OpenXcom Forum

OpenXcom => Troubleshooting => Topic started by: machinehater on September 27, 2020, 08:49:12 am

Title: Battles terrible slow (Xpiratez)
Post by: machinehater on September 27, 2020, 08:49:12 am
Hey.
First: please excuse me, if my questions seem stupid to you, i do not really know much about the software, and could not find any help over google or the forum-search.

I play xpiratez over oxce 6.5.1 .
On my home pc it runs fine, but i wantet to play on the go on my laptop, and there, in battles, on bigger maps, especially with a lot of light sources, it runs terribly slow, only playable if i set it to 1/5 display (but on this setting i don't see shit). The resolution does not change anything i can tell.

When moving the framerate drops to 15, according to the number in the upper left.

The laptop should do it, it runs xcom the bureau and xcom ew 2012 just fine.

Is there any way i can play it in a reasonable speed and with sight on half of the map?

Thank you!
Title: Re: Battles terrible slow (Xpiratez)
Post by: The Reaver of Darkness on September 27, 2020, 08:31:53 pm
Is there any way i can play it in a reasonable speed and with sight on half of the map?

Thank you!
I've been told that having soldier sight range much over the vanilla 20 is a big factor toward slowing the game down. It'll be especially true when playing on huge Piratez maps. So I'd actually suggest keeping soldier vision down to 20. If you set the vision of all of the aliens down to 20 as well, then it shouldn't be too enormous of a problem.

Whichever unit has the longest sight range (even aliens or civilians) is probably what is causing the issue. So even if you trim your soldiers' sight range down to basically blindness, if there's one type of enemy on the field that can see all the way across it, that will slow the whole computer down.

There may be an alternative, however, if you're willing to put in some effort. You could open the MCD files in MCDEdit (by Volutar) and change the LOFT entries (the twelve number slots along the right-hand side). I believe that setting terrain tiles to much simpler shapes, primarily just open ground or cylinders, will speed up the game considerably.

Also, if your computer is a bit beefy it should handle it just fine. I'm not sure what part of the computer handles it, but if it is the GPU that would explain why mine never has any trouble with huge maps, and makes it pretty easy to beat with cheap hardware upgrades.
Title: Re: Battles terrible slow (Xpiratez)
Post by: Yankes on September 27, 2020, 09:00:02 pm
The laptop should do it, it runs xcom the bureau and xcom ew 2012 just fine.
Difference is that OXCE simulate light in more "realistic" way that new games, simply algorithmic complexity exceed graphic complexity.
Another things is that OXCE use only CPU, where new games use GPU.

Of corse there is room for improvements, some operations done in not effective way or simply cheat to avoid some calculations.
Right now I work on way to reduce number of tiles updated when light is updated, instead of reticulating half of map it will update only one room.