48 replies to this topic

[Ghostrider]

I can start with some excellent news. The Lag is Dead. This means that the full version of Galaxy, Far, Far, Away will now be shipped with the release.

We soon realised in the development that the lag (where the map freezes and locks the game) was probably linked to the number of planets in the campaign. After a good bit of poking through various parts of the code we found a small item, forgotten by the deigners and left in the original FOC which caused excessive CPU and memory requirements as the number of planets increased. The offending item has been removed and the map now moves freely with every twitch of the mouse. While this has the greatest effect on the larger campaigns, you should also notice slight improvements in the small campaigns as well.

We do however, recommend the following minimum hardware requirements for both Galaxy Far, Far Away and Galaxy Far, Far Away (Lite): 3.0 GHz CPU and 2GB Ram in order to run the full mod. Anything less is not supported, but if you don’t meet these requirements, or you graphics card is particularly outdated, you probably need to scale back the settings. Please also note that these two large campaigns have lengthy load times.

The GFFA campaigns in detail:
In all cases, your starting forces will be a mix of clone-wars remnants and the emerging technology of your faction, and for added challenge, you will have to start at tech level Zero – with no destroyers or capitals in your armoury. Anything bigger than a basic cruiser will need to be researched before it can be built. In contrast, major worlds will have at destroyers at the very least in their defenses. I also recommend that you pay attention to your heroes in the GFFA and sub-campaign setting as a fully upgraded hero will have more impact here than in the Thrawn or Shadow Hands campaigns, simply because the gap between pirates and heroes will be that much greater.

Core Worlds: This is a tough little campaign of 37 worlds, and as a player, you only start with 3 of them. Alderaan, Dolomar and Ghorman for the Alliance; Byss, Coruscant, and Carida for the Empire. Undergunned and with a poor economy, you are surrounded by the galactic heavyweights – some of the most well defended planets in the galaxy. Taking even one planet will be a challenge. Playing as the Empire will probably be easier as you have the potential construction advantages of Coruscant and Byss, as well as the cheap Stormtroopers from Carida. To compensate, the Alliance starts with a trading fleet advantage, courtesy of Alderaan’s merchant houses. Each side starts with three heroes.

Inner Rim: From the Inner rim out to the Mid-Rim, this campaign takes in a good proportion of the galaxy, with about 48 worlds in total. Defenses are mixed, some light, some heavy, with the added challenge of some criminal hot-spots to consider.
Players start with 4 planets and 4 heroes each: Atzerri, Ithor, Dressel and Kashyyyk for the Alliance and Anteevy, Chazwa, Naboo and Ord Trasi for the Empire. If you are smart, you should still be able to take some planets fairly quickly.

Outer Rim: This large campaign takes in about half the galaxy, - with 73 planets in all, and you will find plenty of variation here. There is a generous distribution of weak systems scattered amongst the strong, but the Outer Rim also is the refuge for many powerful criminal organisations. This has perhaps the most interesting start of the sub campaigns. Only one of your 5 starting worlds has any decent manufacturing facilities (Mon Calamari / Eriadu)– the other 4 are very minor planets indeed, none can build anything bigger than a corvette!.

Galaxy, Far, Far Away – Lite:
This is a simplified version of the full galaxy, combining the best worlds of each of the 3 sub-campaigns to make a very large, varied, and lengthy campaign of about 120 worlds. You start with 8 locations, 4 strong, 4 weak scattered throughout all parts of the galaxy. Beware – your opponent will start with a range of military, research and construction advantages.

Galaxy Far, Far Away
This is the master campaign from which all others were made. 158 worlds in immense variety. Apart from the 40 additional planets, this is identical in starting forces to the Lite version. This will be a very lengthy campaign, so plan your battles carefully.

Enjoy and please post campaign comments on the Forums. I look forward to your feedback.

[EduardPais]

We soon realised in the development that the lag (where the map freezes and locks the game) was probably linked to the number of planets in the campaign. After a good bit of poking through various parts of the code we found a small item, forgotten by the deigners and left in the original FOC which caused excessive CPU and memory requirements as the number of planets increased. The offending item has been removed and the map now moves freely with every twitch of the mouse. While this has the greatest effect on the larger campaigns, you should also notice slight improvements in the small campaigns as well.

I was playing ver v1.0 earlier and the game kept freezing all of a sudden, no error, no nothing, just freezing, leaving me with no other option but to close it from the task manager. Hope that's the little bugger you're talking about.

