Asteroid Fields Slaughter Me |

I'm using an AMD 64 3000 XP CPU, 2 GB of ram, and an ATI x1600xt video card. Most of the game runs as smooth as butter. However, when I'm viewing an asteroid field system map, my frame rate slows to a crawl. It's so slow that it's actually hard to use the interface because my mouse pointer is skipping around. It takes 5-15 seconds to warp because Space Empires V is processing the effect in addition to all the asteroids.
I can think of a few solutions:
1) Replace the asteroids in the system map with lower polygon count models.
2) Implement VPU optimization in the system map. (It feels like it must be using the CPU for most of the work.)
3) Implement frame skipping.
In the meanwhile, what I'm looking for is work-arounds. The only one I've found so far is to switch to the flat view and zoom in with the mouse wheel every time one my ships runs afoul of an asteroid sector, but that's awkward. Anyone come up with a better solution?




Re: Asteroid Fields Slaughter Me
FYI, I just tried lowering the graphic details to low and tweaking the display device. It didn't solve the problem. Seeing how it's just those asteroid fields that are causing the problem, it's probably some kind of CPU system display bottleneck - maybe spinning all of those asteroids is taking too much out of it.