Hi there,
I must say, this mod is an impressive piece of work. However, I'm having some very frustrating problems with it, mainly concerning a spectacular drop in frame-rate under 2 very specific circumstances. By this I mean that frame-rate plummets, making the game virtually unplayable if:
a) I enter a battle in the night time. Actually, a battle is not even required, just exiting the world map mode / entering sea mode during the night causes a drop of fps into the single-digits, by which I mean, I can count the fps out with my naked eye... This drags onto land - if you moor your ship in a city, you still experience the low frame-rate, until you enter a building. Back on the street - back to low fps. This carries on until you "rest until morning". Oddly enough, if you happen to fight an extremely long battle that starts during daylight and drags on until 3 am, there's no such problem. I thought this to be some weird bug in the game and although it was pretty frustrating to conduct my business only during day-time, I was willing to put up with it, avoiding opponents on the world map until dawn, because I find this mod so cool. But then there's the other thing that makes frame-rate plummet...
b) Battles involving ships with more than 40 guns / over 24 lbs. More specifically, a broadside from a ship with more than 40 guns sends frame-rate down to rock bottom. As long as no one is firing, just moving along, everything is fine - as soon as anything with more than 40 guns starts firing, fun's over. Not sure exactly about those numbers, but battles involving corvettes of various kinds (usually 32 guns, usually 16 lbs or lighter) seem to work just fine. I played around with a pimped-up Black Angel for a while, which had 20 lbs guns, 32 of them. No problem. Then I got my hands on a 30 gun frigate, which oddly enough had 42 guns, 24 lbs and the game was basically over because you can't play with that frame-rate. The more guns and higher the calibre and the more such heavy ships are involved, the worse it gets. Oddly enough, I fought battles involving up to 7-8 or so ships problem free - as long as they have few guns, of low calibres. But even a 1 on 1 between only two frigates triggers the problem.
Is this normal? In vanilla I had huge battles, involving multiple first-rates blasting hundreds of 42 lbs at each other without any problem like this - sometimes also involving another hundred or so guns from a nearby fort. As far as I am aware, I meet the required system specs, running this on an Amilo Li 3910, with a 2.2 GHz dual-core CPU, 4 GB of RAM and an Intel GMA 4500 M Graphics controller, running a 32 bit Windows 7 OS. Are the system requirements for GoF so much steeper than vanilla, that my laptop can't take the broadside of a lousy frigate without having a seizure?
I couldn't find anything related here on the forums or the rest of the web. If anyone could help me understand what exactly is going on here, I would be very much obliged. Sorry for the wall of text, but I'm a wit's end.
I just want to know if there's anything I can do, short of buying a new machine.