Hello there, I am having a little problem with Cataclysm. When I am moving my character around inside a town or city the game freezes for 3-5 seconds every 15-14 tiles my character moves. This doesn’t happen when I am in the woods or in open fields but when I am walking down a street of a town or city the game freezes.
I have done some investigation into what might be causing this. Lets say I am walking up a road way “Walking South to North” in a town or city to the left and right of my character a few tiles ahead there is the sidewalk as well as the street lamps. When my character steps on the tile line that the street lamps are on the game freezes for 3-5 seconds. I don’t know this is how the game loads the world because every time I boot the game up and load the world the game does this to me. Interestingly though if I walk back it doesn’t freeze at all. But when the game saves in any regards and I walk on that same roadway the game freezes at each street lamp. I will make a little diagram at the bottom of this post to best show you from an illustration.
I have been playing version 0.E-8807-gffd58c6 Windows 64x Tiles and I completely understand if its just how the game is right now as its experimental. I have also ran this with and without mods and it still happens. But if there is a fix to this problem please do say something and I will try it out. Thanks for reading!
I guess the lag you’re experiencing is probably all 12 tiles walked - as that is the point it generates or loads the next map tile.
It’s worse in the city because there are usually more enemies and items than in the woods or open fields.
It doesn’t happen when you walk back, since it has the tiles loaded in the memory of your computer. After you save, it’s written to your disk and has to be loaded again if you come into range of that region.
As for a fix, there really isn’t much one could do.
Here are a few game settings that may reduce the lag:
Reduce the Options->Current World->Item spawn scaling factor, as more items mean more lags.
Reduce the Options->Current World->Spawn rate scaling factor, as more monster mean more lags.
Reduce or turn of the Options->Debug->Experimental 3D field of vision.
Other than that, playing with a lot of mods on or having explored and saved large portions of the map to the disk might also cause problems.
You might want to upgrade your computer (SSD drives probably reduce that problem a lot), or try to update Cataclysm DDA and see if the problem is still existant in a later version.
It’s with a high certainty a problem with the map loading; s-/he’d most likely experience it with every step if it would be monsters moving around in the city.
I had a feeling that it was the game loading the next set of tiles. Everything you said was what I was thinking I just didn’t draw that as the conclusion as I am a bit new to the game so I posted this on the forums just to make sure its not a bug. Thank you for responding!
When I move my character around the same area in a city/town it seems to be fine (Even with monsters near). Its freezes when I go to a part of the city/town that I have not gone to in that play session. What Valase told me is pretty much what I was thanking was the game was loading that part of the tiles.