Some help with the Lag issues in Zero Hour

[mindslayer]

I did post this under another section but wanted it to be a main posting as well. Here ya go.
Hey guys I am fairly new here but not new to the various problems with the issues with CNC Generals Zero Hour, mainly the lagg issue. I have done testing on several fronts to find what was causing the issue. It seems there is a huge memory leak in the game that allows the game to just keep eating resources slowly. Thats why after like 10 mins or so the game slows down considerably. I have pointed it out to EA's Tech Support but they have claimed they know about it and cant fix it. But anyways, I have something you guys could try that has worked for me and seems to make the game run better not massive better, but it doesnt slow to a grinding halt all the time. No modding(file changes or downloading a mod file) is involved and it is pretty easy to do.
This will work with Windows 2000 and Windows XP only.
1. Start the game as you normally would. When it gets to the full boot screen hit the "windows key" so that you get back to the desktop.
2. Use CTRL+ALT+DEL to get into the task manager. We want to be on the processes tab.
3. Find the following 3 files. "generals.exe" "game.dat" and "~e5d141.tmp" These are created by the Zero Hour Game.
4. What we are going to do is change the way Windows allocates the resources to each of those files. This can be done by "right-clicking" on each of the files one at a time and selecting "Set Priority".
5. Setting Priority to each file as follows below:
-"game.dat" - set priority to "Low"
-"~e5d141.tmp" - set priority to "Low"
-"generals.exe" - set priority to "High"
Now the .tmp file doesnt take much resources and I have had it just set to default which is normal and havent really seen any performance difference. I just figured saving as much resources as possible is good. The file that hogs the resources is the "game.dat" file. It starts out at some range of 151,000 and eventually gets well above 250,000. thats what is eating up all the resources and lagging the game down. Thats why I set it to "Low" in priority to save alittle.
I have seen improvement in playing 3 comps on hard and also having a friend play via LAN connection. Usually it lags so bad(without modifying the Priorities) that you get fed playing and just quit. Theres really no hope of getting another patch out of EA anytime soon if ever again. Hopefully one of the modders could find where the memory leak and maybe fix it in a "unofficial patch". That would take sometime. Until then we have to find our own ways to get the game to be enjoyable.

[vele]

Hi, thanks for the information about the slowing down. I've asked so many people who have played the game and no one could tell me how to fix it. I will try and see if it helps. But I have one more problem:After playing with friends on LAN - 4 vs 4 hards just before we beat the .... out of them the game crashed and displayed an error message: Technical Difficulties......
And thats what goes to my nerves. Sometimes I play a map for 8 with all HARDS, and manage to win without any problem but sometimes just before the end when my enemies have almoust nothing the game crashes. If you have any other solution for this Please tell me about it and thank you so much!

[vele]

Originally Posted by vele

Hi, thanks for the information about the slowing down. I've asked so many people who have played the game and no one could tell me how to fix it. I will try and see if it helps. But I have one more problem:After playing with friends on LAN - 4 vs 4 hards just before we beat the .... out of them the game crashed and displayed an error message: Technical Difficulties......
And thats what goes to my nerves. Sometimes I play a map for 8 with all HARDS, and manage to win without any problem but sometimes just before the end when my enemies have almoust nothing the game crashes. If you have any other solution for this Please tell me about it and thank you so much!

[Golgor]

Me and a couple of friends had this problem for pretty long too. And while we were experimenting with different ways to get rid of it one of us minimized the game and all of the sudden all others got no lag at all. We tried some more and figured, maybe its about the full screen support?

Anyways, we tried it in window mode... and everything went great. No mismatch, no lag at all. Still pretty early in testing this method but if you tried everything else this might be worth a try.

How to:
Create a shortcut to your generals.exe and append "-win" to the "Target" of the shortcut.
http://www.tjofraes.se/generals.jpg

[preyingrazor]

I have noticed that during normal gameplay and multiplayer gameplay against several computer AI (5 to 7) the game lags quite a bit. I've got a pretty decent laptop (dxdiag attached):

Toshiba - Satellite A300D-15B

Specifications include:
2.1 Ghz AMD Turion X2 Ultra (Dual core)
4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
HD 3850 with 512 MB dedicated 1.5 GB shared RAM = total 1.9 GB supporting DirectX 10.1 and shader model 4.0
and a completely defragmented hard drive running Win Vista SP2 beta 32bit
(i carried out the experiment on both SP1 and SP2 with similar results)

I ran the canyourunit.com applet and it passes quite proficiently:



I noticed other people having similar problems on various forums; the most pertinent of which is the current one.


After reading through the thread I tried one of the solutions which was to run in window mode by appending -win at the end of the generals shortcut. Immediately, I noticed everything running much smoother. (Thanks for the tip) By the way, I have graphics maxed out and am running the desktop at 1440 x 900 (native resolution of the laptop) and the game at 1152x864. I can't seem to take it any higher. Obviously it doesn't support widescreen resolutions.

I then started a multiplayer game with 7 other AI, all set to the brutal difficulty. After a couple of minutes massive slowdowns began to occur. I had already disabled useless services and antivirus, defender, firewalls, etc.

Opening taskmanager revealed that the process game.dat was using most processor resources and generals.exe very little. I then set the affinity of the more processor intensive game.dat to CPU 0 and generals.exe and ALL other windows processes to CPU 1. This greatly improved the performance. I imagine generals doesn't make very good use of two cores in tandem.

But there is still massive lag right at the beginning and consequent occasional slowdowns , albeit the campaign modes have vastly improved. Graphics are also mega smooth now.

However, there must be other ways to improve game execution.

[vhin007]

hi! please help me regarding ROTR i allredy install the ROTR then wen i start it's looking for a game CD. please help me