As mentioned in many places on this forum, the game still uses a lot of memory.
This can easily be understood as there are so many pre-rendered images to load.
This gets worse if the game needs to load these images in many different resolutions for different zooming levels.
The developers of AoE1 DE explain here that “Basically, every asset in the game has been rendered 3 times.” I assume a similar stuff is done for AoE2 DE and that these different resolutions must all be loaded in memory for quick access when performing a zoom (hypothesis).
Personally, I never use the zooming feature in-game and I assume that it is maybe the case for many other people (I usually also do not see many pro players using it in their streams). Yet, I assume the game still loads many images at different resolutions, that I will never use. This possibly consumes a lot of memory for nothing.
If it is indeed the case, it would be worth adding an option to select only one zooming level before starting a game/campaign/… This would of course be optional so that people using the zoom can still enjoy it.
Of course, I do not have access to the code and do not know how this would really impact performance and memory consumption, this is just speculation.
I already mentioned this on a similar topic, but I preferred recreating a new one to specifically talk about performance.
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Given that the units/buildings seem to look slightly washed out when viewed in other zoom levels than the default, I would not be sure that they were rendered in multiple resolutions. They could as well just be sampled in a different resolution on-the-fly. But I am just speculating here.
Another option which seems like it should be easy to implement would be to reduce the frame rate of the unit animations or reduce their number of possible facing directions to the same as it was in HD. This should possibly save quite some memory. Another possible option would be to disable the building destruction animations, which take up a lot of memory and also weren’t there in HD.
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I agree, these options (disabling some directions, destruction animations…) could also be valuable for low specs computers.
Currently, I have some friends who cannot play on the DE because of this, and thus decided to stay on the HD version. Whith these options, DE would still look at least as good as HD while still bringing a lot of new features, civilizations…
More graphical options could possibly bring more people from HD to DE.
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Agreed, zoom and deconstruction animations add nothing in competitive play but they take up all the space.
If they can’t fix the melee pathfinding then returning to 8 direction would be a dream since it would also allow classic mode compatibillity. Something that should have been considered in the first place if they want it to be worthy of the name definitive edition.
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