Remove ants now !

[IronWill]

Okay I ran several games in which the rules were to not use ants nests...

Guess what? We had quite no lag in game... Ants really need an update because, unfortunately, there is no way to disable that power-up before starting the game and sometimes CPU takes control of a player... And CPU is stupid, he spawns ants !

[xander]

I really have to wonder what the problem that people are having with ants is... I am using a crappy machine by most standards (a MacBook Air) and ants cause me no problems whatever. Magic forests, on the other hand...

That being said, can't you turn off ants by using basic crates only?

xander

[patto]

yeah, ants can seriously slow the game down. in extreme cases I'm only getting around 5 frames per second

[allen]

Weird enough I played a game with 3 starting powerups and 10 second crate drop time and I got 3 ants nests at the start of the game and I put them all down and eventually got a fourth up. 4 ants nests in play and no lag.

[IronWill]

The game you are speaking about lasted no more than 10 mins I bet !

It is true that when ants are spawned they do not make lag immediately. But on the middle-run they really do !

It is also true that there is a kind of problem with these magic trees and forest fires...

[Kuth]

Ants might not be so much of an issue if they were quicker to destroy.

As is, it seems they gather a ton of souls and spawn a tremendous amount of ants. As they're usually placed by spawn points it means the ants have plenty of meat to feast on.

[Pinky]

My solution: Get a better computer/internet.

I had 6 ant nests in play in one game. No lag, although the game itself was pretty bizarre after that.

[zach]

Pinky, I think you're missing the problem here.
Ants lag on some computers, and it would seem magic forests lag on some others (not one bit of lag on my computer, for example).

I don't know the difference in hardware, but it is clear to me that this is because of difference in computers, not the amount of boxen.

Four ant nests lag terribly on my system;

• 4 GB PC6400 RAM
• 2 x nVidia GeForce 8800GT XXX, overclocked to 670 MHz (running SLi)
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad
• Windows XP Pro SP3

Now, I know this is no longer creme de la creme, but I bet 90% have weaker computers than this.

Are you saying I need to upgrade? In that case, to what? Everything affordable has only become marginally better - what, 2.8 GHz, PC9600 RAM, GeForce 9800?

[xander]

Perhaps it is a problem of CPU boundedness vs graphics card boundedness? The Core2Duo in the MacBook Air is actually a rather spritely little proc, so, if ants are CPU bound, I wouldn't have a problem with them. Magic forests, on the other hand, seem to be highly graphics bound, thus, having a crap Intel chipset (I almost wrote shitset), the MacBook Air chokes on them.

xander

[mikkelet]

what makes you think the CPU is a he

Just disable crates.

IV already planned to make crate system..

[IronWill]

I don't think that disabling crates is a good solution just to avoid one single problem. Maybe we could be able to disable some crates on host configuration panel? Is there no way in config files?

[bert_the_turtle]

Is there no way in config files?

No, because every host would then just disable the crates he doesn't like personally.

You can disable crates in the map files, though.

[IronWill]

I do not see the problem in having some games with some crates that could be disabled, is there one ?

If I edit my map file I guess that won't work with another client isn't it ?

[zach]

Since the map files are compared hash-wise, no.

The maps have to be identical (right down to whitespace and newlines, I think).