witpqs
Matrix Legion of Merit
Posts: 26087
Joined: 10/4/2004
From: Argleton
Status: offline
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I have seen this for a long time, the basic deal is too little graphics power to paint the screen fast enough so that you don't see the breaks in the screen during the painting process. It will only happen during combat phase (turn resolution for Japan or replay for Allies and of course against the AI). The one other place I have seen it is when a ship display is open and the little picture of the ship shows animated waves and/or smoke.
Also, I it is much more pronounced when I run the game in windowed mode than in full screen mode. I guess full screen mode is able to dedicate more of the graphics processing to the game when it doesn't have to worry about keeping up with the other windows that are open. In full screen mode, other windows are just ignored/swapped out of memory/whatever.
So, what to do? Here is what I have done and results I see.
• Results are better in full screen mode (as I mentioned above). But I like to use windowed mode because when I enter orders I use a lot of other programs and it is MUCH faster and more convenient to switch back and forth when using windowed mode than it is using full screen mode. I solved this for myself by making two shortcuts to start AE, one in full screen mode and one in windowed mode.
• The shortcut for windowed mode I use when I give orders. That shortcut includes the "-w" switch, which is what tells the game to use windowed mode. This might already be what you are using if you see the screen jumping so bad.
• The shortcut for full screen mode simply lacks the "-w" switch, although you can optionally include the switch "-f" for full screen mode. You don't need to because it is the default if you don't include the "-w" switch.
• The "-noFire" switch tells the game not to run certain animations. For example, the case I mentioned when giving orders and you open a ship screen and see the little picture of the ship with the animated waves and maybe animated smoke. You might see the picture be split. The "-noFire" switch will stop the animation, and it will be a steady picture with no splitting. The other cases are during the combat replay (turn resolution) when a combat animation window pops up. For ship combat you see firing, splashes, explosions, smoke, etc. For air craft you see firing, smoke, explosions. With the "-noFire" switch you will only see static pictures. The text at the bottom will still update to tell you what is happening.
• The screen pic you show is during the combat replay (turn resolution) but not during a combat animation, and that will not be helped by the "-noFire" switch.
• The "-cpu" switch (or with a number as in "-cpu2") might help.
• "dd_sw" switch might help.
• If on Microsoft Windows 10, "deepColor" switch might help.
• If you see screen splitting when giving orders, "-SingleCpuOrders" switch might help.
• If you are on Windows 10, there might be other switches that will help; maybe other players will jump in here?
Here is a big potential help:
• Add a graphics card (or upgrade your graphics card). My PC was using the graphics processor built into the CPU and it was fine for most things. I put in a separate graphics card and for full screen mode it eliminated 99.99% of the split screen issues - I hardly ever see it anymore. I do still see it if I run combat replay in windowed mode, but I bought a cheap graphics card with 2GB memory that was on sale. Since I just use full screen for the combat replay that is just fine with me. If you spring for a more powerful graphics card you would probably get even better results.
The bottom line is that the graphics part of the game engine - the really deep inside stuff - is older and is not efficient enough to use all the newer hooks that hardware now has built into it. It was put together when screen resolutions were FAR smaller and was way more than adequate. Now we use resolutions that are much greater, and even though the hardware is better it can not be taken full advantage of. That's my paraphrasing of what the developers have said here in the past.
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