message posté le 5 avr 2003 à 15h48
Optimization Details
Simulation
Simulation speed is significantly improved in the update. In particular, the traffic simulation would often have problems with certain cities such that it took too long to make calculations. These have been fixed and result in both faster city simulation and more responsive game play.
View changes
Zoom and rotation switching is faster in all cases, due to changes that made building, prop, and flora graphics loading more conservative and less aggressive.
Certain game events, such as disasters, will cause the game to both auto-center to the location and auto-zoom to the the highest game zoom (5) if you have the feature enabled in the preferences. However, a heavily burdened system could take a number of seconds to complete the zoom change. The update introduces three features to help cope with this situation. First, auto-zooming by the game can be disabled with the command line option (not currently available via the GUI):
-AutoZoomChange:off
This has the effect of disabling auto-zoom-changing but retaining auto-centering on game events. Secondly, the game will no longer auto-switch to zoom 5 if you are already in zoom 4. Previously, it would switch to zoom 5 from zoom 4.Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, zoom changes themselves have been made more responsive under all circumstances.
Another kind of view change is the switch between the city's underground and above ground views. When the user chooses a pipe or subway drawing tool, the game switches to the underground view. Switching back and forth between underground and above ground views can take a few seconds' time in very large and complex cities. A problem that existed before Update 2 is that selecting the pipe or subway menu immediately switched to the last pipe or subway tool and forced a switch to the underground even if the user didn't want to pick a menu item from that menu which would go to an underground view. With the update, the game no longer goes to an underground view unless the user explicitly chooses a tool that requires an underground view.
Graphics
The core graphics engine for the SimCity 4 update remains virtually unchanged. The majority of performance problems that resulted in low frame rates were caused by simulation and memory problems and weren't related to graphics. SimCity 4 is highly simulation-intensive and the game actually spends as much or more of the computer's processing power on simulation as it does on graphics. However, there have been some improvements that still do improve game graphics performance. Among other things, these improvements include more conservative graphics loading during view changes, more conservative default city detail selection, and the ability to skip the thumbnail generation step during city saves. Each of these improvements is discussed in further detail elsewhere in this document.
Simulation
Simulation speed is significantly improved in the update. In particular, the traffic simulation would often have problems with certain cities such that it took too long to make calculations. These have been fixed and result in both faster city simulation and more responsive game play.
View changes
Zoom and rotation switching is faster in all cases, due to changes that made building, prop, and flora graphics loading more conservative and less aggressive.
Certain game events, such as disasters, will cause the game to both auto-center to the location and auto-zoom to the the highest game zoom (5) if you have the feature enabled in the preferences. However, a heavily burdened system could take a number of seconds to complete the zoom change. The update introduces three features to help cope with this situation. First, auto-zooming by the game can be disabled with the command line option (not currently available via the GUI):
-AutoZoomChange:off
This has the effect of disabling auto-zoom-changing but retaining auto-centering on game events. Secondly, the game will no longer auto-switch to zoom 5 if you are already in zoom 4. Previously, it would switch to zoom 5 from zoom 4.Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, zoom changes themselves have been made more responsive under all circumstances.
Another kind of view change is the switch between the city's underground and above ground views. When the user chooses a pipe or subway drawing tool, the game switches to the underground view. Switching back and forth between underground and above ground views can take a few seconds' time in very large and complex cities. A problem that existed before Update 2 is that selecting the pipe or subway menu immediately switched to the last pipe or subway tool and forced a switch to the underground even if the user didn't want to pick a menu item from that menu which would go to an underground view. With the update, the game no longer goes to an underground view unless the user explicitly chooses a tool that requires an underground view.
Graphics
The core graphics engine for the SimCity 4 update remains virtually unchanged. The majority of performance problems that resulted in low frame rates were caused by simulation and memory problems and weren't related to graphics. SimCity 4 is highly simulation-intensive and the game actually spends as much or more of the computer's processing power on simulation as it does on graphics. However, there have been some improvements that still do improve game graphics performance. Among other things, these improvements include more conservative graphics loading during view changes, more conservative default city detail selection, and the ability to skip the thumbnail generation step during city saves. Each of these improvements is discussed in further detail elsewhere in this document.