamer machine to falter. SC2 did away with a lot of cpu and gpu stuff so the game will not bog down but hampered the game a bit. Try 2v2 or 3v3 and you may not see your problem as much.

[Ceejay]

Yep, the game is not very optimised, it only uses one core, the faster the cpu you have the longer the game takes to slow down, but even top of the range i7's eventually slow down in larger games.

No real way round it apart from keeping matches smaller, sc2 also slows down as that is also not multicore.

Hopefully there will be a supm com 3 at some point on a new decent engine.

[Dustreaper]

You could try to use the sorian ai mod that fixes a bit of the ai to make it less cpu heavy. You could also use FAF (Forged Alliance Forever) a community based lobby with the sorian ai build in it gets regular updates and fixes. I'm sure it wil run a bit beter when use FAF i don't know your specs so i'm not for sure.

[InfestedAdam]

Thank you for asking about as I've been noticing the same when I'm playing a comp stomp match with my friend. Even at +10 speed the game feels sluggish so I was stumped as to what could be wrong. Given how old the game is, are modern CPUs still being strained by the game?

After a quick look at Forged Alliance Forever I'm surprise it has co-op campaign. My friend and I will definitely want to try that out.

[Tydo]

Originally posted by InfestedAdam:

Even at +10 speed the game feels sluggish so I was stumped as to what could be wrong. Given how old the game is, are modern CPUs still being strained by the game?

In short yes. Cpu's are not much higher clocked than back then nor much faster per clock.
So yeah, it can bring down current cpus too. Only thing that makes a dent is serious overclocking and by that i dont mean a mere 10-15%.
Lots of the game, a disturbing lot really, is being done in LUA script with lots and lots of range calculations (specially by the AI). LUA can be fine in small doses, but not for massive computation and it really shows.
About as bas as using interpreted Java (=without JIT) instead of C. It's flexible, moddable and noobsafe (as in wont bluesceen you) to use lua, but thats about it.

[Stig92]

Originally posted by Ceejay:

Yep, the game is not very optimised, it only uses one core, the faster the cpu you have the longer the game takes to slow down, but even top of the range i7's eventually slow down in larger games.

No real way round it apart from keeping matches smaller, sc2 also slows down as that is also not multicore.

Hopefully there will be a supm com 3 at some point on a new decent engine.

I wish they made updated version that could use full potentiall of computers and be better optimized

[Tsabrock]

The game runs about as well today on my current system as it did on whatever computer I used when the game originally came out. Apart from the inoptimal coding using Lua and such, the game was also written as a single-threaded process. When Supreme Commander originally came out, multi-core processors were still somewhat uncommon, and thus they built the game the old-fashioned way to use only one core.

[DoomyG (AKA Doomguardian)]

I thought SupCom was touted as the first quad core enabled game?

[Tsabrock]

Maybe that was their intent a long time ago, I don't remember. I just know how it performs now. In fact, for a time, my brother's old single or dual-core processor (I forget exactly) was able to run the game as good as my fancy new Quad-Core processor.

THe problem too is exacerbated with the poor AI and how they overbuild varioius units that just mill around and clog up their bases, adding more things for the computer to keep track of.

[droid]

Originally posted by Ceejay:

Hopefully there will be a supm com 3 at some point on a new decent engine.

There is no planned supcom 3 as 2 was such a slump. however a spiritual successor called ashes of the singularity is coming out in the near future, so keep tabs on that if you want a new supcom

[Tsabrock]

I'll check that out, thanks for the heads-up, Droid.

[droid]

Yeah, its actually in early access right now, but I suggest waiting for a full release before making a decision on purchasing it.

[Requaratus]

I belive there was a tool called "Core Maximizer". Not sure it works correctly, but it may help.
Sorry for my English.

[Tsabrock]

@vokinlem2, I tried that program out a few years back breifly. It might have helped a little with performance, but the game crashed before I could really play long enough to say for sure.

[Requaratus]

Crashes may depend on your cpu characteristics. I think lowering graphic options with another tool called "My speed" or like that may help, but it was useless for me.