Boy, does this game run SLOW

[Synpax]

Sorry; I posted this two days ago on the tech support board, but I don't think anyone reads that, and this is pretty busy..

I just bought the game. I was looking for some kind of space-based 4X game with diplomacy, colonies, ship design, etc. This seems like it. Other games I've liked are the GalCiv and Birth of the Federation - but I wanted something a little more modern.

However, when I set the game up and started playing it the way I wanted to, I've run into some problems.

Primarily, it runs really slow and is like a slideshow, especially in the mid and late game. It's unplayable and I'm inclined to ask for my money back.

I am using the largest possible universe with 19 other empires, plus the ability for independents to become empires. There are bunch of pirate factions as well.

I do not believe the problem is my system. Task manager shows the system is not anywhere near capacity with memory or processing I am running Windows8 with an i7 processor and 10gigs of ram. And when I'm running other apps with the game running (Outlook, Browsers, video, etc.), they run fine.

I've also noticed that I can't change the resolution in game and it doesn't look like that nice, wide-screen version of the game on the community hub web page.

Another problem is that it takes about fifteen minutes to save a game.... and I'm saving to an SSD. It also takes a really long time to load a game.

I just grabbed the update, but I believe - since I just bought the game two days ago - that I'm already running the latest version.

[Roboman]

Sadly the best game in this genre is still MOO2. I wish we could have MOO2 with BotF graphics. This game is a big fat waste of time.

[Caelus]

Origineel geplaatst door Nostrings:

Sadly the best game in this genre is still MOO2. I wish we could have MOO2 with BotF graphics. This game is a big fat waste of time.

ive never played any Moo games yet, although i saw vids of them and they looked like smugglers 5! lol and they seemed to be small, like 10 planets only!

[Ri0Rdian]

Origineel geplaatst door Nostrings:

Sadly the best game in this genre is still MOO2. I wish we could have MOO2 with BotF graphics. This game is a big fat waste of time.

Stop trying to start a flame will ya?

[Caelus]

Origineel geplaatst door Ri0Rdian:

Origineel geplaatst door Nostrings:

Sadly the best game in this genre is still MOO2. I wish we could have MOO2 with BotF graphics. This game is a big fat waste of time.

Stop trying to start a flame will ya?

its over before it begins..... Moo is a pile of ♥♥♥♥♥ compared to distant worlds! ;)

......begun the flame wars have!

[Venatos]

as many other 4x games dw:u relais heavily on the performance of 1 cpu core, laptops usualy are weaker in that regard.(the long save time is the best indicator for that limit), as for the out of memory issue i would guess the 1gb ram of the gpu is the limit here, its only a 2d game, but tens of thousands of pics need a lot of memory too.

sure, if you have the money and need your rig mobile, a gaming laptop is the choice. simple games like Battlefield and stuff will run without problem. just dont expect a high processing game like dw:u or Supreme Commander or Planetary Annihilation to run with everything at maximum. these games can bring custom built desktop gaming rigs to their knees if you tell them to.

[Eat More Humans]

The problem has nothing to do with laptops. I am running an i5-4670/8GB RAM/WD Black 7200RPM Drive. My save game is 129Mb and at loading DW uses 1.2GB RAM. When time comes to save a game, the DW process is around 1.8GB+ and the disk starts thrashing hard (Win8 task manager disk utilization stays very low though) and CPU sticks at around 50% for a long ass time. Maybe 15 minutes...I am starting to use save game time to clean my house. Loading time is like 30 seconds. Map is biggest or 2nd biggest, can't remember.

I think that the problem is that the game has run out of memory as it does whatever it needs to do to save and is swapping everything to disk, and somehow this causes the game to work even harder to figure out what to save. If it was simply swap slowing it down, SSD's would be less effected and setting a RAM drive as swap might help.

[PTCGho5t]

slow..lololol, game runs fine on a good computer.

[Caelus]

Origineel geplaatst door HarryCYUL:

slow my arse, game runs fine on a good computer.

game runs fine on my cheap laptop that was low spec 5 years ago! :D

[King Doom]

I'll be honest, one of the reasons I love this game so much is how well it actually does play on my PC, which at this point and based on the sheer heat it throws off when doing such processor intensive things as reading the forums here is really more of a toaster.

[Relvenian]

I think the issue is with the number of objects in the game. I had experienced the symptoms described, no where as long though. Though only playing 700 stars, I tried to keep playing custom game past the victory condition since I was trying to see how big it can grow.

The game start to stutter when I reach over 3500 troops, 3000 ships, and 145 colonies (roughly, since the last saved file I still have on that game is around those number). The screen gets really really crowded. :)

[AndrewG76]

1400 stars, 15 x 15, 19 factions, maximised independant colonies, maximised pirate factions. It runs fine, saves once right into the game take up to 15 mins. 500+ hrs of DWU played thus far and definitely not done yet., I still wish to full explore the playing as a pirate faction through to fruition (endgame).

Performance data tells me only one core is being used for most functions, including saving. Also limited memory allocation (Under 2GB). This hugely slows down the performance of the game.

High end rig, 290X 4Gb video, Socket-2011 Processor, 64GB ram, SSDs only.
http://raptr.com/viperstrike2611/games?sort_by=hours_played (Spec top right)

I hope the devs with the next release in the series port it to 64-bit with ability to use 4 - 6 cores (8 - 12 cpu) or more (Xeon up to 18 cores now Socket-2011 V3). This game would be great. Though honestly can't compete with X-Rebirth, playing it at the moment, it is like DWU on super-human steroids. (Beats Starpoint Gemeni 2 and others as well by a golden mile)

[Caelus]

Origineel geplaatst door Sparkz:

1400 stars, 15 x 15, 19 factions, maximised independant colonies, maximised pirate factions. It runs fine, saves once right into the game take up to 15 mins. 500+ hrs of DWU played thus far and definitely not done yet., I still wish to full explore the playing as a pirate faction through to fruition (endgame).

Performance data tells me only one core is being used for most functions, including saving. Also limited memory allocation (Under 2GB). This hugely slows down the performance of the game.

High end rig, 290X 4Gb video, Socket-2011 Processor, 64GB ram, SSDs only.
http://raptr.com/viperstrike2611/games?sort_by=hours_played (Spec top right)

I hope the devs with the next release in the series port it to 64-bit with ability to use 4 - 6 cores (8 - 12 cpu) or more (Xeon up to 18 cores now Socket-2011 V3). This game would be great. Though honestly can't compete with X-Rebirth, playing it at the moment, it is like DWU on super-human steroids. (Beats Starpoint Gemeni 2 and others as well by a golden mile)

isn x rebirth a game more to the like of eve online... were your just 1 pilot roaming around a place and shooting stuff for some reason?

[Swadius]

I find a lot of the lag when map scrolling comes from the mini map at the bottom of the right hand side. Hitting "t" twice speeds up the smoothness of the scroll speed dramatically.

Is there a way to comment the mini-map out or tie it to a key to toggle it?

[wolf4243]

Choose No in video options "show private ships" in O key menu.

[Synpax]

So, sports team....

I got a new computer. A much more recent computer. MSI G72 Dominator Pro 210. Vastly superior to my previous machine.

And this save still crashed. It doesn't take as long to load or save, but it still hit a memory error during play that kind of ruined the game....

I guess I can create a new, smaller universe. Maybe that would help? But the bottom line is that this game can't handle max settings on a SOTA machine made four years after it was developed.....

so, ♥♥♥♥-tier development.