Were these problems fixed in Beta5?

from Stardock Forums
There were several people (including myself) who had problems with animations in 4Z on Win98/ME machines :

* opening screen animation (menu doors) very slow and choppy (I have an AMD 1800/512Mb/GeForce3 Ti200/SB Live 5.1)

* Some of the animations don't appear - first colonization, star base, trade route animations. (appeared fine in 4D)

* Sound effects (click sound, shooting, explosions) are too high pitched as if played at double speed.

Like I said, I've seen a few threads about these issues when 4Z was released and I'd like to know if these problems were fixed in Beta 5.

If not - I hope they're going to be fixed by 5A as it is the last public beta.

Thank you in advance!

305 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Some issues are intentional. We removed some of the animations from the betas for download sizes.

We increased the pitch of many of the sound effects to make them crisper.

The opening menu doors, however, is largely based on the machine. We may have to pause the background threads when that plays and then continue the thread when it's done on slower machines.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
The opening menu doors, however, is largely based on the machine. We may have to pause the background threads when that plays and then continue the thread when it's done on slower machines.


by Avatar Frogboy - 2/8/2003 1:18:25 PM

An AMD 1800 with 512mb RAM is a "slower Machine"??? My God man. There is something wrong with the doors opening, It needs to be fixed. Not a good way to welcome someone to the game.

Buket
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
I'm not sure why it would be slow on your machine. What OS you running?

Here's the technical details:

While you are looking at those screens, the game has threads in the background loading up the rest of the game.

So on some machines and OS combinations, it can slow down the animation since it's multitasking in itself. This would be particularly true of non XP/2K OSes.

Our proposed solution is to pause the background threads when the doors open and then resume when the door is finished. Just have to get on that one.

Of course, on a hyperthreading machine or a dual machine, it's perfectly smooth. :)
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
The doors opening on the startup screen play smoothly with no stuttering of either sound or motion on my P3-833.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I think there is probably an OS difference.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
If your not on WIN XP - you should be.
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

Ermmm...yeah. I can see a lot of people running to the shops to buy Win XP to fix an intro movie problem LOL

Asmodean
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
Second Asmodean's opinion.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
On my Win98 machine:

Since 4Z, I have noticed that the intro screens animations have disapeared. Perhaps these allowed any background threads to process before the menu screen appeared?

Prior to 4Z, if I escaped past those intro screens, then the music at the menu was very choppy for a few seconds as the background threads processed. However, I seem to recall that if I let those screens display, there was no choppy music at the menu.

So. Maybe once those screens are back in, this problem will not be an issue... unless you escape past the intros.

Apeiron
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Brad,

Would it be feasable to put up the missing animations as separate packages (multimedia 2, multimedia 3, etc.) with size and download time warnings?
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
They'll be in the gamma. Our beta server bandwidth is maxed as some ofy ou may have noticed.
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
"Our beta server bandwidth is maxed as ..."

And so soon after putting in higher bandwidth servers, too. Portends of post release?