Game Guides Archive

I was in anchorhead cantina couple of days ago, and you all know how laggy it can get in anypart of Anchorhead, with all the players there.

When I was in the cantina, I turned off all the names : player names, npc names, all but hte signe names through options, and it seemed less laggy.

Anyone knows if this really works?

yes turning off names and char bubbles do make the place less laggy

I learned one trick that may be useful depending on what you are doing.

Pan your viewpoint downward until you are looking straight down on your toon and zoom in as far as you can without going into first-person mode. You will basically see your head and a bit of ground. Then, turn on your overhead map and navigate using it. (Or use /find and follow the yellow stripe)

It's a bit tricky to navigate at first and is only reallyuseful if you are trying to get to a particular place but it seems to help quite a bit. YMMV, of course.

How much RAM do you guys have? Because I used to lag really bad in cities like Anchorhead when I had only the minimum required 256Mb of RAM. I upgraded to 640Mb and i don't lag anymore at all. The lag in cities is not caused by your connection, but by your computer having to process and draw all the buildings and players. A better video card than the minimum requirements call for will also help.

The lag in crowded areas is not server driven but is all client side (your computer). A good RAM upgrade should solve the problem. Hope this helps.

The first bit of lag you are going to run into is the model loads of the characters in the area. If I'm not mistaken firstly the information of who is in the area and what they look like is passed down your line, and the engine begins parsing that data and loading models accordingly. This would seem to be a highly CPU intensive process but I could be mistaken.

Secondly, drawing models will also take some time for each frame and this could be both RAM and Video Card dependant. I'm running a GeForce 4 ti4600 and 1Gig of PC2700 DDR and I easily use up almost 700MB of that while in-game (this is all running a P4 2.8 on a 533FSB).

I think in your case you should look to going to 512 minimum, if you're running XP maybe a little higher, as well as a GeForce 4+ video card, assuming your bus speed/cpu aren't your bottlenecks and see how you fare.

Trentelshark
(Novice BH)

Well, I have a 2 Ghz with 128MB Video card, 792MB RAM, DSL connection, 3D accelerator and the thing still lags a bit when I go into a cantina or Med Center, everywhere else is perfectly fine. I notice it the most when there are other players in the area. I do notice that the lagg doesn't happen as much ifIturn offmyoverhead map.

Sometimes, it is my fault though, because many times while I play SWG, I am D/Ling stuff from kazaa...lol But, I still notice some lag when SWG is only application running (other than my ISP)

The game is going to naturally lag a bit no matter what type of machine you are on when in crowded areas. It is inherent to the majority of 3D engines which do a large amount of loading on the fly. A model file (at least if they use 3DSMax files) contains not only vertex data but normally texture and animation (just to name a few) as well. On my PC I only usually stay around 19 - 22 fps in a cantina (funny it seems more than that there is no jerkyness which should be present at that frame rate) but I have many of the details cranked right up.

Trentelshark

I tried adjusting several things in the CNTL-O window whe I first got the game. I think those things helped a little but I finally broke down and upgraded to 512Mb RAM. That helped the most.

I still lag near cantinas. The explaination above explains that. My computer is recieving a lot of character data.

One thing that lags me to the point I stop for about 40 seconds is when leaves fall. My poor GeForce 2 can not handle it. I wish there were more options to reduce the details to make it easier on the minimum systems. And why do the leaves fall so much? Can't SOE change it so that the leaves only fall when the leaves are falling in Austin or something

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Data_Rift wrote:

How much RAM do you guys have? Because I used to lag really bad in cities like Anchorhead when I had only the minimum required 256Mb of RAM. I upgraded to 640Mb and i don't lag anymore at all. The lag in cities is not caused by your connection, but by your computer having to process and draw all the buildings and players. A better video card than the minimum requirements call for will also help.

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I've got 512 Meg which is (unfortunately) all my motherboard can handle (my machine is a couple of years old). I forget my exact video card at the moment but it is an ATI Radeon 6xxx with 64 Meg.

Yes, I knew it was my system and not my connection but without a new PC there isn't much I can do at the moment. The suggestion I made helps by reducing what the system has to draw.

I have also noticed that if I sit and wait for a bit before trying to move once I enter a laggy area performance increases. Apparently the system eventually caches what it needs.

Even with 512 I lagged, but I upgraded to 1G of ram and I get absolutely 0 loading lag now. The posted above is correct in that sometimes SWG uses 700+ megs of memory which is pretty insane.

so you mean to tell me if I get 1 gig of ram instead of 512 I will be lag free?

Well like they said. If you have windows XP then yes. 700+ in RAM. Windows XP has a default RAM usage setting and sometimes uses up to 400Mb of my 512Mb. Then think of what the game wants aswell! No wonder it lags. So I upgraded with another 512Mb and all the lag disappeared! Would have been cheaper to uninstall XP and install windows 2000. But I see the RAM upgrade more as an investment and you can never have too much RAM.