What costs the most CPU time?

I've been developing this on a 2.4GHz Celeron D with 256MB of SDRAM. I can develop with some patience, but when it comes to playing the main map in Act II, it looks like old computers will get overloaded. For reference, since we all know Celerons suck, I've also been working (from my parents house) on a 1.4GHz Pentium4, and wow, it's actually faster on the Pentium IV, even though it's 3 years older. I've noticed this with other Warcraft maps as well. The 1.4GHz P4 still cannot run the main map smoothly, however.

1.) I'm wondering what the most significant factors are that could affect performance. The ones I'd guess are the biggest are:
- Map size (even though I have very few triggers the map seems to have gotten extremely hard for a low-end CPU to handle at 256 x 256)
- Number of doodads
- Number of units of the screen
- Anitarf and iNfraNe's cinematic system (it seems like it may be doing a lot of stuff every 0.01 seconds... does that significantly tax performance when it comes to playable maps?

Now, I have tried this on a dual-processor 3.4GHz Xeon with 1MB chip cache a 2GB of RAM, and I'll soon be taking a lab box of mine (dual-processor, 3.06GHz Xeon, 1MB chip cache, 2GB RAM) home with me. On those machines, this thing runs smooth as can be. No problem. But, I do want to be mindful of people who may have more modest resources.

What makes a map run slow?

Well like any game the graphics ability of it rendering so many units is a big factor in performance. But another factor people seem to overlook is the triggering not just memory leaks but just the simple fact that if you got 100's of triggers and having them constantly going on and off well thats just going go blog down your computer big time.

yea I have a Celeron processor they where orignly used in laptops as a low power consumtion chip but acourse they got the idea here lets just put them in desktops!. But that usly dosen't slow my comp down do to a decent graphics card that gives the game a extra 64MB of ram to use.

I also seen people complain about how it slows down there comp big time but then you relize they happen to have msn,X-fire,Limewire and all those hidden stuff that they have on they forget about.

Yeah, many times its background programs (AIM, msn, limewire, antivirus software, the internet (like open windows). If you want a general idea, pres Ctrl, alt, del then switch to the processes tab. It shows EVERYTHING running on your computer and how much memory its taking up. Some things can't (or shouldn't) be closed, so dont mess around with it. But for example, I have 2 firefox tabs. It current;y takes up about 58,000 kbs of memory. AIM takes up 40,000kb. People don't realise how much background processes can tear a computer apart, so they end up spending the money on more and more memory when in reality all they need to do is play the game with nothing else running.

And obviusly, overall stress from the game (triggers, units, mem. leaks) produce the same results. On average, Wc3 takes up about 40k kb for me. However, I played one game with lots of triggers and it shot up to about 130k kb. Games like Hero Line Wars can do that, since triggers are being used almost every fricken second. Especially when mass spawn happens.

If you are only going to talk about processor then:
- Pathing
- cinematic system is likelly to cause issues because of calculations and stuff, on an old processor it can get messy, should you increase the timer to 0.04 seconds?

Number of units in screen is far from being an issue with the processor but the graphics card.

A lot of units in the whole map, being issued orders thus having to do pathing calculations would fry an old processor. And any trigger with 0.01 seconds is likelly to cause issues as well.

If RAM is inferior memory leaks are the cause, it also sometimes seems that the game slowdowns when there are a lot of handles and not really from a memory issue but a handle quantity issue that slowdowns the engine, this was not demonstrated though and remains as a rumor.

As far as the cinematic system goes, the periods of the periodic triggers can be calibrated to better suit your purposes. The camera and particle engines can both easily run on a 0.02 second period; 50 frames per second is still reasonably smooth. The script system might even run good enough on a 0.1 second period, depending on how much accuracy your cinematic requires. Upgrading to version 1.4 of the system should also considerably increase preformance, as should using a map optimizer.

i cant really answer this question exactly as i havent played warcraft 3 since well a few years ago when i had my old pc which was: Pentium 4 @ 2.4Ghz, Asus P4P800 Deluxe, 1.5Gb RAM DDR400 Corsair/Kingston, I think its got a LeadTek Winfast 128MB GFX Card

Well lets just say i have never seen anything load so slowly, it has the qualities so low my new pc would have loaded even the heftiest map in a split second.

The Best solution to lag is a new PC im sure most of you are older than me with a job (im 15 making AU$8.70 an hour) so im sure you can buy a decent pc with some hard work i hated it but it was worth it

Units and Doodads (even the hidden ones like pathing blockers). I looked through your campaign quickly in WE and I noticed some lag when trying to edit stuff. I would recommend cutting down the number of units on the map at any one time. You can still keep all your spawns, just make a little system to help solve it.

Make "sectors" that when a unit is not near a section of spawns, it turns off the spawning and removes any current units. When a unit gets closer, spawn your required units, so the player doesn't know that anything happened.

For Doodads, just lay off of them. Especially all the little ones. If you want to make your maps beautiful, make them smaller. That way WarCraft III doesn't have to load as much at once.

For the cinematic system, try change to 0.03-0.04, thats around 30 fps. The human eye only sees around 28 (movies player at 32). No need to have the computer do extra calculations that will never be seen.

memory re allocation will use 100% CPU and freeze game soo most hard is creating objects or removing it

As long as the unit is already loaded into memory, it should be fine.