Guild of Writers

PyPRP likes to generate a lot of wasteful vertex output that could be wasting resources. Cyan's tools don't do this. You could try recompiling the PRPs with libPlasma to compress the vertex output and eliminate a lot of the waste. I'm uncertain if that will completely stop the performance issues, but it may help slightly. The file size will, most definitely, go down though.

I could try that with the next release. Which tool is it, Adam: prcc?

Mod note: could someone move this topic to the ERC Age forums?

Decompiling and recompiling the PRC will definitely work. I don't know if any of the other tools will have the same effect.

OK - I decompiled/recompiled the mainRoom PRP. The file is now 40% its original size (!), and after visiting the age, nothing seems to be missing.

Atrion and others: try downloading this version of the ERC Age and see if you still get the long pauses.

ERCAge_v4a.zip

Note: I tried decompiling/recompiling the Textures.PRP, but there was no change in size.

Also, for those of you experiencing problems, could you tell me what video cards you have, what the video memory size is, and the driver date? [Use dxdiag to find this out; look on the display tab.]

The pause is still there, but it is noticeably shorter, to the point of almost not being there, almost.

My Graphics Card:

Radeon x1300/x1550 Series
Approx Memory Size: 1661 MB
Driver Date: 6/3/2008

Edit, and just in case it gets mentioned, I just updated my drivers to the latest (7/21/2009) with the same results.

Wow - you have a card with over 1 GB of video memory, and you're still getting the pause? My card (Radeon X1650) has only 512 MB, and I don't have any pauses.

Are you sure this is correct If I remember correctly only the very latest 5XXX cards have such huge amounts of memory... maybe you have two graphics cards working together, in which case you can't add the two memories together (each card needs everything in its local memory)? ~800MB would still be a huge lot though.

Opps lol, was tired last night and didn't think, just went with what dxdiag showed, its actually a 512 MB card with some normal ram dedicated to video. (Have 4 gigs RAM).

So maybe it isn't video that's the issue - performance may be CPU bound. What type of processor do you have, Neerus? And what is its clock speed?

[You can get this from the System tab of dxdiag; look at the text after "Processor:"]

It seems to be about the same for me, but it's possible it's a little better. I have a GeForce Go 6150 with 256MB onboard RAM. My CPU is a dual core AMD 1.6GHz Turion with 1GB RAM. And yes, it goes and pauses every little bit, just as the others describe. Could it be something to do with the refresh time on the wavesets or timeofday animation?