TWEAKS and TIPS

[modernknight1]

So I wanted to start a topic on how to maximize and tweak the game settings so that you can get maximum enjoyment out of it. This has been a new level of exploration for us going with native DX9. The first thing that I noticed was that DX9 is consuming significantly more memory resources than DX8 did. In my test game this caused numerous anomalies, hang ups, and crashes. Most of these had some sort of graphical glitch associated – like invisible crew or blood spatter turning white, etc. It got worse when I couldn’t transition to my cabin or shore when I had too many ships or characters with me.

If anyone has any tips on how to tweak our game to get more out of it in these instances please feel free to share. When I noticed the page file memory spikes and allocation messages were telling me my memory resources were low (even though I have 12GB RAM and 1.5 Terrabyte harddrive, I had flashbacks to some other games I’ve modded and what we did to make things better.

My game is running perfectly now and I have had none of these glitches and/or bugs transitioning to other scenes/ships cabins, shores, towns, etc and have seen no graphical anomalies in several hours of play.

SO HERE IS WHAT I DID:

First I expanded my Virtual Memory. Even if you have a great video card and lots of ram you still need to have large page sizes defined in order for many resource consuming utilities (like a video game) to work correctly and have all of the memory they require.

The rule of thumb is that you can set this to triple of the amount of ram you have. So for example if I have 10GB RAM I multiply this by 1024 which equals 10240 and then multiply this by 3 which equals 30720

Now open your control panel, then click system & security & then system and then click on Change Settings. Then click Advanced. Then click settings under performance. Then click advanced again. Then you will see Virtual Memory. Press custom size and then replace the numbers in the two fields with the number you already calculated above and fill in the two blocks “initial Size” and “Maximum Size” with these numbers. Then push set. You will have to restart your computer for this to take effect.

NEXT: If your game is already running fine this isn’t necessarily required. Jeffrey wanted to ensure that people who still use XP would be able to play the game so he built the DX9 code based upon that. If your game is running glitchy or crashing, then its likely you need to do the following: Open your game folder and right click on the start icon, then press Properties. Press the compatibility tab. Then check the box “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select
Windows XP (Service Pack 3). See how that works for you – you might also want to tick the “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings and Run as Administrator. I have those ticked in mine.

I know these will help some of you who have been experiencing problems. TRY IT! You’ll like it! Let me know how it goes or if you have any other tweaking tricks or tips.

FYI Orazio made me aware that we can achieve less memory loss with little degradation if I will use a different kind of texture method. So I intend to reconvert all textures into his specified format and resize before our next version.

Cheers,

MK

• This topic was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by modernknight1.

[megaprime]

Can anyone tell me how can i change the sound of cannons some of the lower caliber guns sound better to me than the bigga guns for example changing the 32 pounder sound to 28 pounder i would do it mostly for sea dogs TEHO cuz the 32 pounders in that are pure garbage

[modernknight1]

Well I am glad you like the cannon sounds. I hand selected and created many of them myself. Many are from real guns. I am a former artillery officer with a lot of experience with antique guns, so have a good idea on the realism.

A upcoming mod is changing them yet again. The 28 pounder is not as good as some of the other sounds and that was on purpose. In the future mod, the 28 pounder is going away because it didn’t exist.

The new mod will have: 3,4,6,9,12,16,18,24,32,36, and 50 pounders. The largest culverine will be the 24 pounder and only Spanish forts and the largest Spanish ships will mount Liege 50 pounders which will be hard to get.

There are two ways you can go about doing what you wish. Option 1): Go to RESOURCE\Sounds\Sea Battles and find the sound file you want to change – then find the one you like – copy it to your desktop or a folder and rename it to the one you want to replace and drop it back in the file overwriting the old one.

OR – Option 2): You can open RESOURCE\INI\aliases and open the sound_alias file with a notebook/notpad utility of your choice and scroll down until you find the following lines:

[cannon_fire_cannon_28]
prior = 60
minDistance = 5.0
maxDistance = 1600.0
volume = 1.0
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_37.mp3
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_38.mp3
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_39.mp3

[cannon_fire_cannon_32]
prior = 60
minDistance = 5.0
maxDistance = 1600.0
volume = 1.0
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_15.wav
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_17.wav
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_32.mp3
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_27.mp3
name = SEA BATTLES\cannon_fire_33.mp3

Then simply change the lines you wish to the sounds you like. If you’re doing it in TEHO, obviously you will have to copy the ERAS cannon sounds and drop them into the RESOURCE\Sounds\Sea Battles file and then make the necessary changes to the alias file.

FYI I don’t like the TEHO sounds either – very generic. Have fun.

MK

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