Strange slowdowns ingame...

Hey all, I just wanted to see if anyone had experienced something similar to what I've been experiencing while playing Arcanum. I have what could be accurately described as a small army of followers, the max you can normally have plus dog, dante, that-sucky-dwarf-mage-who's-name-I've-forgotten, and a medical arachnid. Whenever I enter an inn or go anywhere where more than a few npcs appear on screen, the game slows down drastically, I suspect because of some sort of trouble it has 'rendering' so many avatars at once, along with their movement, etc? I didn't used to experience this problem, it only became noticeable when my army of followers grew particulerly large.
I've also noticed that if I go anywhere with an animated environment (like uh, the tarant water treatment plant, with all those steam engines going nuts) the game slows down considerably and seems to stutter, refusing to speed up again until I load a new save. Can anyone shed any light on why these things are happening and what, if anything, I can do to prevent them from continuing to happen? I'd hate to think that having a large party means I'm doomed to watching the game go slow-mo on me every time I enter an inn....
Just in case this information is relevant, I'm using a downloaded image of the game mounted with Daemon (I DO own the game, but can find naught of it but the manual at the moment =/), have Windows XP (no service packs), an ati 9800 pro, and a built-into-my-motherboard sound card (some suspicious part of me wonders if it couldn't be the environmental audio that my card doesn't support that causes the lockups, too many footsteps or something?)
I don't recall this ever happening when I played the game before, with the actual cd in the drive, but then, I never had anywhere near this huge an army of npcs in the past, either.

 

No, this never happened to me, not even when I had all followers + dog and 12 automatons.

 

Does it happen every time you enter an inn or just some times?
If it happens some times it could be caused by some memory-leak Arcanum has that becomes apparent when you've played for a LONG while.

 

I have the same exact problem (but without a downloaded copy), with XP Pro SP2 and a 128 mb ATi Raedon 9600. It's obviously not the video card since other people here have older technology without problems. I, too, have the integrated sound. When it slows down drastically the sound is really choppy for me. How much ram do you have? I only have 512

 

Just to make your game easier, AND to alleviate some slowdown, drop the dwarven mage. He is an ass-clown, and not in the fun sense of the word. Jormund is a waste of space.
On the other hand, I happen to agree with mathboy about the memory leak situation. Arcanum did that to me before I patched it to 1074, but it happened very rarely. The problems with 1074, however...I'll leave that to another thread.

 

Teehee ^_^.;;; I'd better not say how much I have...

That has always happened to me, whenever I'm near buildings. What I do, if my character has to go from, let's say, West Garrillon to Tarant University, is the fatal combination of alt + tab. Yes, I go back to the desktop. I count to ten, and then alt + tab again. And my character is running happily and quickly through the streets of Tarant.

 

Alt+Tab...a fatal, if not delicious, combination. I only needed to use that if I was stuck mid way through a puzzle and had to look up this forum, or, God forbid, a faq. Unfortunately, sometimes when I do that, I find the game continues running in my absence, and someone invariably dies.

 

Hehh... the only 2 bugs I have encountered are:
- Alt-Tab, then another about 2 seconds later, and the corpses moved if I clicked on them. Pressing esc twice solved the problem.
- talking to Perryman with Geoffrey in my party results in game crash/exit

 

That's the beauty of The Alttab

 

It is especially useful at the Ashbury cemetery.