Slow ship movement

http://db48x.net/temp/galciv3%20slow%20ship%20movement-2022-02-21_17.03.45.webm
from GalCiv3 Forums

I haven’t played the game in a few years, and decided to give it a go. Everything seems fine except that ship movement is surprisingly slow and jittery. The game is playable, the graphics are perfectly fine no matter what settings I choose, but the ships move so slowly that it can take minutes to pass a turn.

In the linked video I start a new game with default settings on a tiny map, and simply move the starting exploration ship. It takes 10 seconds to start the game from the main menu, and 20 seconds for the ship to finish moving. Notice in the video that the other animations are not slow: the moon orbits the Earth smoothly, the Earth turns on its axis smoothly, etc.

Can anyone offer any advice? This is a fresh install of version 4.21 of the game, and there are no errors shown in the debug.err file. I am running Fedora 34 with kernel version 5.16.9-100. Steam is using the default Proton compatibility layer, though I tried several older versions with no improvement. My cpu is an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, I have 64GB of ram, and my graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

galciv iii support
7,472 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I got bored enough to try it again, and this time I noticed that the ships move faster if I waggle my mouse. Still slower than they should move, but if I stop moving my mouse then they slow down even further. In fact, unless I keep moving my mouse they move even more slowly than they did while I was recording.

Apparently I have to continually send window messages to the game in order for it to update this type of animation, but the other animation types are not affected.

That makes it a weirder bug than I expected.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Sorry to hear you are having trouble.

Please make sure that the GPU drivers are up to date.

Thank you for your patience and patronage.

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Thanks for the reply. I have driver version 510.47, released 22 days ago. There is one newer version, 510.54, but the changelog is quite short:

Fixed a bug that could cause GPU exceptions when minimizing a fullscreen Vulkan application on certain desktops, such as Plasma.

Since I’m not minimizing anything, and I’m not getting GPU exceptions either, I think this isn’t going to help.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

If you have a gaming mouse that has a very high polling rate and DPI scale, and you use the companion software to set them all the way to the minimum for each, does it still happen?

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

That’s an interesting idea to try. I do have a fancy gaming mouse with a high DPI, but turning the DPI down doesn’t help.

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting db48x, reply 5

That’s an interesting idea to try. I do have a fancy gaming mouse with a high DPI, but turning the DPI down doesn’t help.

And the polling rate?

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

i always move to a part of the map where fog of war is so that i know updates to the screen won't happen. then the turn goes extremely quickly. 

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The polling rate on this one isn’t adjustable. For completeness I have also dug out an old USB mouse and tried it, with the same effect.

Quoting dfriedman, reply 7

i always move to a part of the map where fog of war is so that i know updates to the screen won't happen. then the turn goes extremely quickly. 

Ouch.