First off, best performance doesn't mean you'll never get freezes or black screens. A lot depends on the condition of the server you'll be connecting too, as well as your internet connection. A heavy server load or a poor connection, or even a good connection with lots of jitter or other apps taking up bandwidth, or peak load times at your ISP's end will mean longer load times for wartune.
You can check your internet connection's speed and quality at: speedtest.net
Use both the speed as well as ping test to get a good indication of your connection.
Leaving these aside, what I want to mention here are some steps which can be taken to make your own side, your own system as best as possible to play wartune.
Let me make one thing clear:
This is not a professional guide that can work wonders. Wartune being a browser based game using a lot of server side scripts, there is not a lot that can be done to improve performance as such, as things depend on the wartune server. (Thanks to ancev to remind me of this.)
This guide thus, doesnt make wartune load blazing fast nor makes playing it a breeze.
This guide is purely for those who face black screens, freezes and lags even when the wartune server, the internet connection etc. all seem to be working fine. This guide deals with those problems or issues ON THE CLIENT SIDE that causes wartune to freeze and generally makes browsers slow down and causes web pages/browsers to freeze.
The first requirement is ofcourse the minimum hardware that can play wartunes at a decent level.
A dual core processor and 2+ GB of RAM, and a good graphics chipset will get the job done very well. We dont require the latest Nvidia's or AMD's to render wartunes. Your Intel's inbuilt graphics is good enough. Though it is better if your intel chipset has a dedicated memory for graphics and does not share from the system RAM.
Though we dont need 2GB RAM, I've mentioned 2+ considering that the OS (vista and above) themselves recommend atleast 2GB for the OS, thereby needing the '+' RAM for your apps.
Moving on to the software parts:
I use windows 8.1 pro and the instructions are based on a windows usage scenario.
you will have to adapt them to match linux/unix/mac os yourselves as i dont have them. Sorry.
You'll need to download CCleaner. Get it from filehippo.com or piriform.com
It is a free program that cleans your system of junk files.
Install it and run it. On the left side, select the cleaner tab.
You'll find 2 panels ion the right side. In the windows panel, check mark everything except:
IE: Autocomplete Form History
IE: Saved Passwords
Windows Explorer: Network Passwords
Advanced: Tray Notification Cache
Advanced: Wipe Free Space
The above mentioned ones must be unchecked.
Next, select the Applications tab.
There, you'll find google chrome and firefox if you have them installed.
In both, uncheck options that says something similar to
Form history or Autocomplete or Autofill
Passwords
Cookies
Then, click the 'Run Cleaner' Button. Wait for CCleaner to finish its job and then close it.
Please note: you will have to close your browser and other applications to let ccleaner perform properly. So, dont run ccleaner untill you are able to close all other applications.
For the browser, I recomend Google chrome or Mozilla firefox.
Go for the stable versions of these. Personally, I use the 'dev' version of chrome. But dev and nightly versions of chrome and firefox are somewhat untested and you may end up having strange problems. So unless you are confident of being able to solve any such problems, stick with their stable releases.
Avoid IE - not that I have any problem with IE, but sometimes, flash seems to do strange things on IE, So, better avoid IE. Safari is a good and fast browser, but I find that it takes up a lot of memory. I dont have much idea of Opera. Anyway, I found tht I got the best performance when using Google Chrome, followed by Mozzilla Firefox. No offence meant to fans of the various browsers, this is just my personal find, on my system. I use chrome and give 2nd preferece to firefox, and so the steps following assume that you use the same. If you use other browsers, you may need to skip browser specific steps or adapt them to match the browser of your choice.
In both chrome and firefox, you have to find and install an extension called click&clean by hotcleaner.com
For chrome, go to chrome webstore (Google search 'chrome webstore'), search for the term 'hotcleaner' and you will find the click&clean app by hotcleaner.com
Similarly you can do for firefox by searching for firefox extension and using the search term 'click & clean' or 'hotcleaner'. Install this extension.
