Slow performance

[Rookierookie]

I'm getting some extreme performance in my current SP game on Glory of the Gods. I'm in year 10 now, and every turn takes around 1 hour to resolve IF I'M LUCKY. The program gets stuck a LONG time on the "AI Thinking" phase, altering between Running and Not Responding, and about 50% of the time it just hangs up completely on the phase. (If it gets past the AI Thinking phase, everything becomes fine)

Now I know that turn resolutions take longer and longer, but I've never had the game just hang up on me like that with no response, and in any case I would expect that Battle Resolutions should have been the primary timeclogger. I have supplies set to 300, but both Rl'yeh and Ermor are dead, and in any case I'm not sure how that could cause the AI to think in real game-world time.

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit on a C2D T7100 and 2GB of RAM, which is not great but should be more than enough to handle the load. The system is actually rather responsive (Dom 3 seems to use only one core) even when Dom 3 is resolving the turns.

Anyone can offer some input on that?

[kennydicke]

I don't have an answer but my brother has the exact same issues with Windows XP on a P4 SL7EY HT and 1.5 GB of RAM. However, I've never had the problem and my system is slightly better but virtually identical to his...


Just to cover the bases:

Is your video card an ATI? My bro's is... Could be the drivers or even the GPU itself. Even if it isn't ATI, it could still be the drivers or card.

Do you physically clean out your computer regularly? Excessive dust in the machine can cause the processor or video card to overheat and severely hamper overall performance.

Do you monitor your system's temperatures? Bad cooling can be detrimental to system performance, especially during game-play.

Do you defragment your system regularly? Over-fragmentation can increase seek time, which often appears to the user as a 'hang'.

Do you run a lot of 'background' programs? 2GB of RAM is fine if you don't, but having a lot of programs in your system tray can adversely affect any game's performance.



EDIT: My bro said he fixed the problem by reducing the graphical options to the lowest point possible. This might only work for 'new' games.

[Rookierookie]

I don't have an answer but my brother has the exact same issues with Windows XP on a P4 SL7EY HT and 1.5 GB of RAM. However, I've never had the problem and my system is slightly better but virtually identical to his...


Just to cover the bases:

Is your video card an ATI? My bro's is... Could be the drivers or even the GPU itself. Even if it isn't ATI, it could still be the drivers or card.

Do you physically clean out your computer regularly? Excessive dust in the machine can cause the processor or video card to overheat and severely hamper overall performance.

Do you monitor your system's temperatures? Bad cooling can be detrimental to system performance, especially during game-play.

Do you defragment your system regularly? Over-fragmentation can increase seek time, which often appears to the user as a 'hang'.

Do you run a lot of 'background' programs? 2GB of RAM is fine if you don't, but having a lot of programs in your system tray can adversely affect any game's performance.



EDIT: My bro said he fixed the problem by reducing the graphical options to the lowest point possible. This might only work for 'new' games.

AFAIK graphics performance should not come into play during turn resolution phase, and my drivers are up to date. In addition, other games work just fine, although none of them are as advanced as this one is.

I am on a laptop so cleaning is not something I can do. Temperature doesn't seem to be in the excessive range, although I'm not ruling this out as a possible problem.

I don't run too many background programs, and system resource use is fine in Task Manager.

To me fragmentation or overheating seems to be the most likely cause, and I am a little short on HDD space. On the other hand, I'm not seeing any disk access during play, so I'm not sure what to make of it.

[Rookierookie]

Attaching the savegame to see if anyone can get it to run.

[Rookierookie]

Sorry for the triple post - doesn't seem that I can edit my post - but this is the map file that might be needed to run the save. The game uses CBM 1.6.

[thejeff]

I tried it. It did run, but it took a long time.

It's definitely CPU bound, running at 95-100% whenever I looked at it. So it's not a memory or hard drive issue.

I suspect it's just a big game that takes a long time to process. I can see AI time growing faster than battle time. As the game progresses not only are there more units, but each one has more options.

I've never played an SP game this big or this long, so I'm not sure this is normal. Gandalf, you're the resident expert on giant SP games. Does an hour or so sound reasonable for 600 provinces and 10 years into the game?

