Hi greg, I’m already aware of the possibility of lowering resolution. I did try but encountered an issue: The furthest zoom you can achieve is coupled to your desktop resolution - the resolution you are using on windows outside of the game. If my desktop resolution is 1366x768 and I set my game to something lower than this, I can’t achieve anything further than a very close-up zoom. The obvious solution would be to lower my desktop resolution to the lower resolution I want to play in, but the game refuses to launch if your resolution is lower than 720 pixels height.
I made a thread about it, it received no attention whatsoever: Can't launch game on lower resolutions or select a low resolution in-game and zoom out
I have an SSD. the OS, steam and the game are all on the SSD. And if I didn’t the whole point here is that no solution that involves spending money is good enough, if I had income I would buy a gaming computer and just forget about it.
The thread I linked in my original post in this thread has a point I believe, if I had the option of having a fixed zoom performance would probably be improved, because all available zooms are probably being pre-rendered, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to change zoom on-the-fly without some sort of lag.
I assume if they did that and allowed me to launch the game on lower resolutions (to have proper zoom in low resolution) that performance may become good enough, without they needing to work much for it…
My original argument still stands, i’m playing Age of Empires II, the game is essentially the same, but there is something they are forcing on everyone that is dragging performance down compared to the original, I think whatever that is it should be optional, I don’t know if it’s the zoom, the new graphics, the animations, but something or multiple things were done that DO NOT CHANGE HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED but MADE PERFORMANCE CONSIDERABLY WORSE, whatever it is it should be fixed or we should be able to turn it off.
Hello Creamy,
I see your point and I can only imagine how frustrating but tbh playing on 1366x768 is not healthy for your back. Buy a cheap already used 19’ or 24’ monitor, in my third world country “Morocco” they sell for $30 or a bit less. As it should grant you better zoom scale up.
I understand that you do not want to spend money. But i do not see any other solution at least for now. The current state of the game is unoptimized however eventually it will be as the developers are working on it.
This is something I wonder since the day the game came out. The only new animations are destructions one, if i’m not wrong, but they only happen when you’re attacking/defending a base, so I would discard them as the cause of this low performance.
I would say it’s the higher amount of directions and frames, but come on, they have been increased by… idk 8 times? It’s the same core game from 1999 with just more and better sprites than before. It should run smoothly in a computer from at least about 2006.
I have the luck I can play the game just fine, so I’m not complaining per se, but I honestly and out of curiosity want to know what has changed.
Could anyone who better understand how the game works have a word? Some T-West or anyone
I’m totally on to an option for locked zoom level for the game to load less data
This is because since the engine is 2.5D, it can’t handle 4K sprites too well. It’s not a 3D engine like AOE3, so it’s trickier to work with
Actually, this is why Brutal Doom, for example, might start crashing on weaker PCs
It’s sometimes just too much for the engine to handle (Doom engine is 27 years old, after all)
I also want know, why the game caps FPS, my monitor is 60 fps but sure that if the game run 100 fps is much better for the experience, and my setup can run.
You should have read my post, original game had super low quality audio, files, textures, animations, all of them are in 8 bits, the pure castle animation and destruction of the same weights as much as the whole old game, having said that you don’t need to be a genius to understand that if the same old engine that runs on single core is now loading and working with files 100 times bigger than the original, it was obvious the minimum specs to play this game would have to be way bigger, you can’t run 15 gb game with 128 mb of ram that is quite obvious, also the original engine was never meant to run high resolutions, so we have pushed the limits of the genie engine, the performance in this game is more than acceptable, HD in comparison weights 33%of this game and the performance and input lag is amazing and unplayable, still several players from DE came from there.
Nothing really changed only the weight of the files by a lot and the load on the old engine that now has to render higher resolutions which hurts performance for 4k or even 8k resolutions users.
The guy is not saying his specs but i am pretty sure he is running the game below the minimum specs, very old cpu, limited ram and maybe not even a discrete GPU instead an IGP from intel or ancient APU with r5 graphics.
If you are running the game in very low quality and resolution the zoom caps out, you can’t even change it. Also the zoom only changes the in game resolution, 50% is ur desktop canvas resolution, if you zoom in or out the game will internally render the game smaller or bigger, 1080p fully zoomed out is rendering the game at 4k, and 4k resolution fully zoomed out is running the game at 8k res, obviously you don’t want to move the zoom thing if you can barely run the game.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. If I understood it well, if we had the option of loading the game with assets of the same quality as the original, and it was implemented in a way that only the assets I decided to use are loaded, the game would need considerably less resources.
because game isn’t just about graphics. a bunch of things are poorly implemented for sure and need fix.
after speaking with devs and how they can target lag (strictly performance end, excluding crashes/desync or drops) and testing over several months these are the things we found and a lot of these are closely related.
a lagger with inferior hardware, will cause lag to all players. a typical 2vs2 with 200 pop would be fine with their benchmark score of 1k but thats kinda the limit.
current game implementation, when game starts to lag due to lagger or other reasons (excluding hardware) your fps is actually not dropping and this is already confirmed with f11 or other existing software. what the game does is that it throttles your IN GAME animation to same of the lagger. dev said animation can be decoupled and should be in future patches so we just have to wait, but this does not fix unit unresponsiveness, only the animation throttling caused by lag.
there is a serious issue with online server, it is seriously lacking in terms of performance for w/e reason and you can easily test this. a 200 vs 200 melee units battle in single player does not lag at all, while doing it with another friend online (not using LAN, but an existing server to host lobby) will somehow be enough to trigger animation lag & lags to no end unless you put on “stand ground” attack stance.
closely related to point 3, AI pathing causes lag, partially explains the above with aggresive/defensive stance vs stand ground and also why game on blackforest against AI with walling will increase lag.
these are the biggest ones I can get off top of my head, game speed and resolution also matters, but much less than whats above. there could be additional issue but unless they can be tested and reproduced its hard to say what they are.
There was progress on my end at least… in the beginning I had a score of 1090 in benchmark… over all those updates my score dropped to around 960, which led to not being able to play TGs. Now I have a new PC and my score again is way over 1k3. Nevertheless: now that I can run actual games I have not played a single TG since 11
they sell for $30 or a bit less. As it should grant you better zoom scale up.