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Messages - Spaceman Spiff

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Help Me / TD2 really laggy since last update
« on: November 30, 2007, 02:35:48 PM »
First off, I love this program and I've been running my league with it for several seasons now.  Before my last tourney I updated to 2.4.3 and had a really tough time with lag.  Sometimes it was taking close to a minute to bring up knockouts, rebuys, etc.  The clock would update maybe every 15 seconds or so.  Before updating to 2.4.3 I hadn't really seen this before.

The laptop I'm running on certainly isn't a world beater, but it's 2.2 GHz with 640 in RAM.  We don't really use it for anything anymore except for TD, so the update to the newest version was the only thing changed.

Running a test now and it seemed to run fine until the first rebuy and then the lag started again.  It's not as bad as before, but I expect it will get worse as time goes on.  I'm only running 10-20 player games, so I don't think I should be taxing the calculations too bad.

Any ideas?  Worst case I suppose I can download it to my better laptop.  I do still have the key, but wanted to make sure it's cool to transfer to a new machine.

Thanks!

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General Discussion / Re: Version 2.1 is available
« on: May 25, 2006, 07:01:19 PM »
No, you don't.  This is covered in the FAQ: http://www.thetournamentdirector.net/faq.html#faq2

Where/what are you reading that is confusing to you?  I'd like to clear it up if others are confused as well.

When I go to the download page, it talks about it being a 30 day trial version.  My fear was that it wouldn't see that I already had version 2 and would kill my access after 30 days.  Just wanted to be sure before I upgraded.  Unless there is a different upgrade download that I'm not seeing for those of us that already have 2.0.

Thanks!

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General Discussion / Re: Version 2.1 is available
« on: May 19, 2006, 05:08:12 PM »
This is probably a stupid question, but the way the update page reads it looks like I have to buy another license to update to 2.1.2.  Is this true?  Or does it see I have a licensed copy when it updates and disables the 30 day thing?

Thanks!

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Help Me / Re: Lagging issues with TD2
« on: March 14, 2006, 04:05:46 PM »
Update:

Added 512 MB to the laptop although I had to take out a 128 to do it, so I'm effectively at 640 MB.  Everything seemed to work fine at my most recent 16 person game.

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Help Me / Re: Lagging issues with TD2
« on: March 05, 2006, 08:20:12 PM »
Actually, that's much more useful information.  That leads to an idea that it may in fact be a memory issue.  The TD uses Windows Media Player to play sounds.  As a matter of fact, it uses up to 5 instances of WMP at one time, so that sounds may overlap.  Because the TD doesn't really know any details about the sounds you are playing (other than the filename; it doesn't know, for example, how long the sound will play), it rotates using more than one instance of WMP.  I'm not certain how WMP handles having more than one player running at the same time.  It could be that they all share resources, and so it probably wouldn't have a huge effect on memory footprint.  It could also be that they all have their own memory requirements, and as each new sound plays in your tournament, the memory footprint is getting bigger and bigger.

So, by the time you got to level 2, and the clocked stopped updating for 30-40 seconds, it would be interesting to know if your machine was thrashing (continuously swapping memory back and forth to/from disk).  Was the hard light basically "on" the whole time?

No, the hard drive was pretty quiet other than a flicker every couple of seconds it seemed.  Now when it got to the point where it basically crashed, it was going nuts.

Tried a couple more experiments tonight and I'm not sure what to make of it.  One thing I think I noticed is with the layout.  I had one of the default layouts going and when the lagging started it seemed to get better when I got rid of the fields for the system time and the chip display.  So I did a trial where I started without those and with and without my custom sounds.  Everything seemed to run just fine.  So then I went back to the previous layout showing the system time, chips, and with my custom sounds.  When I ran that game, I got the lagging again.

Not sure what it all means, but hopefully that will help.

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Help Me / Re: Lagging issues with TD2
« on: March 05, 2006, 10:40:35 AM »
Thanks guys.  I'll have to do a little more work I think.  I ran some spyware checkers and got rid of a couple things that had cropped up, but I think the main culprit may be the memory.  I had similar issues on my desktop trying to run Civ4 until I tripled the memory.  Been awhile since I've upgraded my machines!

Don't know if this will help with any diagnosis or not.  After doing a clean of the system I ran TD2 again.  It ran just fine for all of Level 1 until it got to the 1 minute warning.  I had custom sound in for the 1 min. warning.  After playing that, I started getting the jumping and lagging clock.  It played the custom sound for level end, but by the time level2 got going, it was lag city.  Took probably 30-40 seconds before the clock first updated in level 2.

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Help Me / Re: Lagging issues with TD2
« on: March 01, 2006, 05:43:04 PM »
Any ideas at all?  Anyone?

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Help Me / Lagging issues with TD2
« on: February 26, 2006, 10:59:43 AM »
Ran my first game with TD2 yesterday and had some big problems.  The clock kept lagging sometimes only updating every 2 or 3 seconds.  Sometimes it would lag for 30-40 seconds or even a couple minutes.  I also had problems going between screens, especially trying to knock players out.  I eventually crashed and had to resume with TD1.3.  My computer is a 2.1 GHz with 256MB, so I think it should be plenty good enough.  I only have 9 players in the db at this time and the only other program I had open with TD2 was Excel.  Any ideas?  I really like what I see so far in TD2, but if I can't get the clock to work normally it does me no good.

Thanks for any help or ideas.

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