When I run the demo, the mouse does this really wonky thing where it jumps all over the place, decides to go painfully slow at times, is sometimes painfully inaccurate, and the buttons/target doesn’t always respond. This is in Full Screen mode. The mouse moves normally when it’s in Window mode, but whatever button/icon/whatever I click on either takes ages to respond or simply doesn’t. I had the same problem with the Kudos Rock Legend demo (which is from Big Fish Games), but I have Kudos and it works fine. I can’t tell whether this is a problem with the game or my system. I’m using Vista Home Premium, I have an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 graphics card with updated drivers, and there are no updates to the drivers for my mouse so I don’t think it’s a driver problem. Or maybe it is? Is there anything I’m missing? Help? I’d really like these to work because I find them to be extraordinarily interesting games and I want to make sure that I want to purchase them (and that they’ll work on my system).
Hi, does the game generally run slowly? you can download the free version of fraps (fraps.com) to see the framerate. I suspect it might be very low in places.
In a window, the mouse is drawn by windows using a seperate program, so its always very fast, but the game draws it when its fullscreen, and if the frame rate is bad, the mouse might be laggy.
Make sure you don’t have any other programs running in the background, and it can sometimes help to have de-fragged the disk too.
I defragged my computer and ran Fraps. The framerate varied from 18 to…1. Yikes. Slow slow slow. Everything else seems to run just fine on my system whith acceptable framerates. I’m using a laptop if that makes a difference. I’m so puzzled as to why the framerate slows so considerably during certain screens (particularly screens I have not been to before or when a hint pops up). Also, I’m not quite savvy enough to know which processes it’s okay to stop from running during the game. I know that some are quite vital and some are from McAfee and whatnot, but I can’t for the life of me tell the ones that are slowing the game and my system from the ones that are necessary. Le sigh. This is such a pity because I would rather like to try the game. It even lags in window mode, just differently (the mouse moves around just dandy, but for some reason the whenever I click on an icon “x,” button, or whatever it takes about as long as it would have if the mouse had been lagging as it does in full screen mode. Am I the only one having this problem? I did update to Service Pack 1 a while ago. Maybe that has something to do with it? Maybe I have some new version of Direct X? Like I said, I’m not terribly savvy. I’m not computer illiterate, but I guess I’m not so knowledgeable that I can pinpoint the problem. Does any of this make sense?
And seriously, am I the only one? Maybe I am. I’ve had such awful luck with Vista and I’m up to date with all the updates.
It’s almost certainly your video card. Getting a laptop to play proper directx games,a nd run vista requires some pretty decent horsepower, and aa LOT of laptops are sold as ‘vista ready!’ without the RAM, or video card to really back it up.
I suspect the lag is much more video-card related than it is CPU, so ending other processes probably will not make much difference. I think the slowdown is likely to be text (from what you say), but it would be really handy to know which screens run fast, and which run slow. Ideally I’d pinpoint where the slowdown is, and try to patch the game to be more efficient.
Hi, I have the same problem and almost the exact same setup as the OP (Vista Home, GeForce Go 7300). I have the latest driver for the card, along with the Directx and other related drivers.
As it stands the game is basically unplayable. I can get rid of the horrendous mouse lag by going windowed mode - like the OP - but for one thing, it takes forever for any of the context displays for the buttons on the main screen to show up (the relationship arrows when you highlight a menu). More critically, it’s near impossible to use any of the sliders in the game, simply because it is so unresponsive that it either doesn’t move, or goes way over where you intend for it to go. Simply clicking on a button is fine though, for the most part (it doesn’t quite want to register on the first try sometimes), and whatever that’s supposed to come up, does, instantly.
Text is definitely not the issue. Pop-ups, huge screenful of text, portraits and other graphics all display properly without any noticeable pause. It’s only when something moves or otherwise shifts gradually (like a button lighting up) that things grind to a halt.
My only guess it’s some kind of D3D problem, since I’ve had similar issues with other PC games in the past (I think Darwinia was one of them), and the solution then was to switch to something else. I really doubt the culprit is simple lack of RAM or an old card, as suggested, since I can play Left 4 Dead, Fallout 2, and other much more graphic-intensive games with only minor tweaks. I’m actually something annoyed as I was hoping this would be something I’d be able to play on the fly whenever I had a few extra minutes on my hands, and not have to worried about loading and bugs that come part and parcel with “bigger” games.
(Meant to say Fallout 3 if it wasn’t immediately obvious. Gotta stop being so used to being able to edit…)