Interface issues

[T-hawk]

Hi all,

Perhaps this thread would be more suited for Civfanatics, but this place tends to engender more interactive discussion rather than a straight Q&A. Anyway, I've got a few issues with the UI for Civ 4, and I'm wondering what light can be shed on them. The responsiveness of a game's interface contributes greatly to how long I can stick with a game; Civ 3 always had an extremely crisp UI even on my mediocre-for-the-time PC. For Civ 4, my machine is well above recommended (2.8 GHz, Radeon PCIX X700 with freshly updated drivers).

Biggest question: In the late game, every time I click to change a tile or specialist assignment in the city screen, it takes the game several seconds to handle it and respond. This gradually gets slower throughout the game; it's almost instantaneous in the early turns. Any way to speed this up?

2. Whenever I alt-tab back to Civ 4, the screen blanks and takes nearly 10 seconds to return. Civ's mouse pointer is visible the whole time and the monitor itself never blacks out for a video mode change, so it's not a hardware issue, and switching *away* from Civ 4 is perfectly fast. I have my Windows desktop set to exactly the same resolution and color depth as Civ 4 itself. This interferes significantly with the smoothness of the report-writing process; Civ 3 always alt-tabbed to and from the game nearly instantly. I understand this may be low-level DirectX behavior, but I'm wondering how others see it.

3. After commanding a unit, there's a delay of about three seconds before the next unit comes up. This is often actually helpful so you can buffer commands for the unit's next turn or so that you don't accidentally start commanding another unit (maybe if you didn't realize you moved across a river to end this unit's movement.) But the delay is a bit long -- can this be customized anywhere?

4. On the F6 screen and in the city view screen, sometimes my machine stops providing all mouse rollover help text. Most occurrences are if those screens were accessed from the tech-completed or city-build-completed dialogs, but it can randomly happen anytime. Alt-tabbing away from Civ 4 and back restores the rollover functionality. Anyone else ever seen this?

5. Running in windowed mode entirely solves #2, but makes #4 much worse. Also, it makes all the graphics and text appear somewhat blurred. Likely that's a low-level hardware or driver problem, but it rules out windowed mode for me if it can't be fixed.

Any help is greatly appreciated

[Kylearan]

Hi,

The responsiveness of a game's interface contributes greatly to how long I can stick with a game

I agree, and I also think CIV is very bad with this. The amount of small delays in the GUI (after ordering a unit, after clicking on a tile in the city screen, when opening an advisor screen...) drives me crazy - I definately would have preferred a 2D game with a quick-responding GUI, but that wouldn't have sold so well to the eye-candy generation of modern gamers I guess. My machine is a 3400Ghz machine, by the way...

Biggest question: In the late game, every time I click to change a tile or specialist assignment in the city screen, it takes the game several seconds to handle it and respond. This gradually gets slower throughout the game; it's almost instantaneous in the early turns.

I suspect there's a memory leak that causes this. My solution to this problem is to load the current auto-save as soon as the sluggish response time goes on my nerves. After loading a savegame, response times are instantaneous again, even on large maps in the modern age.

Now the long loading times are driving me crazy, but I guess there's no solution to that...

2. Whenever I alt-tab back to Civ 4, the screen blanks and takes nearly 10 seconds to return.

Because of that, I run the game in windowed mode - and it's not blurred at all on my machine.

3. After commanding a unit, there's a delay of about three seconds before the next unit comes up. This is often actually helpful so you can buffer commands for the unit's next turn or so that you don't accidentally start commanding another unit (maybe if you didn't realize you moved across a river to end this unit's movement.) But the delay is a bit long -- can this be customized anywhere?

Three seconds? That's a lot. It's about half a second on my machine, so I guess it's not to allow the player to issue more commands; it's probably a GUI issue again. Annoys me, too.

4. On the F6 screen and in the city view screen, sometimes my machine stops providing all mouse rollover help text. [...] Anyone else ever seen this?

Yep. Have I mentioned I hate modern 3D GUIs? I'm really oldschool. In my personal ideal world, every game would be playable completely with keyboard only, and with lightning-fast GUI response times...even if that would mean using oldschool GFX.

-Kylearan

[mihau]

Yep. Have I mentioned I hate modern 3D GUIs? I'm really oldschool. In my personal ideal world, every game would be playable completely with keyboard only, and with lightning-fast GUI response times...even if that would mean using oldschool GFX.

The same for me. I trashed Civ2 because of 3d nuisence (game seemed unbalanced too).
I remember the game "Battle chess": it had 3d and 2d interface...
Civ4 looks really neat and flying camera is awesome, but the graphics is a killer for older machines.
I think it may be the problem with Python being the programming language. U get flexibility<-->performance clash.
I also suffer while Alt-Tab back to civ: half of the screen load and the other half is black for 3-8 sec. (on 2 out of 3 stronger comps I use - see below). This is irritating if I want to take notes.
I also have the issue that screen sometimes does not goes fast enough to capture the enemy units moving (if watching enabled).

