Declining performance over time

[CautiousChaos]

I'm not sure this is a bug, exactly.

When I start out a brand new Drox player, I set the sector to Medium. It's peppy fast for quite a while, say up to level 10, but as time goes on (in the game), performance drops. I'll start out at 15 FPS and drop to 1-3 FPS.

Here's some points of reference:

1. Performance is not a matter of how long I play a session.
2. Performance is an apparent matter of how far along in the game I am.
3. Or, it could be a factor of how much I explore and encounter.
4. I'm a netbook, so I've got yucky hardware, but 15 FPS is good for me.
5. Intel GMA 3500 stock graphics card, 1.6ghz cpu, 2g ram.
6. Stripping the graphics options to "faster" in options has no effect.
7. Upping graphics options to "best" has negligible effect.
8. Turning on Bloom is a bad idea for me.

I have to think this is because of #3, because the longer I've gone through the game and the more I've seen, the choppier the performance. Seems almost like there's "overhead" I'm taking on during the course of the game.

Oh, performance gurus - what say you to my plight??

-cc

[darksilver]

I got pretty much the same config on one of my comps... troubles only if a bunch of mobs gathered in one screen shooting each other. You could probably check free space at drive C: - swap file eats a lot, and netbooks is notorious for small HDD.

[PixelLord]

The game is heavily dependent on the CPU due to the evolving world dynamics. I believe that you are correct in your #3 comment. The more that's going on in the universe, the more intense becomes the importance of the CPU. Seems you're on the low end there, so slowdowns will be more noticeable. You may have to resort to playing tiny sectors, but you will probably still notice occasional slowdowns.

[CautiousChaos]

Both sound like good ideas. I'll check the swap later tonight. And next game I'll play the tiny and small sizes to see what I can find out.

Thanks, folks...