Thread: Question Older computers
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Old March 9th, 2018, 07:43 PM
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Default Re: Older computers

Quote:
Originally Posted by Oche View Post
Currently, i have both WINSPWW2 & WINSPMBT installed on 3 desktop machines.

The oldest (desktop clone) packs an old (10 years old or more) motherboard and a Dual Core Pentium 4 HT 3.00 ghz CPU, Windows XP, the games work marvellously on that one.

I sometimes experience some short slowdown or delay in battle animations and sound effects when games are running on an HP Core 2 Dual Core with Windows 10 32 bit, but that just happens in the first 1 or 2 minutes when loading a battle. I suspect this is related to some motherboard integrated graphics BS delay.

I also had the games installed on a machine that had Windows Vista 32 bit. Very good experience as well.

I'm a "Retro" PC collector so i'm sure i'll eventually go on installing and loading up WINSPWW2 & WINSPMBT on other older machines, when i do so i'll rate them.
The game loads assets on an as-needed basis. So the first time you are on say a summer map and scroll around then it will be busily loading the SHP files required for terrain tiles to memory from disk.

Once they are loaded into memory then they stay there till you exit the main game. All zoom levels are loaded if any one zoom is called, as I recollect.

So on an older computer if you see this sluggishness at the start then I would try a quick zoom out of the map to zoom 5, and back again. Zoom level 5 should result in all the terrain tiles needed being loaded. Alternatively, when deploying, scroll round the entire map for the same effect. The terrain tile SHP is only loaded the first time it needs to be displayed - that should as I say, force it to load the assets needed.

if you stay with the same terrain type for the next few battles (say playing a campaign) and in the same game session then the tiles are in memory. Changing to another scenario with say snow terrain after say desert would probably need a quick zoom out or a scroll around the map again to force tile loading.

If you have an older lesser horsepower machine that initially lags, try that technique out and let me know if it works.
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