Settings don't change Sim speed? » Forum Post by PurplePaladin

Try making a shortcut to the .exe and adding /nosound to the end of the target line.

I do this, and it makes me able to play 5v5 with no problems (usually doesn't dip below 4 on the low end, usually above that stable). For 4v4s and less (up until the last patch) I played with sound with no problem. After the last one I have to go /nosound for 4v4 and 5v5, but am otherwise fine.

I have 2 7900gtx so i have the same gpu you do, which should be equivilent gains.

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Sim Speed is short for Simulation speed and should be mostly CPU dependant. So no, I wouldn't expect lowering the video settings to make a big difference if it's really chugging already. Lowering the graphics settings will improve your framerate but that's mainly on your end for your display and not about what game states you are sending to other players.

Tsumerius' suggestion of using /nosound should help however, as the sound portion of the engine does use up CPU cycles and therefore slow your sim speed. Other than that though, there aren't a whole lot of options short of increasing raw CPU speed (overclocking or upgrading) or killing other processes also running.

The good news is that if you're games are being played at "Normal" speed, then sim speed 0 is the default speed. So long as you're not dipping below that then you shouldn't be slowing down the game. Hitting sim speed 1 or 2 in a big game is just fine. If people are complaining at you about sim speed 2 at the late stages of a big 5v5 game then don't worry, it's them that need to get a grip and learn what it actually means instead of just bitching at the lowest number they see, which seems all to common in some games.

-dolynick

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Quoting dolynick,

reply 2

The good news is that if you're games are being played at "Normal" speed, then sim speed 0 is the default speed. So long as you're not dipping below that then you shouldn't be slowing down the game. Hitting sim speed 1 or 2 in a big game is just fine. If people are complaining at you about sim speed 2 at the late stages of a big 5v5 game then don't worry, it's them that need to get a grip and learn what it actually means instead of just bitching at the lowest number they see, which seems all to common in some games.

-dolynick

Quoted for Truth. I can't count the number of times I've tried to explain that about Sim speed to players, only to have them laugh at me or tell me my sim speed 4 is lagging the whole game. Most players can't seem to tell the difference between spikes and simply slowing the game down. Its a bit of a difference. Though with this coding, its rare not to see em happen together.

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Quoting dolynick,

reply 2

Sim Speed is short for Simulation speed and should be mostly CPU dependant. So no, I wouldn't expect lowering the video settings to make a big difference if it's really chugging already. Lowering the graphics settings will improve your framerate but that's mainly on your end for your display and not about what game states you are sending to other players.

Tsumerius' suggestion of using /nosound should help however, as the sound portion of the engine does use up CPU cycles and therefore slow your sim speed. Other than that though, there aren't a whole lot of options short of increasing raw CPU speed (overclocking or upgrading) or killing other processes also running.

The good news is that if you're games are being played at "Normal" speed, then sim speed 0 is the default speed. So long as you're not dipping below that then you shouldn't be slowing down the game. Hitting sim speed 1 or 2 in a big game is just fine. If people are complaining at you about sim speed 2 at the late stages of a big 5v5 game then don't worry, it's them that need to get a grip and learn what it actually means instead of just bitching at the lowest number they see, which seems all to common in some games.

-dolynick

Sweet jesus, so I've been having my game look like crap for no reason. Fanks mate, i'll make these changes.

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That's the odd problem: I was Sim5 or 6 at the beggining of the online game (just like when I'm offline); everything was running "normally"; but then it was -2 when someone alerted me. Even odder, it went up a notch (to -1) after the game got even more crowded (with giants and WL 10 spawns). It never gets below 2 when I play skirmish/solo.

So getting a new video card won't help my Sim level?

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Hmm I was wondering too how MP affects sim speed vs SP. I see loads of people with sim speed 4-8 that drop to drop to near zero. Haven't seen many ppl post higher numbers than that. In the SP game I played last night, 3vs3 on zikurat, I had a sim speed of 24, which lowered to about 20ish later on. Will I have much lower sim speeds in MP? I wonder why they are so high because my cpu is only mid-end compared to modern hardware.

