I thought that it saw anti-aliasing that was causing the lag and framerate problems in my game but it wasn't. Whrn i turned off the bump mapping and or ship rendering in the video options menu i got greatly improved results. The biggest problems came when i scrolled over stacked ships or planets with lots of tiny ships defending them.The devs should come up with a button that turns off rendering for ships that defend planets and create an icon that represents staced fleets or ships.This should help in the overall performance.besides why use all tah power to render what you can't see anyway?

You can turn those off already in the options, AFAIK.

is the button to turn off the ships defending planets in the video options menu or somewhere else?

In the interface options, turn off 'show orbiting ships around planets' and 'show ships in planets in normal and quick battles' (whichever it was you meant, or both if you like).

Well, we should really have 3 sets of specs on the box: minimum (you're going to probably have to keep stuff turned down or off), recommended (still might have to stick to large galaxies or smaller, etc), and optimal (all bells and whistles). 

We actually have fairly good systems, more for compiling than anything else.  (Compiling is the process of building a game exe file).  It takes me 15-20 minutes to make a release build of GalCiv2, because I only have 2 CPUs and there are hundreds of thousands of lines of code to stuff into that little exe.

When we run out of the debugger, though, loading times are a lot longer and we lose 10-15 fps depending on how uber our video cards are. 

But I think that since we all have the maximum RAM for our motherboards that helps more than anything else. 

 

Not to be a pest here Cari, but are you basically saying that the bottom line is it is all about the RAM when it comes to this game (aside from graphics cards of course). If so then I would assume that the root of my problem is 'probably' due to only having one gig of RAM, regardless of what I set virtual to, and that I like to play with gigantic galaxies, usually fully loaded, with all bells and whistles.
And if so then is it safe to assume that there are some occasions when there may be a heavy RAM draw/use that maybe a debug wouldn't pick up? Sorry if I am not being very clear... trying to think of how to word it.

Running a program in debug mode can make it easily use twice the ram it would run in release mode. The larger the map you use, and the more items such as ships, planets, stations, detailed textures, sounds, etc... in the game, the more memory it will take up. In most cases, it doesn't matter how much virtual memory you have, other than it means you don't run out of memory. If your program actually has to use it, it will most likely greatly slow down that program because hard drives are much much much slower than ram.

I will say this much...I upgraded from 1Gb to 2Gb of RAM in my system six months or so ago. This made a huge difference in how DL played.

I think that 1GB of RAM and gigantic galaxies are a recipe for trouble. There is just too much going on at that point, and too much data to store. I have just upgraded to 2Gb on my own Vista box at home, and things are much better in general.

I have seen my system memory usage get up around 2.6GB while playing DL gigantic maps (and I don't even play with abundant stars or planets).

When I first had the game I had a tv out as a second monitor, and watched cpu and memory usage pretty closely.

This game is the reason I increased my ram from 2GB to 3GB.

My main development box is a P-3ghz (single core), ATI 9800 Pro, with 2 gigs of RAM.  Not exactly top of the line.

With 1 gig of RAM, it should still be relatively okay if you have a good video card.

But yea, on the largest galaxies, it's going to use a lot of RAM. That's why most games have such small playing fields. 

We could either penalize everyone by just not having gigantic galaxies or we could put the power in the hands of players to decide their level of comfort.

Games like Supreme Commander have gotten a lot of attention because of the "Scale" of the maps. But a gigantic galaxy in GalCiv II is something like 200 million square pixels in size. You're talking about potentially a LOT of stuff. 

I might also point out -- there's no unit limit in GalCiv. 

I think the key thing is to shut down non-essential processes before starting the game. Especially if you have just 1 GB of memory, you're going to see an improvement on larger maps if all the bloatware is first unloaded.

Agreed! We must push the envelope of technology. Maybe someday we will travel through space through the use of a "hyperdrive" device or something like a quantum gate from Supreme Commander (I think more likely). From the books I have read on hyperspace, the amounts of energy involved in creating worm holes, etc. are just rediculuos. You would need the energy contained in entire stars. Hopefully, Stephen Hawking is wrong in his calculations!

The concept of doing more with less is not a new one. Computers have shrunk from room-sized to palm-sized and become more efficient and useful along the way. Despite the problem of radioactive wastes, nuclear reactors can generate more electricity per tonne of fuel than one fired by coal. The problem with advancing space travel is that at present there's no resources that can be exploited economically, nor do we know of any worlds outside our own solar system which can be inhabited with minimal adjustment. When astronomers are finally able to discern these planets orbiting distant stars, there's still the problem of how to move lots of people from here to there, as well as set up the infrastructure they'll need to survive.