Help Needed! sh3+gwx+mylaptop

[shibbyuk29]

hey guys, firstly i love sh3, but i want more!

i spent alot of effort to track down this game and buy it in order to play the gwx mod but i'm having some trouble.

my laptop specs

1.66 dual core cpu (rated at 2.5 or something)
1gb ram
128mb(maybe 256mb) nvideo geforce go 7400 graphics card

the laptop is fairly old but able to run many games full speed such as morrowind full of mods, resident evil 4 hd, and some not so fast but playable like starcraft 2.

i finally obtained silent hunter 3 from an exchange shop and downloaded the gwx mod. however upon running it i was greatly disheartened. long LONG load times, 5 minutes is outrageous. secondly the game often stutters and is unplayable for 10-30 secnds upon loading. a quick rotation of the camera in the boat will stutter as the game loads each detail onto my screen. my question is what do? i have 1.5gb free space. memory allocation is already tweaked with cacheman to speed up a different more modern game. is there no ini tweak for the loading ala killing floor(reducing 5mins to 30seconds)

what can i do, stock sh3 runs perfectly with minor niggles namely at 1024 compression. gwx at 1024 constantly locks up and is a struggle to reduce. often the music skips but i already have dxsound to basic acceleration which sped up another game. ay help would be appreciated, my birthday was yesterday and all i wanted was to install and play this game but its just no joy every step.

[Gerald]

:salute: I would imagine that your ram is low, and that the video card is low Also, to run SH3 + GWX ... you can do some upgrades?

[Fish In The Water]

...long LONG load times, 5 minutes is outrageous. secondly the game often stutters and is unplayable for 10-30 secnds upon loading. a quick rotation of the camera in the boat will stutter as the game loads each detail onto my screen. my question is what do?

Your best bet to reduce loading times would be to install a reduced campaign layers mod. Basically what it does is only load 'traffic' for areas you're actually going to be in rather than for the whole world. Not only does this reduce load times, but it also improves frame rate by easing the load on the CPU.

The mod can be downloaded here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/downloads.php?do=file&id=1536

Hope it helps and enjoy! :sunny:

[Fish In The Water]

Another thing you can try for the 'stuttering' issue is a DX anti-lag mod. What it does is limit the amount of frames that can be pre-rendered thereby helping smooth out game play.

Available here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/downloads.php?do=file&id=2871

Are you just running GWX? If not you may need to disable any other mods that are draining system resources. Try temporarily disabling anything above and beyond GWX (except for the two I've recommended) and try a test run.

If after that you still have issues, then I'd be looking at shutting down background apps and services and if necessary hardware upgrades. Good luck! :sunny:

[Sailor Steve]

If you're running GWX that would account for the load times. It's not outrageous when a supermod adds so many new ships and other things to the game.

You need more ram. You need a better video card. SH3 was never certified for laptops. It will run on them, but the devs said right up front that they wouldn't guarantee that. I'm currently running a desktop with 3 GHz, 4 GB RAM and a 1 GB video card, and I still have problems.

A couple of things you can try are EndItAll http://enditall.en.softonic.com/ and Game Booster http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html. These are free programs that shut down background processes to free up operating space. SH3 takes up a lot of that.

[shibbyuk29]

hi guys, thanks for the advice, i'll try it out and report back.

my gripe was that i was understanding that if you have the recommended to play sh3, gwx should be fine. it was ok yesterday on a single mission besides the loading, but the standard campaign just doesnt want to work, probably due to the fact that the whole world where i'm never going to, is loaded.

think i need the mod to limit the ship sighted compression pauses too, leaving port is a nuisance, besides that this game is fantastic isn't it :p

[HW3]

GWX comes with a lite harbor traffic mod which should help out.

[irish1958]

You need more RAM or you will have trouble forever and there is no substitute, if you are running Vista or Windows7, as the operating system uses most of the RAM.
Your video card is very weak and really can't handle GWX no matter what you do. Also, the video card RAM is almost certainly shared RAM from your 1GB and not discrete RAM. (I am not sure of this however.)
That said, Sailor Steve's suggestion in your only hope to even play the game in a border line fashion, as are the other suggestions to decrease CPU load.
Even adding another gig of RAM won't help your video card.
Enabling more mods is also hopeless, and the new mods are very good and improve the game in a major way;.

[shibbyuk29]

hi guys thanks for the feedback. the game is now playable, no longer stutters to death at 1024 compression midway into the ocean from port.

i used the suggested lite harbor mods and certain sea areas only, north atlantic/sea since i'm doing campaign in wilhemsomethingorover(the port you don't have to go through a maze to get out of) obviously i think my ram/cpu is low in order to run this mod. i can run vanilla sh3 full everything with hardly any problem, the occasional minor stutter at 1024 compression. the problem i think is from the number of boats running around. unlike other games i've modded this is a superpack and i dont have the option to add piece at a time unless i start my own modded version of sh3 combining mods from this site. is that worth doing? some of the extras in gwx are unnecessary to me(mainly the big ports, whilst realistic and iwould enjoy, but with fps issues and loadtimes, i'd rather have less load times,more fps, than a massive port)

the parts i like from gwx

the amount of missions
the new graphics
other ally boats about, don't think i'd seen a german uboat other than my own before.
the new layouts
the new sounds, something about villainous german accents

things i don't like

when using 1024 compression to get near my patrol point the time drops constantly because of a friendly boat every 2 seconds,its nice to see a more realistic world with boats other than my own but is there a way to remove this for friendly boats when time accelerating on the navi map, is there a shortcut key so i dont have to click + many times to get back to 1024. most of my playing time suffers this problem.
the fact i did two patrols, one of which was all the way to bf10 which isn't even there lol, didnt see one single enemy boat. where are they! in stock i could find some and had to travel less distance.
the fact that there is a picture of the french coffee shop girl from das boot on my desk :p

anyway i feel some more slight tinkering would make this perfect. i'm a bit upset about my graphics card being to blame, since when i'm looking at the games graphics there is not a problem, its the bleeding navi map and time compression.

[Fish In The Water]

hi guys thanks for the feedback. the game is now playable, no longer stutters to death at 1024 compression midway into the ocean from port.

Glad to hear it. A little SH3 is better than no SH3 at all, so good luck and even better hunting! :arrgh!:

[shibbyuk29]

the actual game is now running as well as stock sh3 did, which is to say pretty damn well. i could revert the tails and colour of ships on the navi map with a mod, also sh3 commanders max time for enemy ship i changed to really high to stop the pauses everytime a ship comes past, as enemy ship actually means friendly ship, enemy ships still say merchant spotted take action screen. so everything is fine, except for last night when i surfaced to speed up to a target merchant and found 3 planes over my head lol i foolishly chose to fight them instead of submerging and lost my flak cannon right away, then i dived and couldnt pull out and died.