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Quoting twifightDG,

reply 6

Hmm I was wondering too how MP affects sim speed vs SP. I see loads of people with sim speed 4-8 that drop to drop to near zero. Haven't seen many ppl post higher numbers than that. In the SP game I played last night, 3vs3 on zikurat, I had a sim speed of 24, which lowered to about 20ish later on. Will I have much lower sim speeds in MP? I wonder why they are so high because my cpu is only mid-end compared to modern hardware.

wasn't sim speed capped at 10? and if i recall the scale correctly a sim speed of 24 would mean that you could play the game 256 times the normal speed which seems kinda ... unlikely?

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I'll recheck and if correct take a screenie when I'm back home.

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Sometimes I have random Sim drops for no reason. I play mostly 3on3 or 4on4 and usually have an OK Sim speed.

Yesterday i played some games, didnt have any sim problems, next game I started with Sim2 and it went down to -3 so i had to quit because it was not playable.

Does anyone know what could be the problem? It's okay in 99% of the games, but sometimes sim drops and it seems really random, can't really tell what's causing this.

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That sounds like a random background process screwing you over. Maybe your antivirus decided to do a check mid game.

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I have definately noticed lower sim speed players (1-4) with great pings still lagging down the game. I'm not sure if the extra cycles are slowing down the ability of the user to send out packets or what, but when they drop out the game runs smoothly.

Whether this is actually a simspeed problem, or whether sim speed is more of an indication of the quality of their PC, I'm hard pressed to know the answer. I do think most people can fix their problems by messing with the sound and they'd be A-OK.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

Not sure if theis should be in Tech or General, anyway: Ever since I learned about sim-speed, I've been proud that it was usually 6ish all the time. But an online game today, after 1.1 (which fixed lots of graphics glitches with my 7900GT) showed me there seems to be other problems now:

I was playing a 4v4, and someone said MY sim was low (ha ha I thought), sure enough, it was -2 So I go to options, change everything to medium, check, it's still -2 . So I go in again, change everyting to low, and it's -1 . So I had to force my poor fellow players on a somewhat slow/chugging game (which was still kind'a epic).

After the game, I exit, start a solo skirmish, with lowest settings possible (1024x768; Low settings; no AA; no music; no reverb) and it "starts" at 7, but hovers at 1-2 the last half of the game. So I set everything to max resolution/High settings/high quiality music with reverb/1920x1080, and the sim starts at 6, and hovers at 1-2 the last half of the game. Just like when I was online, nothing I do seems to change the sim rate now???

Is anyone else having this problem? It seems fine untill the game gets going a while. I use to be just sim 3-4 at it's worst.

Dual Core 3800; 2 gigs ram; 7900GT; defraged hard drive; Nothing on taskbar (except Nortorns, which is off, allong with Firewall during all online play). Nortons, Ad-Aware, Marwarebytes all say system is clean. And I've never been to a torrent site in my life. . .

Maybe you guys stop playing on outdated hardware?

You really think new games run fine on your 4 years old hardware?

Simspeed is not really affected by gamesettings.

I have seen people with simspeed 4 that slowed our games like hell, because their simspeed was not constant, it spiked from 0 to +4 and that made the game really slow sometimes. Another thing is that GPG made the simspeed and ping stats not updating fast enough so they dont show if people spike most of the time. It only shows that pings are fine but actually they spike like hell, same with simspeed. It spikes/drops, but you cant see it. So someone with simspeed of 4 or 3 will most likely already slow the game.

Just take some money and buy a better cpu... its not expensive to upgrade them.

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Quoting Bhaal,

reply 12

Maybe you guys stop playing on outdated hardware?

You really think new games run fine on your 4 years old hardware?

Simspeed is not really affected by gamesettings.

I have seen people with simspeed 4 that slowed our games like hell, because their simspeed was not constant, it spiked from 0 to +4 and that made the game really slow sometimes. Another thing is that GPG made the simspeed and ping stats not updating fast enough so they dont show if people spike most of the time. It only shows that pings are fine but actually they spike like hell, same with simspeed. It spikes/drops, but you cant see it. So someone with simspeed of 4 or 3 will most likely already slow the game.

Just take some money and buy a better cpu... its not expensive to upgrade them.

This would be fine if...

