Warcraft 3, skipping and lag spikes..

[Iron_DragonLord]

I don't think lag is the exact word, this happens both online and offline.

From what I've notice.. whenever I first click a hero's skill menu for leveling up, there's a slight lag where everythign pauses and then seems to skip ahead. Another example is when a unit first spawns.

It seems to be something related to the game first loading up something.

I've tried both Cedega and Wine; same thing, except I think wine begins to smooth out after a while. Cedega keeps having a few skips.

I tried with sound disabled, so it can't be lag from the game loading up the sound. That just leaves the graphics.

The video card is a GeForce 3, 64 MB, 4x AGP. Old as it may sound, it holds up pretty decently. WC3 worked in Windows previously as well.

I've tried with FastWrites on and off, no difference. I've got my kernel HZ set to 1000. I've tried both Involuntary Premtpible and Voluntary kernel modules. And uhm, I think that's about it I can mention.

Anyone have similar problems or any ideas?

[deadstar]

This is gonna strange - but I think it's audio related.

Try the following:

1) Block the sound from starting on game startup. Play some banging choons in XMMS whilst starting the game, you should get WC3's "Unable to initialise base sound services" message.

2) If you aren't using cedega 5.0 with kernel sheduling, renice the wineserver like this:

renice 19 `pgrep wineserver`

once the game has started.


I had the same sort of "lag" in farcry and WoW, and these seemed to fix it.
_________________
Hysteriagaming.co.uk is now DOT COM! New design, forum, articles, the works! http://www.hysteriagaming.com

(\ /)
(O.o)
(> <)
This is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination

[Iron_DragonLord]

hmm no luck on either.

Could it be a RAM problem? Like the game isn't initially using enough RAM so whenever something happens it loads it up and that causes it to skip?

[bigfam]

i have absolutely no idea what fastwrites, kernel hz, involuntary Premtpible or Voluntary kernel modules are. hehe.


how fast is your cpu? I bet you've got an older cpu. games require more beef with cedega/wine then they do natively in windows. i used to have the same problems your describing with warcaft 3, but my computer was a peice of crap then (some would argue it still is)

my OLD computer was:
pentium 3 - 1.0ghz
32mb geforce2 mx
512 pc133 ram

warcraft 3 was completely playable in windows, in linux it was sluggish and wasn't fun to play, especially when everyone has lots of units. i had basically the same symptons as you are describing.





I now have an athlon64 2800+ and a gig of ram. im still using the geforce2 and warcraft has absolutely no performance trouble (and im playing it 1280x1024 now and usually torrenting). of course i no longer windows installed but thats not a relevant

I have also noticed the game plays smoother in cedega then it does in wine...which makes sense because cedega is optimized for gaming. wines goal is just to make the game work.

my only suggestion is to try 'nice'ing the game, but again I bet you just dont have enough beef

[Iron_DragonLord]

Hmmm possible.

My computer is a 1.7 MHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of PC800 RAM (I think).

I tried the renice, but that didn't seem to help much...

[bigfam]

not renice

use the nice command in my above post to launch the game

not sure what the problem is, I would think 1.7ghz should be fine
are you you using gnome or kde? if so maybe try a lightweight WM, sorry thats all I can think of

[Iron_DragonLord]

Hmm no luck. I even put all the settings to lowest and got some pretty bad lag.

I'm using Enlightenment-0.17 actually. But I tried with just TWM once, same thing...

Well thanks anyway.