Lets take the example of chrome. Once click&clean is installed, you'll find a red icon with 'C' on the right side of your chrome address bar. (For firefox, it is a blue icon without a 'c'). click it and you get a popup window with 4 tabs. Among the tabs, select 'chrome' and click the 'options' tile.
In the options page, in the 'normal website' area, check mark everything except:
Clear Saved passwords
Delete cookies
Clear saved form data
These 3 should be unchecked.
Please note: this is only for the options in the 'normal website' area. the rest of the options in under any other headings, if shown, are to remain unchecked.
Then click the button 'run cleaner'.
After the cleaning is finished, close chrome.
Next, press winkey + r
in the run prompt, type: cmd (enter)
Command prompt opens up.
here, type the following 3 commands:
ipconfig /release (enter)
ipconfig /renew (enter)
ipconfig /flushdns (enter)
the first two will reset your IP and thus, will break any ongoing downloads or browsing sessions. Dont worry, you can reload/redownload your stuff. Else, dont run these commands until after you finish your downloads. These two commands basically affect those who have dynamic IP and has no effect if you have a static IP.
The 3rd command clears your DNS cache.
Next, download the latest version of flash player from Adobe and install it.
In case of chrome, there is an inbuilt flash player called 'pepper flash'. Based on adobe flash player, but it may not necessarily be the latest version you get from Adobe site. So, i prefer to use the flash player i get from the Adobe site.
If you are using chrome, then after you install Adobe flash, Chrome will have 2 flash player plugins, namely the default pepper flash as well as the latest adobe flash player. Both plugins by default are active simultaneously and may cause conflict. So, we disable one of them. To do this, open chrome.
Type in the address bar:
chrome://plugins
In the plughins page, expand the Flash Player plugin.
Here you will see both adobe flash and pepper flash. You can identify them from the
location information. The pepper flash version ends with the file name 'pepflashplayer.dll' while the adobe flash player you got from the Adobe site has a filename that is similar to 'npswf****.dll'. The **** may be some file version number or just the number '32' or it can be just npswf.
Disable pepper flash and any other flash player plugins. Enable only adobe flash player 'npswf' plugin. Close chrome.
A restart at this point is good, but not necessary.
Fire up chrome again and open your wartune page.
When you reach the '7Roads' loading screen, right click anywhere on this screen (not on the top bar that shows the times and event name, but on the load animation.).
you'll get 3 options:
Settings
Global settings
About adobe flash player
First, select 'Global settings' and you get a 'Flash player settings manager' popup. Here, in the storage tab, click 'Delete All'.
You'll now get a second popup. Here, check mark the 'Delete all audio and video license files' and then click delete data. This popup will now close automatically.
Now, close the Flash player settings manager window.
Right click anywhere in the wartunes screen (not on the top bar that shows the times and event name) and this time, select 'Settings'.
In the tiny popup that shows up, you'll find some tabs on the bottom. click the one with a folder icon. This specifies settings for local storage for the flash player.
Here, set the slider all the way to the right till you can see it says 'unlimited'.
Click close.
Thats it.
You can repeat the steps with ccleaner and click&clean to clean again when you feel that wartunes has gotten slower or it freezes. Also repeat the ipconfig commands and the adobe flash player 'global settings' and 'settings' step.
Defrag your OS and program files drive (usually C:\ ) and defrag it untill you cannot get any more improvement out of the defragmenter. This step increases the speed of reading things from your hard disk. You can repeat this step once a month or once in 2 weeks to keep your C: drive in top condition. Those with a SSD drive can skip this step.
Keep your graphics drivers updated. Infact, keep all your drivers updated. The latest version of most browsers and flash player can make good use of direct hardware acceleration, thereby increasing the graphics rendering performance.
Make sure that no other program is using your internet bandwidth when you are playing wartunes. This helps speed up loading. Some programs which can use your bandwidth in the background includes windows updates, other software updates, mail clients like outlook, download manager, torrent clients etc. Stop or close these programs.
