AGEOD Forums

Is this normal? Elapsed time from clicking on the icon to appearancce of the main menu is 3 mins 30 secs on Vista 1800 mhz machine with 1.5 gb RAM.

Hi

Yes is normal. It takes as much in my machine (2.8 Mhz 1 GB RAM and XP).
The map is huge and the areas images take a while to load.
Luckily, you can safely alt-tab the game to your desktop and do other things (like post here ) so no need to relaunch often.

Regards!

Vista is using roughly half of your RAM, so you are under the specs here. No shop should sell a Vista PC without at least 2 gig of RAM, in my opinion, otherwise they are abusing you.

Pocus wrote:Vista is using roughly half of your RAM, so you are under the specs here. No shop should sell a Vista PC without at least 2 gig of RAM, in my opinion, otherwise they are abusing you.

LOL! Quite true -- Vista is indeed a resource hog, as was XP before it at the time it was released.

What is taking a while to load is the textures. I have a 2.8 ghz P4 w/HT, 3 gigs RAM and it still takes a minute to load (just a minute, mind you, but still noticeable). What you need is more RAM, which is by comparison a rather inexpensive upgrade these days. I would recommend a full 4 gigs to run Vista with all the bells and whistles -- 3 to get a decent load time.

Oh, forgot to mention that I am running the game on an XP machine

Oddly enough by the way -- WIA load times are VASTLY improved over ACW?

The map loading is deported later. In AACW with the standard option, you load all the map. In WIA, you don't load anything before you actually pick a scenario, and then depending of the setting of the scenario, you don't load all the map all time.

This is mostly a trick. People accept much more a game with a fast load time, then a progress bar during scenario load time. In truth, the data of the scenario is loaded very fast, the rest being the map graphics.

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You're lucky it takes approx 10 mins to load on my pc. I often pop to the village, do some stuff and come back before I play.

Strax wrote:You're lucky it takes approx 10 mins to load on my pc. I often pop to the village, do some stuff and come back before I play.

Wow!!
What specs do you have?
The game plays ok after loading??

The important message here for AACW users with low specs is that by changing in the options how the textures are loaded (I do not remember exactly the name of the option now - load textures ?, map ? apy: ) you can get load times ala WIA

Strax wrote:You're lucky it takes approx 10 mins to load on my pc. I often pop to the village, do some stuff and come back before I play.

I had that same issue once - on Vista. Actually, it took even longer. After running a registry program called RegCure, the problem disappeared. 3minutes, or so, seems about normal.

arsan wrote:Wow!!
What specs do you have?
The game plays ok after loading??

I'm not sure of my specs. I'm not that good with that sort of thing. I know that I can play modern FPS games without any trouble.
I do need a new computer though. The bloody thing keeps freezing up on me and I have to reboot it about 3 times a day.

Having said that the game plays fine when it's finally running.

I've been at work since Friday and haven't had a chance to play the game for 3 days and I'm suffering withdrawl symptoms. I never thought I'd say this but "Roll on Monday".

Most PC experts recommend 3 gigs for Vista btw to get reasonable performance.

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Gray_Lensman wrote:Sneaky and Sly, but why did you tell everyone... You should keep some things secret so that your "Wizard" image is enhanced...

I know, I hesitated to post that ...