Emperor CD Access slowdown

[Holmium]

Hi there, not sure if you guys can help but will post here anyway. I've tried dealing with the useless tech monkies at WW but their autoreply scripts can't seem to handle my request, so I'm hoping I can get some help here. ;)

Basically, I own Emperor and am running Windows XP (SP 1). The game runs well and I have no real issues there except I have one gripe and I'm open for solutions. My gripe is whenever speech is played during the single player campaigns, my pc will lag for a few seconds as that part of the CD ROM is accessed. Now, I know that you can copy dialog.bag from the CD to the Emperor directory somewhere and Emperor will access that information first, as opposed to lagging my system via the CD. I've done this in the past with not only Emperor but with other WW titles too (I own about 8+ WW games and expansions) I just cannot remember what to copy to where.

If any of you require any additional information, just let me know and I'll post it (within reason).

Regards

Holmium

[IxianMace]

Does the speech lag the game when the CD is being accessed, or does it also lag when a new music track is being played? I had the same problem with both the speech and the music, but I've compiled a 172Mb bag file using BagTool and modified the .txt files in the music folder so that the game doesn't access the CDs for the music anymore, and just gets them straight from the hard disk. Therefore, no more lag with the music for me. I'm not sure how to do the same thing with the speech from the mentats, if I knew, then I would have done the same thing with them by now, just like I did with the music. Anyway, I know what you mean by the lag, I've still got it when the mentats speak during gameplay and the CD-ROM has to wind up again to read the CD after a long time being idle.

[Holmium]

It does the same thing for the music as well (lags momentarily). I believe there may be away to adjust the resource.cfg file, so that it looks at your hdd instead of the CD. I'll have a look once I get home from work. Even if it involves swapping one file out for another (depending on which CD I'm using), it doesn't really matter to me, as long as the lag goes! :)

FYI, in case someone thinks I have a "slow" system, I have a P4 1.5 GHZ CPU, Asus P4b motherboard, 512 Mb RAM, 10+ Gb free on 4 drives (2 20+ Gb drives partitioned split a total of 4 drives), Asus 52x CD rom, Creative SB Audigy, Asus GF4 Ti4600 (128MB). I love Intel and I love Asus, both are reliable and I'll continue to buy their products, as long as they serve me well.

[IxianMace]

Well I just compiled all the music from all the CDs into one big music.bag file, and then modified the .txt files in the music folder so they tell the game to look at the hard drive instead of the CDs. The only really long and tedious part of this is compiling the bag file itself. It takes quite a long time.

[Nyarlathotep]

I do not know how to edit the files the way you think they should (maybe the people on the editing forum can help). However, what you might want to try is to put +w behind the games shortcut (right click on the EBFD icon and select properties).

[Holmium]

Thanks for all your comments, using the idea of IxianMace's I compiled all the dialog files from the CDs and merged the 4 files into 1 large file and stored that in the datadialog directory. I then modified the dialog text files and changed CD2, CD3, CD4 to HD (after making a backup of course). This worked perfectly fine, then I did the same with the music files.

The tool I used was acquired from the FED2K files and it was called bagtool. Very effective and simple to use program. :)

[Nyarlathotep]

Cool, happy gaming again :)

Thanks IxianMace for helping out !