Production Anim Slowdown Bug Options

[Bittah Commander]

For many players the production animation (gclock2.shp) causes the game to slow down when you build something cheap (apparently for some people this even slows the game down to an unbearable frame rate). I just ran a quick test and gave the clock animation fewer frames (17 instead of 55); as I expected it now doesn't slow the game at all anymore while playing on the 'Faster' gamespeed (gamespeed 5) and when playing with the fastest gamespeed, it only slowed the game down to about the rate of gamespeed 5 for a very short time (meaning this wouldn't be noticeable online).

While this could be a "sort-of fix", it'll obvoiusly look a bit odd when building more expensive things... So I was wondering whether it'd either be possible to find a way to keep the normal gclock2.shp anim from lagging the game or make it somehow drop frames when building cheaper buildings.

[SeekSomethingNew]

My assumption is, that for every tick the gclock2.shp is drawn on the built building, the darken.shp is drawn on every other building. Since TS has by default no hardware acceleration and transparent anims (like gasclouds) can cause lags ingame too, i assume that drawing in a short time 55 times a transparent layer on all cameos is too much for the engine.

And your tests have shown, that minimizing the transparent drawing work for the engine, reduces the lag what supports this assumption.

That's why i think the only way to fix this would be a code optimization, but i'm not sure if Hyper can go that deep in the code.
e.g.
-draw darken.shp only once on all visible cameos in the sidemenu when the construction has started
-update cameos with the darken.shp which appear in the sidemenu after scrolling upwards/downwards (and only those new cameos)
-when construction is finished, update all cameos to show the non-darked cameo again.
-adjust the number of shown frames from gclock2.shp concerning the cost and buildspeed of the current building
(100 Credits building shows only 4 frames
1000 Credits building shows half the frames
2000 Credits building shows all frames)

Im gonna just hit on one line you said, "That's why i think the only way to fix this would be a code optimization, but i'm not sure if Hyper can go that deep in the code." Correctomondo, this is something you modders are gonna have to fix until i fully undersand how SHP drawing actualy works.

Though people have said that the "RA2" DDRAW.DLL seems to stop this...