Originally posted by phelos
Hiya Viper37
Hah, not only do I know a thing or two about tech-stuff, I am also a journalist who used to write for various pc games-magazines. And I can smell a rushed game from miles away...
But why - please tell me why??? - won't programming companies just say: "It's finished when it's finished"? Even to their distributors / parent companies' management?
FYI, EU 1 was also rushed... The problems of which we still see today.
It all comes down to money
The programmers never want to release their softwares (games or other) because they always feel it can be better. Any software released on the market is a compromise between the publisher/share-holders and the programmer. If you don't believe me, just look at the bunch of free software out there, and look at the version number of most of them: alpha or beta, and those who are not won't offer support for their software (a majority). They never believe their work is finished
Now, in our particular case, the game was supposed to hit the market just before Christmas, in which, it would have been in a state between patch 1.01 and 1.02. Therefore, Johan could have had time to concentrate on the performance issue, wich is now, unfortunately, behind everything else, has there are imbalances to correct and most people want these fixed before the rest. The north american publisher tested the game in october and decided it was ready to ship in this state, despite what Paradox had to say (and because of what I said before, publishers will never trust developpers as to wheter or not a game is ready). Despite I hate it, I prefer the Blizzard attitude to delay a game by up to a year and make it almost bug free before releasing. Unfortunately, both for the publisher and the developper, they sometimes need the money and they put a game on the market that isn't entirely polished/finished.
Of course, having it released early, meant that our job as beta tester was made easier, because many of you found bugs that we probably would have never found (and it also gave us all a slap in the face and wake us up when we learned the game was gold early november).
About the programs running in the background: I was referring to the 'normal' M$-programs that run in the background of any M$-OS. Peeps that come whining here while running all or some of the programs in the background you mention whilst also playing EU2, should think twice b4 posting here.
Still, normal MS stuff like the task scheduler can lauch a defrag utility while you're playing (I've seen it once under Win95, and that was the last time I ever loaded that bullshit). And as I said, when we post something like "kill all background process", we have no idea what people have running in the background; it could be normal stuff like you, or it could be other stuff like I posted. As we are not in front of every user's machines, we cannot know for sure what is going on. It can be the game, it can be something else. That's why we go "generic", like all tech support for every software companies, be it games or business suites. Sometimes, something pops-up in our head, and we ask.
Still, I'd like you to try something: start MSCONFIG, go to startup, and uncheck everything. Reboot & run the game; if nothing changes, recheck everything.
About the specs on my pc: I've learned from a few tech-guru's that my specs are about the best (safest?) around when playing games - of today, ofcourse. (Although not everybody is happy about the SoundBlaster 128PCI.) The Celeron-processor is no problem either - at least not for 99% of the games out now and yesterday. If there was ever a glimmer of doubt within Paradox that EU2 might have problems with Celerons, then they should've fixed that. In software-land, I consider such things not to be an academic question, but an obligation.
(FYI: I have another system here with Win2k, P-II 375Mhz, 256MB RAM and Matrox 450, and I'm having the same problems there. EU1 also still gives me trouble on that box - even when Win98SE was installed on it.)
Everybody agrees, though, that the nVidia Viper-770 is probably the 'safest' videocard around - especially if you want to know whether a game is 'good' or 'bad' in video-memory management.
There is no known issues with Celeron and EU2, but there are with games and Celeron
Celeron CPUs don't have a lot of cache memory and are designed as "budget" processor. I use a Duron 700 at the office and it's perfectly fine for what I do there, internet, accounting and business suites. However, I wouldn't recommend this to any gamer.
With EU 2, one thing we learned, is that memory is the key. Still, people with 64mb RAM were able to run the game (later betas) without the slutter you are experiencing (except at year's turn or when something special was happening). Normally, 256mb RAM should be more than enough, but some people reported leap bounds going up to 512mb. If you're willing to invest a few more dollars, it won't hurt, and global performance of your system will rise, in every software.
The fact that you, in your reply above, acquise to the fact that EU2 is not running smoothly on your system (some specs there!!!), is all the more telling. It's also too bad, I think, because EU2 (in the essence) is one hell of a fine game. Good idea, bad execution...
Regards,
Phelos.
I said it wasn't running smoothly in the early beta phase, with the K6-2 300, 128mb RAM. And it ran smoothly with the equivalent of path 1.02. With my new system (1.2ghz), it runs smoothly, it's Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW) that isn't running smoothly from time to time (probably because I only have a GeForce 2MX).
I hope Johan will adress some performance issues for lower end system though. I remember with Age of Empires, you had to buy an expension to have the memory leak disapear... And the problem was not occuring for those who had 512mb ram, only those with 256 or lower. To be fair, I have seen many games that were far worst than EU2 in terms of memory management. None lately as I haven't played much games in the last year, but plenty in the past.