1) Older PCs that are still on single core processors had motherboards that supported duel core. Most do not.

2) Most single core motherboards use AGP not PCI express so therefore need a new GPU as well.

3) Had an extra 500$-1000$

Really if the computer is that old, upgrading it is not feasible unless you buy a whole new pc.

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Quoting XRagnar,

reply 7

Quoting twifightDG,
reply 6
Hmm I was wondering too how MP affects sim speed vs SP. I see loads of people with sim speed 4-8 that drop to drop to near zero. Haven't seen many ppl post higher numbers than that. In the SP game I played last night, 3vs3 on zikurat, I had a sim speed of 24, which lowered to about 20ish later on. Will I have much lower sim speeds in MP? I wonder why they are so high because my cpu is only mid-end compared to modern hardware.

wasn't sim speed capped at 10? and if i recall the scale correctly a sim speed of 24 would mean that you could play the game 256 times the normal speed which seems kinda ... unlikely?

Whups apparantly I incorrectly assumed that the ave sim was linked to sim speed, but apparantly they are different values.

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The good news is that if you're games are being played at "Normal" speed, then sim speed 0 is the default speed. So long as you're not dipping below that then you shouldn't be slowing down the game.

I have seen people with simspeed 4 that slowed our games like hell, because their simspeed was not constant, it spiked from 0 to +4 and that made the game really slow sometimes.

.... failed

there just had shitty connection, isdn, modem or such

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Sim speed is going to change during the game, that's just the norm. It's a measurement of how fast your computer is crunching all the numbers for what's going on behind the scenes (AI, pathfinding, sound, etc) and it only makes sense that it drops gradually over the course of a game as there are more and more creeps, etc to track. There will be moments in the game (like a creep surge or something) where processing time may spike but generally sim speed is fairly constant in it's decline as the game progresses. A drastic drop of 4 points or something or spiking up and down does sound to me like something else is running on the PC and is taking CPU time or system resources away from Demigod.

That being said, anything 1 or higher is not going to slow down the game if it's running at "Normal" speed. It doesn't matter how high your sim speed is over 0, the game isn't actually running any faster or sending any more information, it's just letting you know how much overhead you have left before game engine is going to start running below the targetted speed. Lag occurring when someone sim speed is over 0 is almost surely a network congestion problem and packets are just not getting to other players in a timely fashion.

This game is based on the SupCom engine, and while it's not going to be identical it should operate in roughly the same fashion. For SupCom, there was a community made tool call the "Core Maximizer" (or something like that) that re-assigned the games various threads more evenly across the available CPU cores. The end result of this was better sim speeds. I don't know if the person who created the tool is part of the Demigod community but I suspect that this game would also benefit from such a tool. In the meantime though, it was possible to manually retask SupCom's threads to other available CPU cores if need be. You would have to first find out the names of all the various threads that Demigod creates are though. I should note that the optomizing the threads for sim speed had the curious side effect of lowering framerate a bit, so while you gained game speed you lost a little video performance.

-dolynick

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PCI & Dual Core chips are outdated? I'm not going to spend another $1500 just to play Demigod online (like I said, it never goes beleow 2 when I play solo, only online). My rig is only 2+ years old, and I play games like DoWII with perfect smoothness (even in 3v3s). I was just hoping there was something "I" could do (rather than invest another thousand+ dollars) to get my sim speed up. Again, it seemed fine post 1.1.

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Quoting PurplePaladin,

reply 17

PCI & Dual Core chips are outdated? I'm not going to spend another $1500 just to play Demigod online (like I said, it never goes beleow 2 when I play solo, only online). My rig is only 2+ years old, and I play games like DoWII with perfect smoothness (even in 3v3s). I was just hoping there was something "I" could do (rather than invest another thousand+ dollars) to get my sim speed up. Again, it seemed fine post 1.1.

PCI has been outdated for awhile. PCI-e is not. However, if you have to spend $1500 to upgrade a 2 year old computer, then you did a horrible job at picking components 2 years ago.

You can get a new graphics card for $100 to $200 that will be more than enough power for most new games. You can get a new i7 quad core for ~$280 - chances are your motherboard can support it through a firmware update. Tack on another $150 to $300 if you do actually need a new motherboard.

