ericbabe
Posts: 11927
Joined: 3/23/2005 Status: offline
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I added a "low animation" mode to Crown of Glory this morning. From the game's .ini file the user can turn off most of the animations. When these animations are turned off, many graphics are not loaded and the screen refresh rate is decreased, which should greatly improve the performance of COG on low-end machines. In this mode, the strategic map is played with the same units, but the transparency and other shading effects and the animations are reduced and/or disabled. The strategic map still uses the regular 3D icons, but only the first frame of them is shown. Quick combat uses the 3D unit graphics as well, but likewise, only the first frame of animation is loaded into memory. In this mode, detailed combat uses the chit-view only, and the smoke and fire effects are disabled. In all modes the screen refresh rate is slightly slower -- from about 10 frames per second (fps) to about 3 fps. I haven't tested it on our low-end machines yet, but for those who don't mind turning off the animation and the smoke, this should lower the minimum system specs considerably. Users can also turn off sound from the .ini file, which further lowers the memory overhead by approximately another 100MB. Eric
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