Question about System Ship Movement Delay Milliseconds

Resident Alien 2 · #1 December 22nd, 2001, 08:43 PM

Has anybody tried setting "System Ship Movement Delay Milliseconds" at bottom of settings.txt to a value > 0? In Win XP or in Win ME?

I was experimenting with this because my new computer moves the ships too fast with ship animation turned off (instant arrival) and is too slow with it turned on (they trek sloooowly across the screen).

I set it to 5000 (milliseconds) but unfortunately I don't get a chance to evaluate the change because SE4 goes into a hard lock up when I move a ship (CPU maxes out at 100%). It freezes after moving one space. Win XP allows me to kill it after waiting for a short period.

I tried this a number of times with different saved games and also with a value of 3000. Same result.

My system is a P4 1.6G with Win XP and I am running SE4 v1.49 with TDM-Modpack 2.0.

Baron Munchausen · #2 December 22nd, 2001, 10:05 PM

Uh, one 'millisecond' is a thousandth of a second. 5000 is FIVE SECONDS. Do you really need it to wait five seconds between each move of the ship? Remember, this is not per square, this is per FRAME in animation. Assuming 30 frames per second that's forcing a second of animation to Last 150 seconds.

Somehow it's not surprising that setting such a high value would cause some sort of overflow or lockup. I've been using a value of 5, yes 5, for a long time now. I've got Win98 running on an AMD Duron.

Resident Alien 2 · #3 December 22nd, 2001, 10:42 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Uh, one 'millisecond' is a thousandth of a second. 5000 is FIVE SECONDS. Do you really need it to wait five seconds between each move of the ship? Remember, this is not per square, this is per FRAME in animation. Assuming 30 frames per second that's forcing a second of animation to Last 150 seconds. Somehow it's not surprising that setting such a high value would cause some sort of overflow or lockup. I've been using a value of 5, yes 5, for a long time now. I've got Win98 running on an AMD Duron.

A per frame delay, oops that explains why it looked frozen. I was hoping this would slow down the non-animated ship movement. Doesn't look like it's going to help me though.

I would like to either speed up the animated ships a bit (currently 1 sec per move point) or slow down the non-animated ships (instant arrival). Setting to 5 is even slower when animated.

I tried the same save game on my old P200 Win ME system. The animated ship movement is quicker on this older system, this is the setting I used previously and was happy with.

Something to do with XP, or 3d graphics cards maybe?

Zarix · #4 December 22nd, 2001, 11:17 PM

In my old computer the animation slowed a lot if I had used IE before playing SEIV. I remember that some people were having problems when using the game to play CDs. It might be XP but I don't know because I have WIN98.

Zarix · #5 December 22nd, 2001, 11:21 PM

I tried using negative numbers in delay, but it didn't work. The game just gave me an error.

Will · #6 December 23rd, 2001, 01:07 AM

Try turning animation off and setting the delay to 100. That *should* cause a tenth of a second per move delay. Animation off moves ships directly from square to square instead of "smoothing" it, so 10 moves = 1 second. If not, I don't really know what else to try, other than upgrading your drivers. Or using your older system

edit-- Forgot to take off sig...

[ 22 December 2001: Message edited by: Will ]

Resident Alien 2 · #7 December 23rd, 2001, 01:19 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Will:
Try turning animation off and setting the delay to 100. That *should* cause a tenth of a second per move delay. Animation off moves ships directly from square to square instead of "smoothing" it, so 10 moves = 1 second. If not, I don't really know what else to try, other than upgrading your drivers. Or using your older system

edit-- Forgot to take off sig...

[ 22 December 2001: Message edited by: Will ]

After some experiments I confirmed that this setting only applies when the animation is active. I got up to 50000 and it didn't slow down.

Nooo, not going back to that old lump of junk

I think I can live with this or go to no animation if I get irritated. The turn processing is very quick now which is a lot more important, especially on huge 20 player, 250 system end game turns!