V4 causes skipping in certain levels

[spydrct02]

Please read the whole post, otherwise you will get confused and think I'm saying something else.

Before I explain, I'll say I do have a fix for this (anyone with hardware acceleration on their video card seems to be affected by it), and that it doesn't happen on V2. On the other hand, V2 is so slow in comparison to V4 overall that it's not even worth mentioning.

Note: when I say hardware acceleration off, I'm actually referring to the troubleshooting slider set to "disable all basic acceleration;" second from turning it completely off (right click desktop > properties > settings > advanced > troubleshooting). On with the problem -

So far I can only find a few levels that it does this in, all being on the playerworld N-Pulse. What happens is Graal 4 freezes every second or so, and how long it freezes is dependant on your window size (NOT desktop resolution). I find 640 x 480 doesn't skip too badly (still noticable), whereas 1600 x 1200 "skips" -or more like freezes- for about 2 seconds straight every second. If you go in fullscreen with even 1024 x 768 you will notice the skipping right away. It's consistent and will not stop no matter how long I'm in the level.

To help the solution, I've experimented with various settings and gathered that turning hardware acceleration off (I have an NVidia 6600) clears up the problem, as well as long level loads, another problem that I've experienced with all clients except V3. I'll add that V3 seemed to cache the levels as you loaded them, so they were all pretty much instant loading. V4 seems to be even faster than V3 when I turn hardware acceleration off, since it pretty much doesn't load any levels at all. I just fly right through the levels without any stopping (read: V2 had quite the habit for freezing when changing levels).

V2 also ran a little faster when turning hardware acceleration off, but doing it for V4 makes all the difference in everything. Just for fun, I'll let you know what settings I was going through when I was trying to fix this:

- I experimented with different antialiasing settings (none of which affected V4 performance in any way at all), and found that the only thing it seems to affect is making the text look smoother.

- Antriscopic filtering is always set to 16x for me as it has never affects frame rates in anything I've played. I thought maybe this was the problem at first, but again, it had no effect.

- I tried older NVidia drivers, but performance was left untouched. Currently I'm running forceware 83.10 (originally beta and WHQL certified, but the .ini was updated to work with all video cards - so much for WHQL).

- I tried both 16 bit and 32 bit desktop modes, also none of which affected performance in any way.

Remember, I DID find a solution for it, so go back up and read if you didn't see it. Still, noone should have to do any acceleration tweaking to get Graal running at the speed it's meant to be run.

Oh, and before I forget, the levels were all on N-Pulse, being level2.graal; event_main.nw; and event_north.nw. You can't tell me to talk to the staff either, because honestly I don't think they'd have a clue how to fix it. As for anyone that can look into it, I can say to maybe look for a same NPC that's in all 3 levels. I'm thinking it's just an incompatible--or perhaps badly scripted (this wouldn't be the first time bad scripts have shown up on that playerworld) never ending timeout loop.

Remember to put your acceleration back up when you're done playing, otherwise you may not be able to play certain games.