Your barbarian settlements lag too much

[Roma_Victrix]

The Barbarian large town is bad enough, lagging from time to time, especially as your army reaches the main square at the top of the oppidum. However, your city and large-city level settlement is untenable, unbearable, dropping frame rates left and right, throughout the entire siege. I played a siege that took an hour and a half just to finish (even though I've got a 45-minute time limit and didn't even use up half of my hourglass); that's unprecedented and quite unsatisfactory. Did you guys not draft any testers for this? I know from reading elsewhere that I'm not the only one to bring this up, either.

Unfortunately, your mod *forces* the player to play with high unit detail in the graphics settings. Otherwise various units, across multiple different factions, look absolutely haphazard, bugged out, missing eyeballs, capes, helmets, having completely wrong textures and colors. I've eliminated shadows and grass detail, put building detail on low, and put my filter on bilinear to compensate and improve performance/frames per second. In any other siege or field battle your mod plays just fine. When it comes to your Barbarian settlements, it's almost not worth the effort, with auto-resolve seemingly very tempting. That's a shame, because your Barbarian settlements look pretty cool.

In light of that, how are you going to fix this problem? Couldn't you just provide us with a lower resolution quality version of the large town and city settlements for Barbarian factions? Obviously you are doing something wrong with them if literally every other settlement model plays just fine.

[Boogie Knight]

This happens to me, too. Not sure exactly when it started, but it's been there since at least 2.1 and it makes those battles utterly unplayable. Weirdly, when paused the frame rate jumps right back up again. It's only when the battle is running that there's a problem.

[romanius24]

Ah yes...thats still a thing.

I hoped it would be fixed in 2.2 but i guess we still dont know what the cause is.

Autoresolving all battles taking place in barbarian settlements is not really a good solution for a mod called Europa Barbarorum.

[bordinis]

I got to admit i have pretty good machine but barbarian cities and large cities lag to me quite a bit. I play on normal unit scale.

[Roma_Victrix]

I'm glad to know that I'm not going crazy, or that my computer or download is somehow unique, with no one else having this problem.

Would it kill the EB II team to release a lower res Barbarian settlement patch?

[Seljuq Prince]

I had an insane lag in greek a settlement to and I have decent rig :/ I hope this gets fixed.

[Roma_Victrix]

I have never once had a serious lag problem with any Greek settlement, not even huge city level settlements. It is only the Barbarian ones, exclusively.

[Thuycidides]

This could be hardware specific. My machine is nothing special and I don't have framerate problems.

[Roma_Victrix]

This could be hardware specific. My machine is nothing special and I don't have framerate problems.

Not everyone has an amazingly high performance PC. It's one thing if someone here just had a crap computer and they were alone in voicing their concerns. Yet with Bordinis, Boogie Knight, Romanius, and I all having the same problem, I think we've established a pattern. It's not a random coincidence. I'm willing to be that the other three I've mentioned have decent enough PCs with okay graphics cards and RAM. Like I've said before, the game plays fine on my computer, it is ONLY these particular settlements that present an issue.

[z3n]

Sounds like a polycount issue with some models- some graphics cards may not be able to handle it while others can. Although this is just a guess based on my very limited knowledge in regards to graphics.

[Roma_Victrix]

Sounds like a polycount issue with some models- some graphics cards may not be able to handle it while others can. Although this is just a guess based on my very limited knowledge in regards to graphics.

Okay. Will offering a lower res version of these settlements help with that issue at all? From what I can tell the models based on vanilla M2TW towns and cities work just fine. It's these custom-made Barbarian settlements made from scratch that present a problem for certain players like me and the others above who've confirmed they've experienced the same issue. Is there something that can be done about this?

Just for the record Roman towns and cities work just fine, even though they were not based on any preexisting M2TW settlement model (unlike the Western Greek, Eastern Greek, Eastern/Semitic towns and cities). The nomadic camps also work just fine, even though they were also made from scratch by xHolyCrusader and others I think.

[Sar1n]

Sounds like a polycount issue with some models- some graphics cards may not be able to handle it while others can. Although this is just a guess based on my very limited knowledge in regards to graphics.

There is another explanation...AI issue. EBII got quite complex AI that might simply be stressing the 32bit program limits too much. Ever since the new AI in 2.2, I had periods of bad lags in every larger battle. It didn't happen in 2.1, and barbarian settlements worked fine too. 2.2 was very problematic for me unyil I installed the Large Address Aware posted by QS.

[Roma_Victrix]

There is another explanation...AI issue. EBII got quite complex AI that might simply be stressing the 32bit program limits too much. Ever since the new AI in 2.2, I had periods of bad lags in every larger battle. It didn't happen in 2.1, and barbarian settlements worked fine too. 2.2 was very problematic for me unyil I installed the Large Address Aware posted by QS.

Large Address Aware? Where can I find this? I don't have problems generally with battles, only the Barbarian settlements, although this thing you've mentioned might help me a bit.

[xHolyCrusader]

When I checked the settlement some while ago I noticed several things that could cause the performance drop.
1) The high-poly walls, it would probably be better to just mimic these wooden trunks sticking inside it through the texture, cause right now they cause a really high poly and tri count.
2) The way the settlement is set up in the IWTE, structures are in complexes they dont belong to, this is also causing some lighting issues, maybe you have noticed these already.
3) Something pathfinding related, the AI cant bring the walls down as they currently have no damage states, these would have to be modelled first though...

I will give fixing this a try in the future but right now another project is keeping me busy.

[rovert]

Its the main gate , everyone gets rammed into the same space then it crawls to a nice ticking battle .

[Roma_Victrix]

Thank you for the explanation, xHolyCrusader! I hope sometime in the future you're able to solve this.

@rovert: that's certainly part of it. I noticed that it certainly got worse at that point, but to be honest my siege battle was already fairly slow before that point, even while just scaling the walls with ladders and towers.

[Sar1n]

Large Address Aware? Where can I find this? I don't have problems generally with battles, only the Barbarian settlements, although this thing you've mentioned might help me a bit.

Took me a while to find...here you go: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...=#post15036990

[Boogie Knight]

Just knowing we have some info on this issue is great. Fingers crossed it'll make it into 2.2c, in which I'm planning to finally try out the Pritanoi. Thanks, xHolyCrusader.

[Rafkos]

Couldn't you just provide us with a lower resolution quality version of the large town and city settlements for Barbarian factions?

"just"


Replacing and remodelling each model would take only a little bit less time than rebuilding the whole settlement from scratch

[Roma_Victrix]

Why does everything have to be so difficult?