[Foodstamp]

A turn will use as much processor as you can give it, that is really the only deciding factor as to how fast it will resolve. Keep in mind with multiple cores it will still only use 1 core. I usually overclock my system to 4.16 to run really large games 1500ish provinces, 70ish nations and I never get anywhere near an hour turn time. At the most I get 1.5 minutes, so something definitely seems fishy.

[Rookierookie]

A turn will use as much processor as you can give it, that is really the only deciding factor as to how fast it will resolve. Keep in mind with multiple cores it will still only use 1 core. I usually overclock my system to 4.16 to run really large games 1500ish provinces, 70ish nations and I never get anywhere near an hour turn time. At the most I get 1.5 minutes, so something definitely seems fishy.

Well my processor is quite a bit slower :)

Still this turn time is annoying and weird. I'm thinking there might be an issue with Windows 7 resource management that causes it to throttle or kill Dom3, but in Task Manager it does show Dom3 taking 50% CPU. Something is making the program not respond.

Is there a way to change how Windows recognizes "dead" processes?

[Johan K]

I've taken a look at it and it was unbearably slow for me too. Usually this part does not take long time at all. I made some performance improvements to the guilty function, so the part that slows down your game should be considerably faster with the next patch.

[Sombre]

Nice one JK.

I would advise the thread starter to give up on this game though and possibly stick to smaller games - it seems unlikely that you're going to b interacting with all of those 600 provs. Maybe you could try 300, or 200.

Personally I wouldn't touch anything over 100.

[Atreidi]

This same thing happens to me periodically in SP games bigger than 400 Probs. Is there any way to rescue the game? I would hate to abandon it so many turns into it.

[Gandalf Parker]

You might try rebooting your computer, then running the game with many of the features turned off. No music, low graphics, no fade screens, etc. You dont have to change those for ALL your games. It can just be for the one you are having problems with. Some help for that is here...
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44262

The map can also be a problem if the graphic part of it is too high-resolution. But that is really hard to try and change in mid-game.

Or you might zip up the game (and the map) to send to a server so they can run it for you. I can do that if you want to send it to me. That way you can connect over the net and the server does the heavy processing.

[Atreidi]

You might try rebooting your computer, then running the game with many of the features turned off. No music, low graphics, no fade screens, etc. You dont have to change those for ALL your games. It can just be for the one you are having problems with. Some help for that is here...
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44262

The map can also be a problem if the graphic part of it is too high-resolution. But that is really hard to try and change in mid-game.

Or you might zip up the game (and the map) to send to a server so they can run it for you. I can do that if you want to send it to me. That way you can connect over the net and the server does the heavy processing.

Thanks for the tip. But I am certain this is not a hardware or CPU power capacity problem. At this point I already know what kind of dominions game sizes my computer can handle. This happens even in smaller maps. I've ran much bigger maps for more turns with out it getting stuck on the thinking phase. I have no way of verifying this but I think it is a problem with how the AI is processing the turn. It is as if it was getting stuck with a decision. I just wish I knew how to avoid it. From all the hundreds of SP games I've played its only happend a couple of times, but it is still frustrating having to end the game earlier than expected. :(

[Gandalf Parker]

Are you using mods?

Try turning on the debugging (use a -dd switch) and check the end of the file it creates.
There might be just one thing in the mod file that you can remark out to continue.

[Atreidi]

Are you using mods?

Try turning on the debugging (use a -dd switch) and check the end of the file it creates.
There might be just one thing in the mod file that you can remark out to continue.

I'll give it a try. Tnx.

[Rookierookie]

The issue I'm getting is that Dom3 seems to completely phase out at times and just not respond. My log file for example was stuck at 459kb for about 30 minutes before it grew in size again, which I assume is the sign that the program came back to life.

From what I can understand, that section where it got stuck seems to be Tien-Chi's commanders making their moves. But I really have no idea how that can cause problems.

Attached an incomplete log file for reference.

Although, since JK seems to have found the problem already, I guess I'll just wait for the next patch to resolve the issues.