[Casen]

Are you sure the gigahertz on the CPU is what matters? My CPU is a Intel Core2 Quad with 2.4 gigahertz, and it's a common misconception that higher gigahertz = better CPU. For instance my old comp had a Celeron D which was 2.9 gigahertz yet the Core2 Quad is vastly superior.

I forgot the reason why it's like that but if I recall it has to do with how many times per clock cycle it processes.

Edited by Kacen, 21 December 2008 - 06:43 PM.

[bob345]

I know I've asked this before but since there is more info on GFFA and GFFA Lite I was wondering if 1.5GHz Cpu, 640 Megabites ram, and a Nivida Geforce 66000 can run atleast the GFFA Lite witout crashing or preventing me from finishing the campaign (I don't mind major lag). If I can't run a GFFa Lite would my computer beable to handle the threee sub-campaigns?

Edited by bob345, 21 December 2008 - 07:05 PM.

[turbotails23]

Are you sure the gigahertz on the CPU is what matters? My CPU is a Intel Core2 Quad with 2.4 gigahertz, and it's a common misconception that higher gigahertz = better CPU. For instance my old comp had a Celeron D which was 2.9 gigahertz yet the Core2 Quad is vastly superior.

I forgot the reason why it's like that but if I recall it has to do with how many times per clock cycle it processes.

Eh, I can see reasons for both of the above.

By the way, before I forget, I am quite sure you will need more than 640 MB of ram if you want to avoid lag.

**********
CPU
**********

#1 In order to fully utilize a multiple core CPU, a program must be written for it. In the event that a program is not written for it, A higher GHZ is better.

#2 Celerons are defective CPU's that had parts of them shut off and sold at low prices. In short, stating your quad is better than your Celeron D is a "'Duh' moment" (No offense intended). In fact, stating a Pentium 4 2.1Ghz Processor outperformed your Celeron D at 3.0ghz wouldn't be too surprising.---Also, before I get bashers, I have a few people I know who spent a few hours talking about their work at intel and about the processors they make--and one of them works with new processors before they are released. They all confirm the above.

#3. Do note that a Celeron D is not a dual core--Useful for the following point.




Now, with the Celeron D established, Ill bring the main reason why GHZ does matter, yet you see a difference with your current CPU (Besides the Celeron Factor)


#1. Empire at War and Forces of Corruption can not directly benefit from a dual/tri/quad core. That being said, they can indirectly benefit from a duo core--quite simply because on a single core, all functions on the computer are run through one cpu. With a duo core, all of your processes are spread out across your 2/3/4 cores as your OS sees fit.
That brings in a visible speed increase.

#2. Two of the most influential items in a gaming PC, are they GPU and the CPU. The GPU handles graphics, and the CPU (For the most part) processes information, and runs calculations. The Galaxy Far Far Away campaign seemed to have suffered from something that caused it to run unneeded calculations--This can be noticed by the stuttering--Perhaps something was checked every ___? amount of seconds, and was a large amount of info to instantly process?. Obviously, speeding up your CPU would help it process calculations and information faster.

#3. It would appear that they don't have sufficient items to do benchmarking on different hardware and give a conclusive answer, and it may turn out you only need a 1.6 GHZ processor. It may turn out you need a 2.9, or a 2ghz processor.








Anyway, can you inform us what exactly caused the lag?

Edited by turbotails23, 21 December 2008 - 07:54 PM.

[Ghostrider]

I know I've asked this before but since there is more info on GFFA and GFFA Lite I was wondering if 1.5GHz Cpu, 640 Megabites ram, and a Nivida Geforce 66000 can run atleast the GFFA Lite witout crashing or preventing me from finishing the campaign (I don't mind major lag). If I can't run a GFFa Lite would my computer beable to handle the threee sub-campaigns?

My recommendation is simple: Try running Outer Rim first, but with such a low RAM, I seriously recommend against the larger campaigns.

The basic equation is simple, the more planets in the campaign, the harder it gets for the hardware, both in terms of RAM (there are more units to put into RAM), and CPU (more calculations to run in Galactic Mode) I run 2GB ram and the Master version of the GFFA campaign (slightly bigger than the released full version of GFFA) took over 5 minutes minutes to load and the game required 1.2GB Ram.

With only 640 Ram, your system will be doing a lot of data swapping and this will put further pressure on the CPU. Try the smaller campaigns first and work your way up.

Anyway, can you inform us what exactly caused the lag?

It's fairly technical, but basically the original game designers left a piece of code behind that added considerably to processor loads as the number of planets was increased. We removed it. As to what that item was - well that's our little secret.