For those with additional hardware, there are a few more things that can be done to get more performance.
1) If you have a spare secondary drive, you would benefit if you set the location of temporary files and program files to this second drive.
2) If you have 4 or more GB ram, then creating a ramdisk and installing a portable version of chrome or firefox into it will greatly improve chrome/firefox startup times. You will need to create a ramdisk with an associated image file to do this step. Ramdisk size upto 500MB is enough for your chrome and firefox.
Also, an additional ramdisk without any associated image file can be created and your temp folder location set to this ramdisk. Changing the temp folder location can be done from 'control panle/advanced settings/environment variables'. This improves performance vastly.
You can get the software 'Primo Ramdisk' for this. It is a paid software, but I think there is a time limited trial version. You may try it and then buy if you feel the performance increase is worth it. Any other ramdisk software can be used. Depends on your choice.
Please note: DO NOT DO THIS STEP UNLESS YOU HAVE 4+ GB RAM. INFACT, IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU FIRST STUDY YOUR SYSTEM'S WORKINGS AND FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH RAM YOUR SYSTEM USUALLY ACTUALLY MAKES USE OF (THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM HOW MUCH RAM YOU HAVE INSTALLED IN YOUR SYSTEM). THEN, EXCLUDING THIS AMOUNT FROM THE TOTAL INSTALLED RAM, IF YOU HAVE >= 1GB RAM STILL REMAINING, ONLY THEM GO FOR THIS STEP.
3) If you have upto 3GB RAM, use a 32 bit OS. But if you have 4 or more GB of RAM, please change your OS to a 64bit one as a 32bit OS cannot read/write to RAM above 4GB (the limit is actually a little lower than 4GB, i think), so the remaining RAM is wasted.
4) Set your pagefile to a fixed size, rather than a dynamic one. Around 2 or 2.5 GB seems enough in most cases unless you run programs that use up a lot of memory. Also, it is recomended to move your pagefile to a secondary harddisk or atleast another partition that your OS drive. This can be done from control panel/advanced settings/virtual memory
Thats all. I'll update or post any new steps that I can find. If anyone has any suggetions, please inform me, and I will update the post accordingly.
You can check your internet connection's speed and quality at: speedtest.net
Use both the speed as well as ping test to get a good indication of your connection.
Leaving these aside, what I want to mention here are some steps which can be taken to make your own side, your own system as best as possible to play wartune.
Let me make one thing clear:
This is not a professional guide that can work wonders. Wartune being a browser based game using a lot of server side scripts, there is not a lot that can be done to improve performance as such, as things depend on the wartune server. (Thanks to ancev to remind me of this.)
This guide thus, doesnt make wartune load blazing fast nor makes playing it a breeze.
This guide is purely for those who face black screens, freezes and lags even when the wartune server, the internet connection etc. all seem to be working fine. This guide deals with those problems or issues ON THE CLIENT SIDE that causes wartune to freeze and generally makes browsers slow down and causes web pages/browsers to freeze.
The first requirement is ofcourse the minimum hardware that can play wartunes at a decent level.
A dual core processor and 2+ GB of RAM, and a good graphics chipset will get the job done very well. We dont require the latest Nvidia's or AMD's to render wartunes. Your Intel's inbuilt graphics is good enough. Though it is better if your intel chipset has a dedicated memory for graphics and does not share from the system RAM.
Though we dont need 2GB RAM, I've mentioned 2+ considering that the OS (vista and above) themselves recommend atleast 2GB for the OS, thereby needing the '+' RAM for your apps.
Moving on to the software parts:
I use windows 8.1 pro and the instructions are based on a windows usage scenario.
you will have to adapt them to match linux/unix/mac os yourselves as i dont have them. Sorry.
You'll need to download CCleaner. Get it from filehippo.com or piriform.com
It is a free program that cleans your system of junk files.
Install it and run it. On the left side, select the cleaner tab.
