Help request

[jim]

Installed Deluxe patch. I am not very PC savvy. Had a friend broadband download and burn it on a CD.

Game comes up as Deluxe, no problemo there.

Have one problem, and will need to find the latest TDM Modpack should I get it solved. The problem is that the game has gone glacial on me! I doubt I have MP3 on my Pentium III-733, so I turned off sound and also effects noises. Turning off those sounds eliminated the glacial bit during setup. The turns themselves go well, however, the game chokes at the end of each turn leaving my PC studying its navel for about 5 or more minutes between turns. It is not playable that way.

Would deleting SEIV completely then installing from my very old original SEIV disk and then patching again help?

Ideas anyone?

Hellllppp!

[jim]

A- HAAA!

It was the autosave that was doing it! Changed it to every two turns and the huge pause went away on the non-save turns! Go figure!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

How fast is your computer?
and
How large is your hard drive, and how full is it?

[Wolfman77]

Try defragmenting your drive. I ran into that problem once and it did exactly what you describe. My computer said it didn't need it, but I did it anyway and most of the delay went away. There was still a small delay with very large games, but I figure that it was normal to have a few seconds, just not several minutes.

[Fyron]

I doubt I have MP3 on my Pentium III-733...

What do you mean by this? MP3 is just a file format, readable by any number of programs, such as SE4 1.93+. The only reason why you would be unable to play them is if you have no sound card or speakers.

[jim]

As I said earlier, I have a Pentium III, 733 MHz. I have defragged recently, and have over 3 gig free. I am using Windows 98, and am unsure it can recognize MP3 files but that seems not a problem as I do not want to use music anyway.

I applied the 3.60 TDM patch and the game statup screen shows TDM Modpack. However, when I tried to start a game, the screen showed "AI Settings" errors, indicating all kinds of missing AI settings, like drones storage on planets, move through minefields, etc for I think all of the AIs (or at least 3 of the 4 the game randomly chose at 3000 racial points).

It let me proceed anyway but then choked on the end of the first turn, saying files not found.

[Suicide Junkie]

Sounds like a lot of pre-gold AIs in your gold game.

Does it say which files aren't found?
Have you got SE4's temp folders *not* read-only?

[jim]

3 of the 4 WERE pre-Gold. Do I need to avoid those AIs?

I patched from the not-Gold installed game. Does that make a difference?

Above, I gave examples of the not-found AI Settings.


I do not know what you are talking about on the last point.

[Fyron]

Pre-gold AIs do not work in Gold/Deluxe without modification.

jim said:
As I said earlier, I have a Pentium III, 733 MHz. I have defragged recently, and have over 3 gig free. I am using Windows 98, and am unsure it can recognize MP3 files but that seems not a problem as I do not want to use music anyway.

SE4 does not care if you are on Win98. It will still read the mp3 files and create wav data to send to the soundcard (or DirectSound, I forget the exact sequence).

Playing MP3s does not depend on your OS, but on the software you have installed.

As for read only, right click on the Temp folder in Explorer and select Properties. Read Only is a check box in that window.

[Wolfman77]

I just put SEIV on a windows 95 machine with no sound card driver, it just gave an error message when starting the game and at the end of turns but it didn't effect the game at all otherwise. The error message went away when I turned the sound off in the options menu.

How many save game files do you have? If you have allot of them in one folder it might slow it down. Try moving them into a backup folder.