DNH
December 1st, 2010, 12:23
First off, I realise this post could quite probably find a good home in the House of Healing but the issues I have been having are exclusively with the 4e ruleset, so I am starting things here. I shall probably post in HoH too to refer to this post.
Now, as you can probably get from the title, I am having problems with my 4e campaign that can be summarised as follows:
The campaign takes a long time to load. I have not actually timed it (perhaps I should) but it is upwards of ten minutes. The campaign frequently takes its time to respond to certain events. For example, when opening up the powers tab of a character sheet. The whole FG2 system hangs on a fairly regular basis, perhaps four or five times during a three-hour session.
To be fair, the second and third points are probably the same thing.
I realise my PC is not the fastest or most modern system, having been built by myself something like seven years ago, but it seems to do the job for most other things (including gaming, eg LotRO). It runs Windows XP with SP3 on 2GB RAM. I don't actually think the PC hardware is the problem. Or rather, it's not the cause of the problem (it only exacerbates it).
Looking at the db.xml file for the campaign, I get the following:
The file is 735KB in size. The file is nearly 19000 lines long. There are an awful lot of <holder> tags about.
This last is actually what is worrying me the most. Our group often has to pass ownership of characters around due to player absences and so on. As I understand it, this means that a <holder> tag for the new owner is added to pretty much every element in the character sheet XML. The old one(s) are not removed. Looking at db.xml just now, three of the five characters have four <holder> tags for each element, and the other two characters have half a dozen <holder> tags for each!
It works out at fully 4645 <holder> tags throughout the db.xml!
I am assuming that I can delete these manually from the XML file to no detrimental effect (yes?) but I do wonder why the system does not do this automatically or why the necessity for so many. (For example, the <abilities> element has a set of <holder> tags and then each individual ability - all sub-elements of <abilities> - has a set of <holder> tags too!)
I have read on here about a few things you can do to prevent campaign bloat and I have been trying them but to no appreciable effect. I would very much appreciate it if someone can make some further suggestions. As things stand, it is not so much the startup time (we have a regular game and can mitigate against this issue by starting up the clients a little earlier) but the regular hanging time. I am assuming this is something to do with XML parsing going on.
Anyway, any suggestions much appreciated.
Thanks.
Now, as you can probably get from the title, I am having problems with my 4e campaign that can be summarised as follows:
The campaign takes a long time to load. I have not actually timed it (perhaps I should) but it is upwards of ten minutes. The campaign frequently takes its time to respond to certain events. For example, when opening up the powers tab of a character sheet. The whole FG2 system hangs on a fairly regular basis, perhaps four or five times during a three-hour session.
To be fair, the second and third points are probably the same thing.
I realise my PC is not the fastest or most modern system, having been built by myself something like seven years ago, but it seems to do the job for most other things (including gaming, eg LotRO). It runs Windows XP with SP3 on 2GB RAM. I don't actually think the PC hardware is the problem. Or rather, it's not the cause of the problem (it only exacerbates it).
Looking at the db.xml file for the campaign, I get the following:
The file is 735KB in size. The file is nearly 19000 lines long. There are an awful lot of <holder> tags about.
This last is actually what is worrying me the most. Our group often has to pass ownership of characters around due to player absences and so on. As I understand it, this means that a <holder> tag for the new owner is added to pretty much every element in the character sheet XML. The old one(s) are not removed. Looking at db.xml just now, three of the five characters have four <holder> tags for each element, and the other two characters have half a dozen <holder> tags for each!
It works out at fully 4645 <holder> tags throughout the db.xml!
I am assuming that I can delete these manually from the XML file to no detrimental effect (yes?) but I do wonder why the system does not do this automatically or why the necessity for so many. (For example, the <abilities> element has a set of <holder> tags and then each individual ability - all sub-elements of <abilities> - has a set of <holder> tags too!)
I have read on here about a few things you can do to prevent campaign bloat and I have been trying them but to no appreciable effect. I would very much appreciate it if someone can make some further suggestions. As things stand, it is not so much the startup time (we have a regular game and can mitigate against this issue by starting up the clients a little earlier) but the regular hanging time. I am assuming this is something to do with XML parsing going on.
Anyway, any suggestions much appreciated.
Thanks.