Also, regarding the subject matter, if the simspeed is only a function of operations on the processor, then it is not an accurate reflection of anything. Being able to simulate faster than the game speed desires means absolutely nothing if you can not also render it. Therefore, sim speed must also take in to account rendering, or else it is pretty much useless.

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Quoting dolynick,

reply 16

This game is based on the SupCom engine, and while it's not going to be identical it should operate in roughly the same fashion. For SupCom, there was a community made tool call the "Core Maximizer" (or something like that) that re-assigned the games various threads more evenly across the available CPU cores. The end result of this was better sim speeds. I don't know if the person who created the tool is part of the Demigod community but I suspect that this game would also benefit from such a tool. In the meantime though, it was possible to manually retask SupCom's threads to other available CPU cores if need be. You would have to first find out the names of all the various threads that Demigod creates are though. I should note that the optomizing the threads for sim speed had the curious side effect of lowering framerate a bit, so while you gained game speed you lost a little video performance.
-dolynick

Tools like the core maximizer increase your framerate/fps but at the same time make the simspeed slower. Thats why it was never recommended to use them in multiplayer games.

Quoting PurplePaladin,

reply 17

PCI & Dual Core chips are outdated? I'm not going to spend another $1500 just to play Demigod online (like I said, it never goes beleow 2 when I play solo, only online). My rig is only 2+ years old, and I play games like DoWII with perfect smoothness (even in 3v3s). I was just hoping there was something "I" could do (rather than invest another thousand+ dollars) to get my sim speed up. Again, it seemed fine post 1.1.

You could go and buy a faster dualcore for your chipset which will improve your simspeed a lot.

If its not possible to upgrade, we cant help, if you buy outdated crap 2years ago(for so much money) its your own fault...

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You can get a new i7 quad core for ~$280 - chances are your motherboard can support it through a firmware update.

Core i7s use a different socket (LGA1366) from Core Duos (LGA775), so the only people who would be able to get an i7 without a new motherboard are those who already have them.

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Double post due to forum slowness

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Quoting Bhaal,

reply 19

Tools like the core maximizer increase your framerate/fps but at the same time make the simspeed slower. Thats why it was never recommended to use them in multiplayer games.

I'm sorry but that is just incorrect. The entire point of the Core Maximizer was to increase Sim Speed. The tool came with the caveat that it could cause a small hit in FPS but would make long games where Sim Speeds often dipped into the -5 to -8 range in SupCom more playable. It worked and I used it fairly regularly. I'm sure the threads for it are still on the SupCom forums if you want to check it out for yourself.

-dolynick

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I don't think it's about out-dated hardware anymore, because since 1.1, it seems that there have been more games with negative sim speeds. In fact, every game I've played since the patch has seen someone in the negatives.

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PCI & Dual Core chips are outdated?

I had a pretty similar setup, exact same CPU, I upgraded as DG was hammering my PC.

Yes they are outdated, in terms of an Athlon 3800, even two years ago it was bottom of the dual core pile. A 7900 GT is also pretty bad for this game, I had an ATi 1950 and it struggled with the 3800. I upgrade to an Intel Duo 8400, I went to a solid Sim Speed 10 with the ATi 1950, from about 5-6.When I added in the GTX275, it was heavenlike

Moral of this story, the 3800 Athlon is a POS CPU. It just about scrapes in as a dual core, but it will seriously bottleneck your GPU with modern games.

As for being above Sim Speed 0, if you are on Sim Speed 2, safe to say your PC is chugging, you will be dipping on performance, I know because my PC used to do it. Then when you have a spike in ping or a chug it affects everyone. Since upgrading my PC, I have had no such problems, play with everything on full.

With your specs, you would be wise to stick to 3v3, 4v4 is a struggle and 5v5 is asking for problems. This game is pretty resource hungry

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Well, I tried the /nosound test, both with maxed settings, and min settings. Both games both started at Sim 7, and bounced between 5-6 the entire rest of the game (just like before 1.1). When I take the /nosound off, it's down to 1-2 Sim the last half of the game, and I'm guessing it will be -1 to -2 online. . . .

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