More Awesome Than You!

This has been happening with sims 2 since BV BUT doesn't occur with any cutscenes except the stupid EA cutscene at the begining.

This is more about it happening with other games.

SimCity Societies (God awful game) lag during the EA cutscene and also doing the main cutscene before the main screen. The game runs perfectly fine while playing. Empire Earth III does the same thing, but takes it to a whole new level. The whole game is full of cutscenes, making it a virtually impossibly to play; I have never gotten past the into to the first part of world domination before the game just stops working.

I know for sure that it isn't a video card issue. I've switched three different cards and the same thing happens. I'm a little stumped on that could be causing this.

PC specs? I know Command & Conquer 3 had problems on Pentium 4 machines with hyperthreading enabled but it works fine on dual core processors. Most of the EA games use the VP6 codec for video (which is what C&C3 has), The Sims 2 is the only one that doesn't I believe.

You can completely skip the Sims 2 introduction cutscene using Escape.

Well of course you can skip sims 2 cutscenes, but the problem is this is happening with other games that have cutscenes in game that lag to pieces and end up crashing the entire game in the process.

Seems all of them are using a .bik format, also known as bink format. I got the codec for bink, but it didn't appear to help. When I play the cutscenes outside of the game; they run perfectly fine. I think the game company did a complete fubar.

What worries me is EA is starting to use this format. More people will start experiencing this.

Black and white 2 does the same thing to me on this computer. I just figured that it didn't make the cut. I have no idea what I'm looking at when it comes to hardware, software I'm okay with, so long as I have access to google.

Have you tried shutting down non-vital User background tasks?

Gentle word in your shell-like ear:  I believe Morriganrant has been playing for yea these many years and is eminently aware of the basics, as she has provided assistance to many on the boards here, myself included.  She is unlikely to have ignored the completely bleeding obvious.

I turned off anything under "system" that I could get away with, and everything in admin except for the game. I always do when I play a game that I know I would get better performance out of if I did. Sims2 and Everquest2 are in this. As for Black and White 2, the stutter is so bad that it is not playable, I can't even get past the opening scenes to discover whether it is like that though out the game. I blame those weird little floating guys.

Skip the cutscene? I delete it so that it doesn't play at all. I dunno if you can do that for other games though.

You need to use the Any key, actually.

Or just delete the file and you don't have to worry about it at all. I can't do that with B&W2 though.