Performance degradation as you progress.

[Bigheadmikelove]

For people with slower cpus, it is going to be unplayable very soon. Imagine there's someone with a 2.4GHz C2Q, having to play at 10-15 fps all the time. And what about people with minimum requirements (2 GHz P4), which is about twice slower than this C2Q. They would get, at max, 10 fps.

Hey I've got one of those c2qs (q6600) and I noticed that you are an overclocker, I'd like to try it, (and need to to maintain any hope of playing this game) do you know a reputable source for information on OCing? any help is appreciated

[Predator02]

I noticed when I was playing, it didn't start slowing down until Aldrin, after that the whole game felt slower regardless of what system I was in.

[Sandalpocalypse]

Since the game is only barely multithreaded, quadcores will perform pretty crappily. You're much better off with a faster dualcore.

[acrh2]

For people with slower cpus, it is going to be unplayable very soon. Imagine there's someone with a 2.4GHz C2Q, having to play at 10-15 fps all the time. And what about people with minimum requirements (2 GHz P4), which is about twice slower than this C2Q. They would get, at max, 10 fps.

Hey I've got one of those c2qs (q6600) and I noticed that you are an overclocker, I'd like to try it, (and need to to maintain any hope of playing this game) do you know a reputable source for information on OCing? any help is appreciated

Well, CPU ocing is often a tedious process which entirely depends on pretty much your entire pc hardware. It can be touchy if you try to squeeze every bit out of your chip.

It's probably better to ask someone who knows how to do it with your particular cpu type and stepping, and has time to explain it in detail .
I myself have to relearn old and new tricks every time I upgrade.
But there's always a lot of helpful people at these two site.

www.ocforums.com
www.xtremesystems.org

And they have fairly comprehensive guides on how to OC.

If I remember correctly, when the first G0 steppings of q6600 came out, they were doing 3.0GHz right out of the box on stock air and voltage. Getting them higher required some work because those chips still got a bit hot, and there was talk about a stability hole around 3.3-3.8 GHz. Which is why I got a q6700, because I wanted no less than 3.5 (and I have an expensive air setup to handle the heat).
If I remember correctly, with C2Q and low to moderate overclock, you just need to raise the FSB, and possibly voltage.

[buxtonm]

Wow im getting the same thing during combat. However i have noticed that at the start of the game some sectores(ore belt) were deserted and now the trade lanes are so full that ships are crashing into each other. so maybe the game is spawning too many ships and not removing them. I also noticed that Akeela's beacon fill up with non hostile pirates at a regular basis. these pirates outnumbered the local ships and just in general spammed the sector. it was like one of those patrol missions for one sector, but noone was fighting

Yeah, I have the same in Legend's End. There's about 30 non-hostile pirate ships just flying around.

Ha, 30? I counted 76 in legend's home. Yeah, that's a lotta pirates just dilly-dallying around. All show up as blue on the IFF too, even after I tried re-setting them to hostile. Though they don't attack me or anyone else. There's about as many, if not more, other ships too so there's gotta be 150+ ships in here.

[D_Zorro]

The real problem here is. When the game begins only one sector is scanned so that means less system hogging. The more sector you visit and this will be noticeable. It was like this with every previous version with X started from X-tension.

[JCESAR]

Problem is the AI companies, too many, and they start to grow up in numbers. Had that FPS problem in Reunion XTM, because of a mod that hadded companies, soon after the game was unplayable, too many stations and UT's running around.

[withar]

I’ll probably have to remove all the civilian ships, though X3:TC has far fewer Civi ships that X3R had, I remember going it to some sectors and there could be 40+civi ships.

I haven’t had that much of a performance hit, though I don't have a smashing Gxf card, I spent most of my cash on the processor and 3gigs of ram when putting this rig together so good for the computation cycles...however I still have my old Nvidia 6200 254Mb so no AA or AF for me, shaders and textures on high at 1280-1024 and I get around average 20fps with lows of 12fps and highs of 26fps….will probably upgrade in the new year, no rush

[modo77]

Its slowing down for me too, a lot more than the previous games!
It probably doesn't help that I have hundreds of friendly pirates in a Lot of systems for some reason?

[Hob Anagerik]

I only ever get slow down after I have been playing for a while and normally during a shoot out. What I refer to is more of a stutter than a slow down where the game will pause for anything from 1 second to 3 or so. What I normally do is save the game, quit then reload. Instantly the game runs smoothly again for at least a few hours.

Some people have suggested that it may be to do with the videos playing on those advertising boards. I have watched one playing a video and the game stutters when it is not changing to another video. I have also watched my hard disk when this is happening and it is not loading chunks of data from the drive, or swap file usage etc.

It could be video driver related perhaps but I would imagine that I would see this behaviour in other games in that case, which I don't.

[bluesteel1]

Is there a clear or flush cashe command?Or in the.cfg file to make the cache smaller?Would that work?

[Spaceweed Adict]

I only ever get slow down after I have been playing for a while and normally during a shoot out. What I refer to is more of a stutter than a slow down where the game will pause for anything from 1 second to 3 or so. What I normally do is save the game, quit then reload. Instantly the game runs smoothly again for at least a few hours.

Some people have suggested that it may be to do with the videos playing on those advertising boards. I have watched one playing a video and the game stutters when it is not changing to another video. I have also watched my hard disk when this is happening and it is not loading chunks of data from the drive, or swap file usage etc.

