increased the cycles a bit ?
recall U7 is a bit picky.

Think that problem is unsolved though.

I wonder if the source of the problem could be the "priority" setting in dosbox.conf. On my old machine (P4/2.6 Ghz) I've had keyboard "pauses" and other "jerk" effects that disappeared once I set "priority=normal,normal". Not sure if this happens to be the default now for 0.74 anyway though.

Qbix wrote:

increased the cycles a bit ?
recall U7 is a bit picky.

One of the first things I tried... at about 11000 everything is near the "correct" speed (except the issues I mentioned) though if you boost it up to like 40000, the delay when you click dialogue in a conversation becomes even longer.

Priority was "Higher" on default, but I changed it to normal and no difference.

I wonder if the source of the problem could be the "priority" setting in dosbox.conf.

It's something the game does itself (it's "running" fine during the slow speeding walk)
but i couldn't even get an idea of why it happens when debugging it back then.

I thought it would be worth looking at vsync, which the game uses, but it doesn't appear to have an effect on the intermittent pauses. The Voodoo engine uses "unreal mode" to access more memory in real mode; I wonder if the issue could be related to that, as not too many games use the trick.

Yeah but no idea how to approach this, the code execution looks just fine
during the pauses (possibly still has something it waits for).
Don't remember if i tried it in bochs&co, their segment caching logic should
be nice for unreal mode though no idea how complete it is regarding this.

I get this stop every ~1.5 seconds on real hardware too.
486 100MHz both Trio64 and ET4000.
Turbo on an off(worse).

...which is even stranger, don't remember this occurring on a real system in dos days.

I *think* this is just how it works but no one remembers it anymore (wouldn't be the first time we encountered stuff like this). With Exult we had ongoing complains about how the Avatar walks, how many frames he uses etc...

Dominus wrote:

I *think* this is just how it works but no one remembers it anymore (wouldn't be the first time we encountered stuff like this). With Exult we had ongoing complains about how the Avatar walks, how many frames he uses etc...

I could see people complaining about the fact that he only has 2 walking frames opposed to all other party members who have 3 or 4?

Anyway, I know the whole "memory" problem is going to affect a lot of opinions on this. It's true that I played this game quite a while ago on a real DOS system but I played the *hell* out of it, and I seem to recall plenty of times when running full speed in one direction and I don't ever remember it halting like this. Not on a consistent basis at least. It totally kills the immersion, as someone else said, the whole world just seems to pause, over and over.

The problem is that if there ARE real systems (like hal tested) where this
problem appears, it's a game bug that surfaces under some (which??) conditions.

wd wrote:

The problem is that if there ARE real systems (like hal tested) where this
problem appears, it's a game bug that surfaces under some (which??) conditions.

I suppose we won't know what that is until more than a handful of people post their DOS system specs and whether they have this problem or not...

Is there only one version of the game?

AFAIK, Black Gate had only one small patch for an item related to a quest, so wouldn't change how the engine runs. The Forge of Virtue addon was the big change to the game, but the short pauses are seen with or without the addon. The Serpent Isle sequel also has the short pauses, with or without its Silver Seed addon.

Walking around just isn't smooth in the games, but maybe that's understandable when you have these large world maps that you can move through seamlessly. I wonder if a disk cache makes any difference...

wd wrote:

...which is even stranger, don't remember this occurring on a real system in dos days.

what system have you been using exactly?

I checked 386dx40 (ISA gfx) and 486dx40 (VLB gfx) and it is still there too.

The reason why you may not remember it may be caused by the fact that this game is accessing HDD almost all the time unless you are going back for a while. If you for example make circles on the wall around the city the game is accessing hdd even when you are doing another circle. The hdd access ads to the jerkiness making the regular jerkiness less regular and also when you hear HDD working you expect jerkiness even it is not caused by it. And I guess no body was walking left<->right again and again when hdd was not being accessed -> and that would be the only way to notice that!

On more modern sytems (586 133mhz) the jerkiness is not visible simply cause the character moves too fast. Also in dosbox if you set cycles 50000 and more (with dynamic core to allow that) you won't see jerkiness. You can slow down walking/running speed by lowering keyboard rate and the jerkiness will still not be visible (but the surrounding will still be too fast of course).

Also notice that no one complaining about the jerkiness remembered that the game is accessing hdd like crazy all the time you move. Reason is simple: hdd noise = jerkiness, so there was nothing special about it that time. Right now in dosbox we hear no hdd noise, but we see jerkines, so everybody notices that sth has to be broken here.

what system have you been using exactly?
I checked 386dx40 (ISA gfx) and 486dx40 (VLB gfx) and it is still there too.

Similar systems but lower than 40mhz iirc.

Can you check if Smartdrive makes a difference?

Hi, I have tested the game on my 486dx33 with smartdrive, and I do not experience the usual jerkiness which has been addressed in this thread. However, the walking movement does get occasional slowdowns, as the hard drive is accessed very often.