Low FPS, laggy mouse movement |
Very strange things happen here,
I have an Acer5920G with 8600GT (512MB) and 2Gigs of Ram and using WinXP home.
FPS is 50 at the start of the game,
it drops to 25 for any menu i open,
then it drops to further 17 and 11 for any additional menu opened respectively.
when i close all menus, it doesnt raise back to 50 but can only make it to 25 FPS.
I read all related articles here, (seems a very common issue) disabled Clear type fonts, turned off all running processes in background, changed resolution and even tried running the game in 16bit color. The performance just slightly improves but it is still annoying and totally ruins my nerves.
Mouse gets laggy and laggy with each menu opened.
I also gave a try to play on windowed mode, it worked!
with 1024x768 default resolution it was just fine and i have experienced 70FPS at start and 30FPS at worse situation which was bearable.
Then suddenly, after a couple turns, graphics gone crazy ships appear as x100 times bigger in map screen, (at least they are x15 times of a planet) visually blocking everything on sight, planet names are displayed (even i didnt change any settings with that) and i gave a warp order some of my ships, when they arrive on warp point, the flash animation was in slow motion and flare started to grow to fill all the screen... hoped to get everything right on next turn and i hit the end turn button... the game was frozen afterwards.
The rest is more crazy! i terminated the prg. and restarted, i thought my mouse was not working but hey, it was working but the movements were delayed something like 5-7 seconds! I quit the prg. and windows displayed a message "system encountered (or recovered?) from a serious error, please report to microsoft..."
After a couple of tries only to find the delayed mouse/commands are intact, i decided to return back to full screen mode and everything was fine (except the FPS) and give a try for "safe memory" execution to be able to play in windowed mode. it worked! I am able to execute and successfully move the mouse but i noticed extreme FPS loss by doing that.
So what to do next? i have ran out of solutions and frustrated.. pity that i was just got used to game and enjoying it...
I dont understand? there are tons of patches released and aint any geek in dev team decided to fix that problem? even with such huge players complain about the same problem?
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
The lag problem is a known issue for most users of the SE5 + Vista combo, but I haven't seen any posts on the subject with XP and specs as good as yours.
Does running in windowed mode constantly result in a crash? I know some users are randomly hit with the big ship glitch, but the underlying cause has never been determined.
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
When I was plagued with 3 FPS I had to change the 3D device in the Setup menu. Fixed the problem for me instantly.
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
I can't recall what I started with (the setting that had the problem) but it's on 3D TL-HAL now and works perfectly.
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
I tried once again in win2000 compatibility mode, same sh*t all day! You can see what happens if i try it on windowed mode:
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/9358/sevhp0.jpg
it is only happening in windowed mode. Pity, as i have seen 125FPS all the time with windowed mode!!
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
I've had similar issues with laggy mouse movement... I prefer windowed so I can easily swap between the game and wordpad files where I keep my future plans for the galaxy (I miss adding notes to the map from SEIV 
) and also keep a "history" of what is going on in the game in case I get sidetracked and can easily get up to date or for when I run an RPG based upon it (trying to get to a specific era in tech development first).
The only lag I have in windowed is during the title menu and I've found the only way to navigate it easily is press the windows key after I comes up and wait a few seconds for the start menu to appear, then I can move my windows cursor with easy to the option I want and click the button returning to the game and selecting the option... in the follow up menus from the main (selecting mod, star maps, etc) I have no issues.
And I run in XP, not Vista
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
System Notes exists in SE5 as well. Right-click in any sector and choose "Sector Report" or one of the buttons next to sector view also brings up the Sector Report window. There's a section for system notes - although the text box functionality sucks.
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
One thing I found with laggy mouse movement....
Do you have 2 or more active monitors????
I could not play SE5 and did not for a while because of this...
Then one day, I turned off the second monitor,(Disabled, do not extend to second monitor)
and the game played much faster....
Re: Low FPS, laggy mouse movement
I've never encountered any of the problems you're seeing, so I don't have any further suggestions.
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