It could be video driver related perhaps but I would imagine that I would see this behaviour in other games in that case, which I don't.

Well I tend to agree with you there Hob I have also noticed this to with the gradual slow down effect the longer you play.
But I don't think is anything to do with the Bill boards, I think its more to do with the way the engine generates AI ships.
Someone stated that the more sectors you visit will slow your game down .
well yes it probably will as the CPU has a bigger work load but I've found this to be minimal.
No I really think its to do with the game engine generating far to many ships.
Think about it as Hob says you save then restart and all of a sudden your FPS has jumped back up again, how many people do this when trying to capture ships as the senario is differant every time well that also apply's to the way the engine regenarates ships,sector battles station wares availability and so on.
Well ofcourse this has got to be controled inisially by some sort of randum number genarator and I'm thinking this is were the root of the problem lies.

[VincentTH]

Wow im getting the same thing during combat. However i have noticed that at the start of the game some sectores(ore belt) were deserted and now the trade lanes are so full that ships are crashing into each other. so maybe the game is spawning too many ships and not removing them. I also noticed that Akeela's beacon fill up with non hostile pirates at a regular basis. these pirates outnumbered the local ships and just in general spammed the sector. it was like one of those patrol missions for one sector, but noone was fighting

Yeah, I have the same in Legend's End. There's about 30 non-hostile pirate ships just flying around.

Ha, 30? I counted 76 in legend's home. Yeah, that's a lotta pirates just dilly-dallying around. All show up as blue on the IFF too, even after I tried re-setting them to hostile. Though they don't attack me or anyone else. There's about as many, if not more, other ships too so there's gotta be 150+ ships in here.

Humm: THis is the same problem I have, hundreds of blue Pirate Centaurs/Pirate Ospreys in Aladna Hill, and I thought it was caused by the Modified tag. So, I think I can hold on to my save games, and hope that ES fix it in a patch?

[alpha39]

Add one more person to the pile noticing this. Hopefully we can get it fixed in not too long a time before it gets too bad to play.

[Malakie]

Why on earth did egosoft include civilian ships in TC!? All they do is hog docking clamps.

Many of us like all the variety of ships and such. It adds a lot of atmosphere. Personally I think the X3 space would really be boring with out civvy ships etc. I say leave them all in and just wait (or write one yourself) for a script you can use to turn them off if that is what you want.

the X series is not an arcade shootem up game. It is a strategic economic space fleet battle simulator emulating a living universe. It is NOT linear in its playability and game engine. THAT is what makes it so good. With scripts and plugins you can make them game do or have what you want. But if something is not there to start with, it makes that task that much harder to do... one of the reasons XTM came out for X3r.

Nope leave them in as well as everything else. Those that do not want, just need to have patience while we await the modders to start releasing scripts and mods. It will take a bit of time.

Malakie

[Empier4552]

Same here. I don't knwo if it relates to how many explored sectors there are, regardless of how much you see, in theory the AI will be handling all sectors. Either way, its definitely occured the longer I play the game. At some points it stutter stops to where i give up and alt + F4. mind you I have an 8800 GTX (768MB) Graphics Card and a Q6600 OC'd along with 4GB of RAM. I see NO reason why x3:TC should be hiccuping so much even on complex CPU computations. Even without multithreading it is a serious issue.

[brekehan]

Why not have someone go and blow all these pirates up and see if it helps? Then we know if its ships.

Clean these overcrowded sectors the hard way? Should be fun.

[Social-Pariah]

I released a vast horde of Xenon in a relatively unpopulated sector... now I can't get rid of them because I'm dead as soon as I come out of the gate, as are my minions, so that's not going to help, along with the vast amount of blue pirates around.

[Empier4552]

Well thats that. Left my game running with me docked in a station today for ~8 hours. Came back to a stuttering lagged out game could barely save and exit. Reloaded the game and it started out immediately laggy. Im guessing more time = more lag so far. Time to start a new -sigh- I guess I'll go with Terran Start this time and hope for no lag.

Hopefully Egosoft will find a fix soon. Loved X3R, came to TC Only because I thought it'd offer more but so far its been disappointing due to the performance lag after long periods (Gameplay etc is great but can't brag about that when I can't even play )

[Baleur]

I've begun noticing the exact same thing. I've already had to scale down my graphical settings from 4xFSAA/8xAF to 2/4, and thinking about going 0/2.

I was wondering if it was just me, but apparently not. It's DEFINITELY slowing down. The whole game was smooth as silk at first. Now it's a slideshow in most combats.



Creston

I just checked the fps in 3 different sectors.
I got a constant 20 fps in 2, and 12-15 fps in Ore Belt. The fps numbers were the same regardless of settings:
1) 1280x960, 4xAA, 16xAF, all maximum quality settings.
2) 1024x768, 0xAA, 0xAF, all minimal quality settings.

I'd like to share a story.
Ive had a good framerate all the time, varied by sectors of course (siezewell slow as always).
Then i went into Ore Belt (terran). Sat with SETA x10 while i slept.
When i came back, the entire orbital defence station had turned into ruins, and another one had been built 20km straight up, and the entire sector was now slugging along at 5fps.. Jumped into Jupiter to check if my entire game was fracked, nope, 60fps there..

Some sectors are getting bugged lol, im sure its a bug, like a group of ships constantly panic-processing some collision avoidance or something.
There was a bug like this in Empire Earth 2, where it would crawl to a halt when a group of units tried to cross a bridge, and the pathfinding bugged out.