Text reduces frame rate

It's been an on and off issue for some people since the game's release.. it was fixed for the majority in one of the first patches, but a few still get it and IC can't figure out why. What I'd recommend is sending an email to support@ironcladgames.com with your dxdiag and see if they've got any ideas.

Hey, thanks for the reply!  At least it's not just me.  For the most part it's not too noticeable - it'd be better if I could at least set the duration of text events so they don't hang around for like, 20 seconds.

In any case I'll post my DX Diag to them and see what they make of it.  Cheers!

I had this issue wiht 1.05 and than it was gone after that patch.

I have the same issue - and nearly the same video card as you do.  Mine is a 1900XT PCI-E (512MB) ... info cards and such don't seem to be any problem.  But anytime the AI whispers something, there is a massive decrease in framerate.

Hmm, wonder if it's a chipset thing.  I remember trying out Homeworld 2 a while back and even though it's a pretty old game, self-shadowing on ships killed the framerate. Turns out everyone with a particular series of ATI card had the same problem.  Sometimes driver updates/rollbacks fixed it, and sometimes there was no fix except to turn self-shadowing off.

What I wonder is where the difference is - in the game engine - between whispers, and other text in the game like completed research or other updates that don't seem to affect frame rate.

Wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on this?

I have this issue aswell.  I am running NVidia cards.  They have no issues with the game (Highest or lowest setting, few to many ships), but once that text pops up everything grinds to a halt. I look forward to seeing a fix for this silly little bug.

Nevermind,  I still have this issue.  Just didn't notice lately becaues I have been playing more online.

I may have found a solution. I think, there must be something around the fonts used by the game. So, I copied a lot of fonts from my Fonts folder to the "[GameFolder]\Font" folder (typically it's the "C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Font\" path). And then, I edited the ListItem.font file, like this:

TXT
Font
        Height 14
        TypeFaceName "impact"

You can see, the TypeFaceName property must be changed with the appropriate name of the new font, wich is the file name of that without the extension.

The game doesn't support a lot of kind of fonts, only the Arial-like ones, the Nina-family and the Impact were what I had success with. Now, I'm using Impact, it's the closest to the original SinsAgencyBold font.

The game runs much more flawlessly after changing the font.

(A note: you may do the same with the PlanetNameMainView.font file, too.)

I hope, it's helpful as for the gamers solving their problem as for the developers finding the real cause of this issue.

Regards,

trigorin

trigorin, you should e-mail this info (and a link to this thread also) to support@ironcladgames.com.

I sent them, but they couldn't help me, because they wasn't able to reproduce the issue. We all who have this problem should send them a letter to support@ironcladgames.com attaching the dxdiag file. It may help them more.

So, I may have found a better solution. I turned on the font smoothing in windows (right click on My Computer, then change to Advanced tab, select the Performance setting, and check the "Smooth edges of screen fonts" box). I got back the default game fonts without any FPS drop.

I changed to Win7, and now I have to absolutely turn off the ClearType feature in the fonts window to get correct framerate in the game.

There must be something in this software around using fonts. I hope that the new expansion, Diplomacy, will give a solution to this issue, too.

The 1.05 pacth for Entrenchment seems to resolve this problem with fonts.

Yeah, I came here to say the same thing, I'm so glad