Scourge of War Boards

Back before Chancellorsville was released, I had a pretty bad time with Scourge of War. The performance was so utterly horrid, it completely crippled all my enthusiasm for the game to the point where I can't honestly say I played more than a few scenarios, and not even to completion.

I had a very powerful computer then, and I have a very powerful computer now. I posted about the problem on this forum, but there was no actual solution. A number of theories were raised by several members of the forum, but I actually don't think even the developer was entirely aware of what was causing that truly wretched performance on higher-end machines like mine. I have gone through three different machines since that time, and the performance has always been exactly as bad.

Chancellorsville changed that utterly.

Apparently, from what I understand - the developers had come up with a new technique for rendering environment details like for example trees. Whatever the reason, the difference between vanilla Scourge of War and Chancellorsville was so profound, It could just as well have been magic. It was like the game had been made in an entirely different engine. I can't really physically see any major visual differences between these trees and the old trees, but the performance in Chancellorsville is still several hundred times better.

For the first time since the Take Command-series, I actually enjoyed my time with the game. I nearly couldn't believe it. So when Brandy Station was released, I bought it the same day.

However, it turned out that you needed Gettysburg installed in order to install Brandy Station. (The standalone Chancellorsville isn't sufficient, for some reason.) So after having installed it again after all this time, I truly marveled over just how vast the difference in performance is between the Gettysburg-scenarios and those of Chancellorsville/Brandy Station. It truly is a bizarre experience to play them back-to-back.

Do you ever intend to update Gettysburg and its expansions with the environment-rendering solution of Chancellorsville and Brandy Station?

Gettyburg was updated previous to the release of Chancellorsville. If you are using the 1.61 version of the game you should see the same speed improvement.

Gettyburg was updated previous to the release of Chancellorsville. If you are using the 1.61 version of the game you should see the same speed improvement.

Nope.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that chancellorsville has much fewer vegetation sprites per area, and the grayscale BMP that decides where to put them is 1/4 the scale of those on the gettysburg or antietam maps. Using this BMP scale, stone walls have to be thinner, like on the one big Gettysburg map.

I don't think this is the only factor, but it matters. If I go on chancellorsville and look at one of the thick green fields, my FPS goes down. If I look at a similarly sized field of wheat on gettysburg, my FPS is about similar.

My random maps have better performance than gettysburg maps due to having thinner vegetation and far fewer fields with thick crops in them. (But they use the dense BMP scale, so they're not as good as chancellorsville.)

So we have from Garnier the official word on the subject: SIZE MATTERS!

So we have from Garnier the official word on the subject: SIZE MATTERS!

I think part of it has to do with the fact that chancellorsville has much fewer vegetation sprites per area, and the grayscale BMP that decides where to put them is 1/4 the scale of those on the gettysburg or antietam maps. Using this BMP scale, stone walls have to be thinner, like on the one big Gettysburg map.

I don't think this is the only factor, but it matters. If I go on chancellorsville and look at one of the thick green fields, my FPS goes down. If I look at a similarly sized field of wheat on gettysburg, my FPS is about similar.

My random maps have better performance than gettysburg maps due to having thinner vegetation and far fewer fields with thick crops in them. (But they use the dense BMP scale, so they're not as good as chancellorsville.)

Could be, could be. All I know is that a given Chancellorsville-scenario can have about similar amounts of troops and vegetation on-screen as a given Gettysburg-scenario, and Chancellorsville will always have several times higher FPS, to the point of disbelief.

So my request still stands: Could you please consider doing to Gettysburg whatever it is that you did to Chancellorsville at some point in the (ideally not too distant) future?

It would take a complete redesign of the maps. This would take a lot of development time--time away from improving the game engine and developing more products.

Even after that effort you wouldn't be able to have stone walls like those on the current Gettysburg maps -- which are pretty important for that battle. And if you kept the huge fields full of crops it would still have much worse performance than Chancellorsville.

You can get better performance on them by reducing the vegetation density in the settings, or using the T key to turn off crops.

Not trying to crush your dreams.

Someone could make a mod for the big gettysburg map using the chancellorsville vegetation. You'd need both games to use it and it would obviously be far less detailed than the small gettysburg maps. You don't need map-making rights to do this either.