Dominions, Vista, and Video files help?

[K]

I'm trying to optimize my laptop for Dominions and I was wondering if anyone had any data about the video files. What kind of rendering does it use?

I have a program (Catalyst Control Center)that lets me optimize my graphics card for certain kinds of 3D rendering, but I need to know what Dominions battle files use so that I can adjust my settings (I think... I admit I'm out of my comfort zone). I've turned off Vista's visual crap and that seems to help, but here are CCCs settings:

The setting possibilities are:
-Anti-aliasing (scales for performance or quality)
-Anti-sotropic filtering (scales for performance or quality, with a high quality AF toggle)
-mipmap detail levels (scales for performance or quality)
-Direct3D Settings: Enable geometry instancing (toggle)
-Direct3D Settings: Support DXT Texturing (toggle)
-OpenGL settings: Triple-buffering (toggle)
-OpenGL settings: Support 24-bit Z-buffer depth (toggle)


Any help would be appreciated!

[lch]

I think that most of those settings will have very little effect on the game at all, if any. AFAIK it utilizes OpenGL for cross-portability, no Direct3D. AA/AF/mipmap stuff is probably only effective for 3D models, what Dom3 is lacking. Graphics-wise, Dom3 is like Duke Nukem 3D: The terrain is in 3D, but units and environment objects and so on are sprite graphics in 2D. Maybe the battleground will look a little nicer if you fiddle around, but that's probably all that will happen, and I even doubt it.

Those two OpenGL settings sound that they might be effective. But it's not like the game really needs buffering for the graphics, this is no First Person Shooter. In case the framerate is so bad that the battle replay is stuttering (??) this might help a little.

More or less the only thing that will make the game run better: a faster CPU.

[K]

Originally Posted by lch

I think that most of those settings will have very little effect on the game at all, if any. AFAIK it utilizes OpenGL for cross-portability, no Direct3D. AA/AF/mipmap stuff is probably only effective for 3D models, what Dom3 is lacking. Graphics-wise, Dom3 is like Duke Nukem 3D: The terrain is in 3D, but units and environment objects and so on are sprite graphics in 2D. Maybe the battleground will look a little nicer if you fiddle around, but that's probably all that will happen, and I even doubt it.

Those two OpenGL settings sound that they might be effective. But it's not like the game really needs buffering for the graphics, this is no First Person Shooter. In case the framerate is so bad that the battle replay is stuttering (??) this might help a little.

More or less the only thing that will make the game run better: a faster CPU.

Yeh, JK confirmed that it uses OpenGL.

I've been trying to optimize the card for battle replays simply because I hate going to wireframe(W key) and having the units disappear when they get hit.

I also get a little lag when scripting battle orders which is a real killer considering how complicated my scripting gets.

Turning off Vista features has helped, but I've been looking for other things I could do to improve performance of these two aspects of the game.


Is there a way to allocate more memory to an application is Vista?

[llamabeast]

I do find the graphics to be a major bottleneck when running this on slower computers. So it may be worth some fiddling. However, I am ignorant in such areas.

I found turning the grass off within Dominions to be helpful.

[lch]

Yeah, my normal startup parameters contain "--nograss" as well. The others are "-afcon".

[Dedas]

Dom3 does do filtering on all graphics (including units). You could probably improve it further with some fiddling.

[K]

While screwing around, I found that everything in Dominions can be sped up by making the actual window that dominions runs in smaller.