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V 1.09 Playing with integrated graphics (Intel 945) Stuttering on geoscape


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Ok, I pretty much get what is happening here. On the Geoscape and only on the geoscape I am getting horrific stuttering and lag making the game unplayable. However, in combat or on the other information screens the game runs perfectly smoothly. Is there any possible remedy to this? It would be great if the developers offered some kind of low resolution geoscape for those of us with older machines. The geoscape is great and an integral part of the 'xcom' experience but in my opinion it is secondary to the actual combat. So please devs, if you're out there, consider some solution to this problem.

Thank you,

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Hi - can you try changing to the Experimental branch and seeing if that helps? That has some texture loading improvements, I think.

One of the biggest problems with the game engine is that it doesn't really support image compression, so images have a minimum size based on their dimensions. That means we can't just make the images lower quality whilst keeping them the same size.

It should be possible to reduce the size of all the images by 50%, reducing the memory use by 75% or so...but I believe that would require code changes because the dimensions of the images are currently hardcoded. The coder who coded the Geoscape is no longer with us so that's not something we can do officially, but perhaps the community coders (llunak / Solver) might be able to have a look and see if it's an easy change to make.

If so, I can always provide the updated images resized down by 50%.

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Thanks for your response. I started a thread in the modding forum and got a response here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/12642-Any-discussion-for-a-Reduced-texture-quality-Geoscape-Mod

couldn't you just replace the existing images with lower resolution versions? The dimensions are hard coded yea but you could have an image of the same size with lower resolution, right?

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One of the biggest problems with the game engine is that it doesn't really support image compression, so images have a minimum size based on their dimensions. That means we can't just make the images lower quality whilst keeping them the same size.

I don't think so, but this area is all black magic to me. Actually, maybe I'll ask Giovanni to have a look at it - it might help us with performance on the Mac versions too.

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Actually, you can update the images. Here's the pack: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26290309/smallerearth.zip

Take those files and replace the existing ones in /assets/earth/ and have a play.

It's immediately obvious that it screws up the city placement on the map, but no doubt that can fixed easily enough. I'd be interested if it runs better for you and if it ruins anything else? Let me know. If it all works well I may create a "low performance" version of the game that uses these files and doesn't use the tile atlases, which should help a lot for low-end machines.

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Hey, I finally got around to doing what you asked. It seems to have worked a treat. Its nice and smooth now. As you say the city locations are messed up now, with some being out in the ocean. Also the area of base influence is way larger now that the map is lower resolution. So you will probably have to account for things like this. IDK if maybe ship speed is another factor you will have to change if you attempt a fix.

Thank you for taking the time to look into this for me! I (and many other potato owners) really appreciate it.

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I did this a long time ago to check on a similar problem.

The files had the same physical size but much lower detail. You could see the reduced quality as you zoomed in but it didn't look any different while zoomed out. Ran a lot smoother on mobile cards.

If I manage to get hold of some image editing software again I could redo it or someone with access to photoshop or paint shop pro could easily set up a script to reduce the dpi of the images (*edit* in the end I just reduced the palette size from 256 to 64 instead). Should only take minutes to do.

As long as you reduce the detail level but keep the physical dimensions the cities should remain in the correct locations as well.

*edit*

Ok if someone wants to give this a try I have made some images with the same physical dimensions but reduced the file size to around 30% of the originals. There are a couple of places where you can see the changes if you pay attention but not enough to affect the look in my opinion.

The cities are in the right places and so on so the only change is to file size.

http://www.filedropper.com/earth2

The file has just the 80 geoscape images.

Edited by Gauddlike
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  • 1 month later...

Hi guys, the same problem here. While it gets fixed by the texture pack from post #5, the misplaced cities remain. The textures uploaded in post #7 are no longer available, so I can't check if it'd work for me.

Any chance to get this fixed properly any time soon? It kinda breaks the immersion, and makes it hard to counter the terror missions when half of Europe is in the middle of the Pacific.

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I'm afraid we probably won't be fixing it - the coder who worked on this part of the code has since moved on to other things, and I don't know if the fix is actually as simple as just changing some static values to relative values. As such it'll be quite a bit of effort to get it changed and it might cause additional issues, so it's not something I'm overly keen to do.

The game needs a graphics card to run, really. If you've bought it in a machine with integrated graphics and it's not working I suggest you seek a refund from the vendor - I don't have a problem with people being refunded for the game if they can't play it.

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This shouldn't need any coding to fix up, maybe just a little time and notepad.

If you have halved the dimensions of each image file then you need to half the co-ordinates in cities.xml as well.

For example if your original earth image files were 100x200 but are now 50x100 then your city previously set at 50,100 now needs to be set at 25,50 to appear in the same place on the new image.

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