You'll find 2 panels ion the right side. In the windows panel, check mark everything except:
IE: Autocomplete Form History
IE: Saved Passwords
Windows Explorer: Network Passwords
Advanced: Tray Notification Cache
Advanced: Wipe Free Space
The above mentioned ones must be unchecked.
Next, select the Applications tab.
There, you'll find google chrome and firefox if you have them installed.
In both, uncheck options that says something similar to
Form history or Autocomplete or Autofill
Passwords
Cookies
Then, click the 'Run Cleaner' Button. Wait for CCleaner to finish its job and then close it.
Please note: you will have to close your browser and other applications to let ccleaner perform properly. So, dont run ccleaner untill you are able to close all other applications.
For the browser, I recomend Google chrome or Mozilla firefox.
Go for the stable versions of these. Personally, I use the 'dev' version of chrome. But dev and nightly versions of chrome and firefox are somewhat untested and you may end up having strange problems. So unless you are confident of being able to solve any such problems, stick with their stable releases.
Avoid IE - not that I have any problem with IE, but sometimes, flash seems to do strange things on IE, So, better avoid IE. Safari is a good and fast browser, but I find that it takes up a lot of memory. I dont have much idea of Opera. Anyway, I found tht I got the best performance when using Google Chrome, followed by Mozzilla Firefox. No offence meant to fans of the various browsers, this is just my personal find, on my system. I use chrome and give 2nd preferece to firefox, and so the steps following assume that you use the same. If you use other browsers, you may need to skip browser specific steps or adapt them to match the browser of your choice.
In both chrome and firefox, you have to find and install an extension called click&clean by hotcleaner.com
For chrome, go to chrome webstore (Google search 'chrome webstore'), search for the term 'hotcleaner' and you will find the click&clean app by hotcleaner.com
Similarly you can do for firefox by searching for firefox extension and using the search term 'click & clean' or 'hotcleaner'. Install this extension.
Lets take the example of chrome. Once click&clean is installed, you'll find a red icon with 'C' on the right side of your chrome address bar. (For firefox, it is a blue icon without a 'c'). click it and you get a popup window with 4 tabs. Among the tabs, select 'chrome' and click the 'options' tile.
In the options page, in the 'normal website' area, check mark everything except:
Clear Saved passwords
Delete cookies
Clear saved form data
These 3 should be unchecked.
Please note: this is only for the options in the 'normal website' area. the rest of the options in under any other headings, if shown, are to remain unchecked.
Then click the button 'run cleaner'.
After the cleaning is finished, close chrome.
Next, press winkey + r
in the run prompt, type: cmd (enter)
Command prompt opens up.
here, type the following 3 commands:
ipconfig /release (enter)
ipconfig /renew (enter)
ipconfig /flushdns (enter)
the first two will reset your IP and thus, will break any ongoing downloads or browsing sessions. Dont worry, you can reload/redownload your stuff. Else, dont run these commands until after you finish your downloads. These two commands basically affect those who have dynamic IP and has no effect if you have a static IP.
The 3rd command clears your DNS cache.
Next, download the latest version of flash player from Adobe and install it.
In case of chrome, there is an inbuilt flash player called 'pepper flash'. Based on adobe flash player, but it may not necessarily be the latest version you get from Adobe site. So, i prefer to use the flash player i get from the Adobe site.
If you are using chrome, then after you install Adobe flash, Chrome will have 2 flash player plugins, namely the default pepper flash as well as the latest adobe flash player. Both plugins by default are active simultaneously and may cause conflict. So, we disable one of them. To do this, open chrome.
Type in the address bar:
chrome://plugins
In the plughins page, expand the Flash Player plugin.
Here you will see both adobe flash and pepper flash. You can identify them from the
location information. The pepper flash version ends with the file name 'pepflashplayer.dll' while the adobe flash player you got from the Adobe site has a filename that is similar to 'npswf****.dll'. The **** may be some file version number or just the number '32' or it can be just npswf.
Disable pepper flash and any other flash player plugins. Enable only adobe flash player 'npswf' plugin. Close chrome.
