[REL] Reduced Traffic Mod v1.2

[switch.dota]

Granted, by removing these layers, the tradeoff is that the world is less realistic and feels less alive but this might be a sacrifice that those who are having trouble getting the game to run smoothly because of the background tracking of ships, etc. are willing to make.

What exactly do you mean by that?

[Excalibur Bane]

Well, besides running the GUI and the graphics engine, the game is contantly tracking the position of stuff in the game world, which is very taxing on the CPU because of the raw data that needs to be processed and the general lack of decent coding. SH3 had precisely the same problem, clearly they didn't give much time to tightening up the code in SH4.

For example, removing the layer for friendly merchants, would get rid of all of the junk merchants coming off the west coast of the US. For gameplay purposes, this would have no effect. Unless you plan on cruising around and shooting up your own merchant vessels

It really depends on how much a person wants to sacrifice in terms of immersion, realism, etc to get a smoother game experience. You could remove coastal traffic althogether, both friendly and enemy, because they consist of nothing but Sampans, Fishing boats and Junks. Again, not terribly important to gameplay since they don't represent major targets, they are more irritants then anything else but they do contribute to the game's atmosphere.

[Fercyful]

sounds very insteresting please can you release your campaign like a mod so we can try it,

thanks!

[Hartmann]

Another interesting thing could be reduce the size of convois and task forces. or reduce coastal traffic :hmm:

[Excalibur Bane]

Well, at the moment, I'm just looking at removing ALL coastal traffic. Friendly and enemy. The consist is nothing vital at all. Fishing boats mostly, some sampans, a few junks, etc. The non-major friendly merchants (French, Dutch, Australian) are gonna go as well. They have some rather pointless routes along the west coast to Pearl. Beyond that, some of the consists of the merchants are just odd. A netherland large coastal freighter going from the west coast to Pearl? That's a touch strange but okay

As I said before, it's hard to find a balance that pleases everyone without having ten different versions, all with minor changes. So, I'm just going to test out removing those two items which are major enough to hopefully see some decent performance gain. It can be further reduced of course, but I'll see how this works out and go from there.

I've had very little time today to work on anything, but I'll have something up by tommorow for testing and feedback.

[Excalibur Bane]

Okay. I have a test version up and ready to be tested

This is just a prelimary version, so I haven't bothered with a readme or any kind of version numbering. It removes the Japanese coastal traffic, as well as the non-major powers coastal traffic and there merchants as well. I did some basic testing, and transition from the menu to ingame is about 10-15% better on my system. Performance with time acceleration (particularly high levels) is considerably smoother as well.

It's in JSGME format, so simply extract it to the mods folder in your SH4 directory, and enable it in JSGME and you'll be all set. You can download it here.

I didn't encounter any problems with it, but if you do, just let me know here. It'd be great if you guys could post results with it as well. Not looking for exact numbers, just a general idea.

My system specs:
Athlon XP 3200+
1 GB of RAM
GF 7600 GT

So, enjoy

[PULSEOX]

I just tried out your mod, and so far, it seems great. The first thing I noticed was the game loaded up a lot faster. (seemed like twice as fast).
Where I was getting 7-12 fps before, now it seems to consistently average around 12- 17 fps. Nice work, Thanks!