*The lag bug tears Sereina's throat out*

Lag. We all know it, we all hate it, but we can't do anything about it... or can we?
I have 900mHz processor and 512mbps of RAM. So, yeah, I have a pretty great computer, if not the best on the market. But that doesn't explain why I have lag! Is there anything I can do about it? Any patches, or any settings on my computers?
Thanks! :grin:
Sereina

 

You can go into Task Manager and turn off everything but Systray and Explorer before you start up Arcanum. This should free up some system resources.

You can defrag your hard drive. This always helps.

You can download a Direct X control panel application that will let you turn off sound debugging. For some reason, it's left on by default. Or at least it was on the version of Direct X that was current when Arcanum first came out.

 

wtf??? 900Mhz??? My friend has a 2 Ghz,and that's a normal computer in these days... It's certainly NOT the best on the market :grin:

 

To get rid of the lag, you need a video card with 32 meg of video memory or more. AGP 4X helps too. The video card is more important than the CPU here IMHO. Working on testing this as we speak. I believe the lag is from swapping out animation frames.

 

I had a lag when I had 400 celeron, when I switched to 900MHz Celeron it was gone. I had only 196MB RAM and 32MB Matrox G400 graphic card (working on AGPx2) so you can safely assume that your RAM is much more than enough for a smooth play.

What's your graphic card and OS? This game lagged for me under Windows ME. No problems in 98 or XP.

 

I found that playing in turn based mode removed the lag in all cases except a few times when entering Tarant and vendigroth. And that's on a 733MHz Celeron, with 192MB SDRAM and original 16Mb TNT card.

Other than that, I was runnning in max resolution with all detail turned on. I found that it was just a case of how much was moving on your screen at any point in time. By putting combat in TB, it cut down dramatically on the time spent where everything was moving at once.

 

If you get a lot of folowers then you lag a lot! I once made an army of 10 Automatons and they made my game lag horribly!

 

I think that lag is associated with NPCs - for the game lagged near pubs, hotels and other NPC dense areas.

How do you change resolution in Arcanum? :???:

 

Now changing resolution would be SWEET! Also turning those effects down... But hey, why does Arcanum has so high requirements anyway? I mean, I've played games like it with better graphics without problems... Heh...

 

Oh but it is an eternal question. Ok, maybe not eternal but it's been around ever since Arcanum showed up and its lag bug became apparent.

 

My game only gets laggy if I walk around a night, enter combat in the wilderness suddenly, or if I enter a big city.

 

What I mean is, to actually enter combat mode using turn based combat. walk around like that, even in cities. As long as you don't right click or accidentally click on someone you don't mean to, then it should solve all lag problems. You only have to wait for a fraction of a second whilst your turns reload and you follower's placements are worked out and you can move again.

However, you only have to do this in areas that exhibit lag - like Tarant.