Edited by Ghostrider, 21 December 2008 - 08:17 PM.

[Casen]

I have 3 gigs of RAM, more than enough.

[Phoenix Rising]

I know I've asked this before but since there is more info on GFFA and GFFA Lite I was wondering if 1.5GHz Cpu, 640 Megabites ram, and a Nivida Geforce 66000 can run atleast the GFFA Lite witout crashing or preventing me from finishing the campaign (I don't mind major lag). If I can't run a GFFa Lite would my computer beable to handle the threee sub-campaigns?

I would not even attempt GFFA Full or Lite with those settings. Stick to the others.

Anyway, can you inform us what exactly caused the lag?

It's fairly technical, but basically the original game designers left a piece of code behind that added considerably to processor loads as the number of planets was increased. We removed it. As to what that item was - well that's our little secret.

In due time, but not before the release. That's all we can say for now.

[Casen]

In due time, but not before the release. That's all we can say for now.

What motive would you have for keeping that a secret from us...?

[Phoenix Rising]

Verification. We've only tested it with a very small sample size.

Edited by Phoenix Rising, 21 December 2008 - 08:54 PM.

[Invadious]

My recommendation is simple: Try running Outer Rim first, but with such a low RAM, I seriously recommend against the larger campaigns.

Isn't that a little bit exaggerated?
My specifications are really low.

I have no problems at all with most campaigns and GFFA is playable for a certain amount of time. I think this is a little bit exaggerated unless GFFA Lite is even bigger than the original GFFA in v1.0, or are you guys are talking about that if you use full settings in-game?

Edited by Invadious, 21 December 2008 - 08:58 PM.

[Phoenix Rising]

My recommendation is simple: Try running Outer Rim first, but with such a low RAM, I seriously recommend against the larger campaigns.

Isn't that a little bit exaggerated?

The RAM requirements are almost all about actually having pirate units now. So, no, it's quite on. 512 is insufficient for GFFA.

[bob345]

My recommendation is simple: Try running Outer Rim first, but with such a low RAM, I seriously recommend against the larger campaigns.

does this mean I'll likely beable to handle Outer Rim, and what kind of problems will the larger campains cause?

Edited by bob345, 21 December 2008 - 09:36 PM.

[Casen]

Verification. We've only tested it with a very small sample size.

Are you going to test it with the full thing before releasing it? Because that would be a good idea...

Also, my specs.

Intel Core2 Quad 2.4 ghz

3 Gigabytes of RAM

Should I have problems?

[anakinskysolo]

Verification. We've only tested it with a very small sample size.

Are you going to test it with the full thing before releasing it? Because that would be a good idea...

Also, my specs.

Intel Core2 Quad 2.4 ghz

3 Gigabytes of RAM

Should I have problems?

If you have problems, then all of us with a regular computer won't be able to play even in a map with two planets.

[Phoenix Rising]

Are you going to test it with the full thing before releasing it? Because that would be a good idea...

I meant only people on the team have tested it, not that it's untested. Obviously PC specs can be wildly different, so it's hard to gauge just how beneficial the fix is. Both me and Ghost found it to be a noticeable (and measurable, in terms of FPS) improvement though.

Should I have problems?

Nah, you'll be fine.

[Darth Stalin]

So, thus I can hope that my little, 2,5-years old PC with the following:

CPU #0 AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+, 2792 MHz
2047 MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT (256 MB RAM)

will have enough power to run the GFFA whole galaxy campaign (with 158 planets) without serious problems?

BTW: is that possible to install PR mod on the same EaW:FoC installations where I have Ultimate Empire at War installed? I mean, if the mods are "foldered" (each in separate folders) then there should be no interferences between them, right?

[Casen]

I'm gonna make a comment, I think it should be extremely expensive for the CSA to purchase Imperial Star Destroyers...

I'd rather not have them using them constantly, it's just not..."them"...the Victory's are more their thing.

[Kitkun]

Considering I could barely get 50 weeks into GFFA in 1.0, I really hope you're spot on with that fix.

Other than that, I knew there was a good reason I paid a premium for my system.

DStal: If PR's specs estimate turns out to be right on the money, I'd say you could expect some lag, but not a lot. 'Course, this is just what I'm estimating by what's just been posted.
Also, I wouldn't expect any conflicts with UEAW if it doesn't use anything in the Data folder of the FoC installation.

Edited by Kitkun, 29 October 2009 - 05:46 AM.

[coinich]

I'm worried about my graphics chip; it may not be able to handle the game. :(