Running SEV Minimized

What you need to two computers side by side. seriously though, nobody is complaining about the new first person shooter being a memory hog... I will agree what Aaron should be working on is making turn processing faster, rather than making SEV run in the background... We will hit a wall on the whole speed vs dumb AI thing though...

Having two computers side by side is nice.

SEV, more than a feeling.

I used to minimize Se5 whenever i had something i wanted to change in the scripts or data files. But now, the game just take so much resources i can't run anything else at the same time. It really sucks. Is there a way to turn of that annoying feature?

I don't really have any problems running it minimized and I have middle of the pack specs. There's only the occasional stutter during a combat perhaps.

You could change se5.exe's priority via the task manager if it's such a problem.

The actual processing time though has little to do with the AI thinking, but rather the combat and move phases.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

With me it's the same as with Kwok, there's no real problems running it minimized while processing, this on a P4 3ghz HT.

I've also noticed it hogging resources when minimized. If an anti-virus check kicks off and minimizes SE5 while I'm AFK it runs at a crawl.

The only thing really going on if you minimize it during your turn is the music, and turning that off makes no difference. Just what is it doing with all those CPU cycles?

I have a Logitech G15 keyboard that displays my mem and CPU usage on its LCD while I play SEV.

SEV has always, since day one, occupied 90% CPU and 50% memory (growing to 90%+ as I play). That is with the game full screen, windowed, or (after 1.33) minimized.

It has always been that way...you guys are just now noticing it.

I believe it is due to a problem with how they game refreshes the display. Not being an experienced DX9 programmer I can't say for sure.

Anyways, I'm grateful for the 1.33 patch...hoping I see some 1.34 notes soon!

Thedude, the se5.exe process initially only uses 50mb ram here( after loading or starting a game ), slowly increasing by about 1-2mb each turn. So there's definitely some hardware differences at work here.

I think what is being seen is the memory leak in operation. this the program hoging processor resorces an memory and as it over flows into it filling up the systems virtual memory. I belive that this was always happening just a lot less visibly. The only indication was the occasional warning about low virtual memory previously.

that the game don't free up memory or processor time when it's minimized. It sucks because even when idling this game is a processor/memory hog...

Yah, but the actual memory usage seem to vary alot from computer to computer. As I mentioned, it only takes 50'ish mb here, after loading a large galaxy game with 10AIs. So in my case I'd have to play for probably 100-150 turns before the ram is filled, and then start filling the even larger virtual memory. Other people seem to experience far more severe memory leaks.

I'm not talking about the memory leak! Sorry I even mentioned my mem usage. I'm talking about the CPU usage for the game...it has always hogged the cpu and I suspect it has to do with the method used to refresh the display.

BTW, I couldn't care less about memory leaks. When I hit 90% mem usage I save the game and re-load.

I used to alt-tab my way out of the game to do other things all the time in previous versions, but now everything is so slow that i'm forced to kill SE5 to get anything done...

Hmm, I can alt-tab out of the game and start playing another game without any problems, and this with an ancient 4 year old computer. Could be that CPUs with HT( and probably the 2/4 core CPUs ) aren't affected to the same degree.

While I notice the CPU being hogged a lot, it doesn't stop me from doing basic forum reading/writing and IM services. That's good enough I'd say. But it seems everyone is having different degrees of Hogging.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

I've got an Athlon-64 too and not having any problems.

Suction feet are not to be trifled with!

P4 1.4 and no problems on my aging 5 year old mutation. Ten or less AI on medium size map seems to have no mem leak issues too. I'm regularly running 3 programs or so while playing, so it's fine here.

"Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and will always long to return." ~Leonardo DaVinci

As I'm using an X2 AMD it only seems to use one cpu core, so I can alt-tab happily atleast

Janster

I can attest to that. Whenever I play SEV and want to do something else on the computer I minimise and set the game to below average priority. Only problem is that you can't do that at the initial load up (where you can setup the resolution). You have to do it in the actual game.

Hmm. I m running an old Athlon 1400 and while the game is slow, I can ALT_TAB out of it to so anything. Maybe this is a problem with 64 bit systems?

Here is a quick little AHK script to automagically set SE5 to "Below Normal" priority whenever it is detected.
The script then waits for SE5 to exit before looking for a new instance of SE5 to set, so it does not waste CPU time.

http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/MM/SE5/Tools/Se5prioritizer.zip
Source code (302 bytes), plus a compiled exe version (196kb) are both included.

This works very well for me; at "normal", SE5 lags my system enough that it takes 20 seconds to start a new process such as calc.exe...
On the other hand, everything is nice and responsive when the script is running.