Regarding the sluggyness. If you have checked everyting in the FAQ, and have optimized the system as best as is possible, then I can only conclude that your TNT2 is too slow for the method Vicky uses (through DirectX) to generate the images.Gen.Wellington said:i done that same problem but yust for ur information my cursor is laggy even on the main menu and since i installed 1.03b game stops for a sec evry day ! this didnt happend before...
Keep in mind here that the TNT2 is pre DirectX 7 hardware, and that Vicky runs with DirectX 9. DirectX 9 implements a lot of new features that in modern cards are executed in hardware. If the hardware support for these features isn't available (like in a TNT/TNT2), then DirectX emulates it in software, which is much, much slower.
To give you an idea of how much difference this makes. A couple of years ago, my main game rig was an overclocked 300 MHz Celeron with a TNT board (not even the TNT2 version). At the time, I was quite into Diablo II, which ran acceptable on that configuration. When the expansion came out, all of a sudden the graphics were slowing the game down to the point of being unplayable. There were scenes where I got a mere 1 frame per 2 seconds (which is very comparable to the sluggyness you experience with Vicky). So, I ripped out my TNT board, and replaced it with the slowest, cheapest GeForce 2 I could find, which was an Elsa GeForce2 MX with 32 MB RAM. This one change increased my frame rate to a far more acceptable 14 frames per second. In other words, by replacing my pre DirectX 7 hardware with a DirectX 7 hardware video chip, I improved overall game performance with a factor of 28. And both cards were AGP enabled. In your case, you are even worse off with your TNT2, as appearantly it doesn't use AGP. AGP makes accessing your video board at least twice as fast when compared to PCI, usually even faster.
As for your daily pauses. That's the game engine updating the universe and running the AI. As the POP income is fixed now in version 1.03b, there are a lot more goods traded through the world marked. Middle and rich POP's now buy at least 3 times more stuff than before, when their income was bugged. That, naturally, means that the game engine spends more CPU cycles on all those POP's each game turn, making each turn slower.
Jan Peter
