Problems on Time compression | Forums

[aurgolo]

Dear friends, it is a couple of day that I have some problem with time compression in my SH3.

This is the story:

I play SH3 since issued on the market, regularly updated with ubi official patches, no mods, no problems till now

I am finishing mission n. 13 in my career and going back home lorient. But the time compression facility gives me problems like: if I go more than 8 the PC gets very slow, the mouse pointer does not move or moves not fluenty but jumping on the screen, very slow response (around 30 seconds) if I wanna go back to 4x o 2x or 1x time compression....

-Operative system in WIn XP pro regularly updated
-No new software installed since when time compression worked properly
-VGA Sapphire Radeon 9600XT regularly updated (but I have heard that new catalyst 5.8 has been released, so I will try to update)
-Sblaster audigy 2 platinum regularly updated
Mtherboard Gigabyte GA7-VA regularly updated
-CPU AMD athlon xp3000

Maybe this problem is caused by too many patrols?
DO I have to reinstall SH3?
Do I have to dock at lorient and try to start a new mission?
Does anyone got the same problem in his carrer history?

Thank you for support

Ciao

Andrea

[Messervy]

Same with me any many others.
It usualy means your CPU is overloaded which in term means there is a (heavy) traffic in a vicinity.

[Dominicrigg]

Hmmm my puter is only a 1.4 t-bird and i dont have this problem unless i go to full speed.

If i set to 1024 time compression then its very sluggish, so i usually run at 512 and less in dangerous situations.

I guess the sluggishness at 1024 is my computer not being able to process it as messervy says. Maybe you have something running in the background of your computer to cause the same at lower time scales?

Ctrl alt Delete before you start the game and shut down as much useless things as you can, that way all games run better

When your computer is working perfectly there should be less then 10 things running in the processes window. More then that and you are making your computer juggle a lot of things at once.

[aurgolo]

Thank you for prompt reply.

Something sounds strange to me:

if PC sluggishness is due to heavy traffic, why never happened before? Normally I speed up TC to 1024x without any problem

one thing I will do for sure is turn off as many processes as I can but, again, why 5 days ago I could go at 1024x without problems and no necessity to turning off any active process?

[L.Sword]

I'm currently 100km from the north west coast of Ireland and heading home to Brest after a most successful patrol. The game simply refuses to run at anything better than 16X. Exit Patrol doesn't work (End Career is the only option).
At first I thought I was being shadowed by a hunter killer group (I did see a team of DD's not that long ago (patrol time)), but nope, there's nothing around me now.
ETA: three hours real time at 20 knots.

Woe is me.

Nah, it's not that big a deal, but it's annoying. I may have found a way to reproduce it though. It's happened to me twice, and both times it happened when I loaded a save that was created in the vicinity of an enemy port. Usually I don't save, but I had some problems with CTDs last week and I still don't trust the game completely.

I guess I should do some more harbor raiding and saving/loading to verify my theory... Too bad I don't have that much time on my hands at the moment.

[aurgolo]

Thank you for reporting your experience.
I can add that in this last patrol (which gives me problems) I saved the game a lot of times because played only little time per day, maybe this caused this sluggishness.

If anyone has evidence of this theory please let me\us know

ciao

andrea

[Chrystine]

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Hi Andrea,

“I can add that in this last patrol (which gives me problems) I saved the game a lot of times because played only little time per day, maybe this caused this sluggishness.â€Â�

I can confirm that suspicion â€" IF, you’ve Saved Game “a lotâ€Â� as Unique Save-points (not many times overwriting the same Save-file).
If you have, let’s say 50 Saves for that Patrol, it will almost certainly increase the amount of time needed to Load the Patrol from the Career menu, and it could very well impact how the game runs at higher-speeds while in the Patrol.

It is, for this reason, just a good idea to create as few Save-points as possible â€" continuously overwriting only a few at-most (I now never have more than three â€" which becomes four when I get back to Base / Port).
Doing this, has increased the performance of SH III at higher speeds for me while on Patrol.

If this isn’t what you mean here by “..saved the game a lot of times…â€Â� â€" then I can only think it’s just what Messervy has said: simply heavy traffic has been loaded (by the Game Engine) in your general A.O.
I have a pretty high end system here as well: P IV, 4.2 Ghz, 1 GB SDDR 5200, nVidia GeForce Ultra, 256MB, etc … and the same thing happens to me here when a Convoy has been actually “loadedâ€Â� by the engine (whether I ever see it or not).

Best, BOL & happy hunting!
~ C.

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[aurgolo]

Hy christine,

I have saved my last patrol at least 30 times each time as a new point and not overwriting the same file. This means that I have 30 saved points only for my last patrol (not considering the others)....sigh...
This may cause TC malfunction!!

Ok, I will go back to lorient and start a new patrol. Hope that in this way, somehow, the game engine re-start from beginning and let me use TC properly in the next patrol....do you think TC will work properly in this way?

Thank you for inestimable support and good hunting!!

ciao

a

[Chrystine]

*

Hi Andrea,

“Ok, I will go back to lorient and start a new patrol. Hope that in this way, somehow, the game engine re-start from beginning and let me use TC properly in the next patrol....do you think TC will work properly in this way?â€Â�

I think that would be very-difficult to answer honestly, at-best â€" and for me, impossible. ..But, I think there’s a very-good chance it will improve things generally.
SH III ‘remembers’ all of those Save-points, and re-loads them all each time you return to that Career Profile.
Just look at the byte-size of that folder with all those saves to see how ‘Huge’ that really is, and how taxing on the system.
It’s not so-much a drain on our PC’s memory â€" as it is a drain on the Game Engine’s internal-memory (I’m pretty sure) â€" which, like all applications, is finite & really not very large.

I Hope that you will have the same positive effects from doing it so as I’ve had and continue to have…

Best, BOL! & good hunting to you as well!
~ C.

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[paulhager]

Is Athlon processor 3 GHz or more? If so, I'd be surprised if it is being overtaxed.

I also doubt that number of saves is a factor, at least directly.

Things I'd check:
<UL TYPE=SQUARE>
<LI>Disk usage and when you last defragged. If your disk is starting to fill and it's been a long time since last defragging this could be your problem. Adding more files (i.e., save games) can exacerbate the problem.
<LI>Spyware/adware. This could impact your system. Run your anti-virus/anti-adware software.
<LI>Running a lot of applications. I assume that your processor is single-threaded. The more applications it's running the more your game will be competing for the CPU resource. Check your Task Manager and find out what it is running. There are probably a bunch of tasks you could shut down while running SH3. Consult your op-sys docs and/or installed application docs to figure out which.[/list]


Those are off the top of my head. See if doing the above helps.