Fixed my Alea Jacta Est Lag, Mostly

[Cheimison]

I have owned AJE for several years, but I have basically never played it because it had monstrous lag. This was true on three different computers I tried, on three different operating systems, all of which were above the stated game requirements.
By lag, I don't mean the long intervals between turns while the computer is doing its Thinkum Dinkum bit. Heck, even Civ3 does that. Rather, it had a horrendous scroll lag and several second intervals between clicking the mouse and responding.

Just today I finally got it to be playable by changing "PreCaching       = 0" to "PreCaching       = 1"  and "RegionsBorders    = 1" to "RegionsBorders    = 0". Neither of these settings is available through the menu in game, and there is no settings change program, so I had to do this manually via notepad in General.opt (AJE/Settings/ folder).

After looking into this it seems I'm not the only person with this problem, though there seem to be crickets from AGEOD regarding it. I don't understand WHY these settings are so important, WHY the game is so poorly optimized for not one but three different PC/OS combinations, or why the settings aren't available through the in-game settings menu, but there you go.

Depending on how much I like this game this may set back my plans to learn FoG2 several months. I dig the board game stylings.

[Nefaro]

Pre-caching is pre-loading the map textures into memory.

From what I've seen, the AGE engine has each individual map zone load independently.  So there are many of them, and it loads the new ones coming into view as you move the map around during play.

I imagine pre-caching was off in order to keep it playable on computers with low system RAM.  But if you have something better than a dinosaur potato for a computer, it's probably best to have it on.

[WallysWorld]

Thanks for the tip, Cheimison. I changed all of my Ageod games to use Precaching and even though it takes a little while longer to load the game at start, the map scrolling is much smoother.

[Cheimison]

Pre-caching is pre-loading the map textures into memory.

From what I've seen, the AGE engine has each individual map zone load independently.  So there are many of them, and it loads the new ones coming into view as you move the map around during play.

I imagine pre-caching was off in order to keep it playable on computers with low system RAM.  But if you have something better than a dinosaur potato for a computer, it's probably best to have it on.

Turns out once I updated the game they were in the Settings, though they're both on the 'wrong' default. Still, even assuming I have maximum texture size on I simply don't understand why the graphics would lag it that much. There is virtually no animation, just static images and some texture fading. This speaks of very poor optimization.
I have heard of other people having luck by using DirectX wrappers to run it.
I can run EU4 with several hundred 3D troops (many with unique models thanks to DLC) on screen at max speed, and it does slow down a bit, but nothing nearly as bad as that texture and border induced lag in IJA. I think they should consider seriously overhauling the engine, this makes no sense to me.

[Nefaro]

I think the map hitching is more to do with:

1) Loading many individual 2D graphic files at once, when moving the view.  Likely bottlenecked by disk drive loading speeds, or similar.

and

2) A steady problem with the AGE system - doing it on one CPU core. 


Probably some map redrawing involved too, after loaded, which may partly be the border graphics thing.

[Cheimison]

2) A steady problem with the AGE system - doing it on one CPU core. 
Probably some map redrawing involved too, after loaded, which may partly be the border graphics thing.

It's obviously got something in it that doesn't optimize well. Ghost Recon AWF2 runs better than AJE, which makes no sense unless they're just using bad programming for the graphical rendering.