I just recently got wiz 8, and while I'm enjoying the game, it takes 3-5 min to open saved games, 2-3 min to open the map, and 3-5 min to fully quit the game. Is this normal? Did the install mess up somehow? I did see the posts @ openGL and have downloaded to see if it helps. I can almost rationalize the time for the loading and the map, ( allthough severely annoying), but I just don't understand why quitting the game should take so long before I'm back at my desktop. Suggestions, thoughts, or ideas?

Welcome Ashara!

Yes.

It does take a long time to open and change areas for me (and exit the game), not quite as bad as your situation, but a long time.

If following the openGL advice others have given helps you, by all means go for that (doesn't hurt to try it, eh). Also, you can remove the competition. I remove the screen saver and also, temporarily, my virus software, which seems to prevent that churning where the music and everything seems to be creeping forward with very little progress.

At least the design is such that I am never seriously slowed once I am on a map. I've gotten so used to it now I use it to set back for a minute, look around, grab a soda, etc. It's bad, but I prefer that to the game being slow all the time.

Oh, map reading in an area speeds up once you have used it a couple times, but if you leave items around that slows it down. It is best to pick up stray items and either sell them or put them in a chest somewhere, specifically so you can use the map. I use the maps all the time as I play.

[ 09-27-2003, 01:35 PM: Message edited by: EEWorzelle ]

Memory expansions, bigger Hard drive, Graphics accelerator.....new machine?
For a while i played on an old PC with only 64M Ram and a 64M graphics card, now i built a new system with 256M and 128 for graphics. I also got new Windows, i dunno how much that changed, but anyway most everything is much faster now!
My biggest complaint now is there's no way to turn off the spell animations--when you've seen them all so many times, and some take so long, i would like to know if there's a way to speed those up...(i used to stand on the return key during combat in W-7)

Thanks for the feedback. OpenGL just made my cursor jump around, but maybe I got the wrong version since this a new computor with windows xp (yeck, but it was a good deal, now I know why). I have 128 RAM, but was considering the memory upgrade eventually anyway. I was diabling the anti-virus, but I'll also now try the screen saver. I have a Pent 4 chip, and the computor seems to zip along in anything but Wizardry. My friends who came to poke through the new computor said if it was driving ne crazy, stop playing. They don't get it. Any other thoughts that anyome has about this situation, please let me know......

I've seen recomendations for XP and NT to use 128 MB minimum to run. Lesser RAM is OK for Win 98 and Win 95. I upgraded to 256 MB RAM for Wiz 8 and got a big improvement. I hate Microsoft, but they are the standard. My next computer will be a 3 Gigabyte+ screamer with 512 MB RAM with Win 98.

i also did the hardware upgrade thing, purely for wizardry. extra ram and and higher video card ram seemed to be the biggest help.

however, i still run into thrashing problems when opening/closing maps and when shutting down. the bottom line, i think, is swap space. wizardry just loads a ***load of stuff into memory and your swap file can grow and grow. so faster discs, and defragging, can have a major impact. further, a disc utility that sorts swap space to the front of the disc (like norton) helped, too.

i have the same problem as well so dont worry, it only takes asround 1 min now i got a video card, it used to be terrible with a max of 10 mins just for arnika/trtnton road.

I got the same problem too when my graphic card is ATI Radeon 8500.apparently wizardry 8 couldn't handle the latest ATI graphic cards. so when I change back to my older voodoo 3 2000. the game went back to normal without any problem. so I guess the problem has something to do with graphic cards.

Im currently running a Pentium 2.8 // 640RAM // Radeon 9800 Pro and having no problems with everything on. Just to let you know what it takes to run this game at its best. FYI I have problems when i exit as well so dont fret about quitting taking to long. =)

I had a minor issue with stuttering and fixed by getting
a sound card. using on board sound eats some cpu cycles.