A restart at this point is good, but not necessary.
Fire up chrome again and open your wartune page.
When you reach the '7Roads' loading screen, right click anywhere on this screen (not on the top bar that shows the times and event name, but on the load animation.).
you'll get 3 options:
Settings
Global settings
About adobe flash player
First, select 'Global settings' and you get a 'Flash player settings manager' popup. Here, in the storage tab, click 'Delete All'.
You'll now get a second popup. Here, check mark the 'Delete all audio and video license files' and then click delete data. This popup will now close automatically.
Now, close the Flash player settings manager window.
Right click anywhere in the wartunes screen (not on the top bar that shows the times and event name) and this time, select 'Settings'.
In the tiny popup that shows up, you'll find some tabs on the bottom. click the one with a folder icon. This specifies settings for local storage for the flash player.
Here, set the slider all the way to the right till you can see it says 'unlimited'.
Click close.
Thats it.
You can repeat the steps with ccleaner and click&clean to clean again when you feel that wartunes has gotten slower or it freezes. Also repeat the ipconfig commands and the adobe flash player 'global settings' and 'settings' step.
Defrag your OS and program files drive (usually C:\ ) and defrag it untill you cannot get any more improvement out of the defragmenter. This step increases the speed of reading things from your hard disk. You can repeat this step once a month or once in 2 weeks to keep your C: drive in top condition. Those with a SSD drive can skip this step.
Keep your graphics drivers updated. Infact, keep all your drivers updated. The latest version of most browsers and flash player can make good use of direct hardware acceleration, thereby increasing the graphics rendering performance.
Make sure that no other program is using your internet bandwidth when you are playing wartunes. This helps speed up loading. Some programs which can use your bandwidth in the background includes windows updates, other software updates, mail clients like outlook, download manager, torrent clients etc. Stop or close these programs.
For those with additional hardware, there are a few more things that can be done to get more performance.
1) If you have a spare secondary drive, you would benefit if you set the location of temporary files and program files to this second drive.
2) If you have 4 or more GB ram, then creating a ramdisk and installing a portable version of chrome or firefox into it will greatly improve chrome/firefox startup times. You will need to create a ramdisk with an associated image file to do this step. Ramdisk size upto 500MB is enough for your chrome and firefox.
Also, an additional ramdisk without any associated image file can be created and your temp folder location set to this ramdisk. Changing the temp folder location can be done from 'control panle/advanced settings/environment variables'. This improves performance vastly.
You can get the software 'Primo Ramdisk' for this. It is a paid software, but I think there is a time limited trial version. You may try it and then buy if you feel the performance increase is worth it. Any other ramdisk software can be used. Depends on your choice.
Please note: DO NOT DO THIS STEP UNLESS YOU HAVE 4+ GB RAM. INFACT, IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU FIRST STUDY YOUR SYSTEM'S WORKINGS AND FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH RAM YOUR SYSTEM USUALLY ACTUALLY MAKES USE OF (THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM HOW MUCH RAM YOU HAVE INSTALLED IN YOUR SYSTEM). THEN, EXCLUDING THIS AMOUNT FROM THE TOTAL INSTALLED RAM, IF YOU HAVE >= 1GB RAM STILL REMAINING, ONLY THEM GO FOR THIS STEP.
3) If you have upto 3GB RAM, use a 32 bit OS. But if you have 4 or more GB of RAM, please change your OS to a 64bit one as a 32bit OS cannot read/write to RAM above 4GB (the limit is actually a little lower than 4GB, i think), so the remaining RAM is wasted.
4) Set your pagefile to a fixed size, rather than a dynamic one. Around 2 or 2.5 GB seems enough in most cases unless you run programs that use up a lot of memory. Also, it is recomended to move your pagefile to a secondary harddisk or atleast another partition that your OS drive. This can be done from control panel/advanced settings/virtual memory
Thats all. I'll update or post any new steps that I can find. If anyone has any suggetions, please inform me, and I will update the post accordingly.
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