I have played CivIV on few different machines:
Pentium IV 1.6GHz, 512MB, not strong graph.
Athlon 2.0GHz, 512MB, not strong graph.
Pentium IV 3,5GHz, 1GB, GForce FX5700

After installing the 1.61 patch all of them acted similary. The difference was of course noticable, but not gigantic. Before installing it large maps choked and I suffered crashes. But none of the machines suffered 3 sec. delay between units, even before the patch...!

Have U checked for the background aplications?
While playing the weakest comp before the 1.61 patch I was:
1) disabling background downloaders (Zinio reader(!)), skype, etc.
2) disconnecting internet to block in/out traffic
3) disabling anti-viral monitor etc.

BTW: never tried windowed mode...

[T-hawk]

Well, I took some dedicated time to experiment tonight, and it looks like I can actually solve most of the problems by using windowed mode. Alt-Tab works snappily. The problem with blurred text turned out to be because I was "maximizing" the Civ 4 window,which actually caused it to scale the 768 vertical resolution down to 768 minus the height of the title bar. Leaving the window non-maximized causes the bottom of the interface (equal to the height of the title bar) to extend off the bottom of the screen, but the text stays sharp.

The mouse rollover problems seemed to go away once I disabled the Logitech mouse driver (em_exec.exe in task manager). That driver has had problems with Firaxis games for many people, going all the way back to SMAC.

The unit command delay isn't actually three seconds, it's more like slightly over one second. I'd still like to reduce this -- anyone know if it's accessible in the XML anywhere?

Also, Kylearan, thanks for that suggestion, but reloading a fresh save didn't seem to help the city screen lag problems. That's still quite annoying, but not a dealbreaker for playing the game, at least not yet. It is linearly related to the population of the city in question (smaller cities are fast, large cities are slow), which makes me wonder if there's some kind of automation that it's trying to calculate? Citizen Automation is definitely off everywhere...

[Dreylin]

Leaving the window non-maximized causes the bottom of the interface (equal to the height of the title bar) to extend off the bottom of the screen, but the text stays sharp.

You can get most of the bottom back onto the screen by just moving the window up to reduce the amount of the title bar on the screen. This can be seen on some of my uncropped screenies.

[T-hawk]

4. On the F6 screen and in the city view screen, sometimes my machine stops providing all mouse rollover help text.

In case anyone cares (Kylearan?), I've nailed down the exact cause and effect and solution. The game goes into that rollovers-disabled state any time I use the unit context menu in the main map screen (it's shift-click by default, configurable to be right-click instead.) Simply single-clicking on any empty tile on the map restores normal behavior.

[mostly_harmless]

I ran Civ3 on a rather old machine and was suffering some delays.
Civ4 runs now on my new machine (3GHz)with equal delays. But then again I am currently playing a huge pangea with 18civ and lots of modern times wars.

I don't like the windowed mode because I like scrolling the view by moving the mouse to the borders of the screen. That, however, is not working in windowed mode.
As for the memory leak:
If someone is bleeding to death, you can keep him alive by giving him some transfusion.
That won't heal the guy but he stays alive. Meaning, just put more memory in your slots! ;-) I am currently running 2GB. Also I think the X850 XT Platinum provides some useful resource cushions for playing. Enough of bragging. :-) (I bought that machine specifically for Halflife 2 but never played it ...)
I am also more in favour of a fast 2D UI, like back in the old Civ1 times. The downside of this is, that it took me years to figure out what the settler icon was actually showing (a wagon, sideview). I always thought it was someone looking through a binocular! :-)
From time to time I still play a game of colonization. It is still fun despite the VGA graphics.

Finshed post. Not much content, but ...

[mostly_harmless]

One more thing, actually useful this time, one of the first things I did plaing CIV was setting the units to single unit (or whatever it is called). Maybe that solves some delay issues with the game, the computer has less stuff to animate and render and so on?
With single units shown the whole display does not appear so overloaded.

[T-hawk]

I don't like the windowed mode because I like scrolling the view by moving the mouse to the borders of the screen. That, however, is not working in windowed mode.

There's a setting in Civilization4.ini to allow mouse scrolling in windowed mode. That might be just the ticket.

That won't heal the guy but he stays alive. Meaning, just put more memory in your slots! ;-) I am currently running 2GB.

I've got 1 GB RAM, and it doesn't seem to actually be a RAM problem - Task Manager shows Civ 4's usage stays around 500 MB. I have discovered, though, that saving and reloading frequently does indeed alleviate a fair bit of the interface lag. So when my tournament games show 50 sessions played in the replay, that's why.

[mostly_harmless]

Thanks for the hint. I will have a look. As you said that wil make report writing so much easier.