What can I do to increase the simulation speed of the game?

[Andreas Raht]

Compared with most other text based baseball simulation games including OOTP 6.5, OOTPBB 2006 simulates games very fast. Of course it might be slower than other games if you activate each available option, set stats level to "Very high" and select a big number of leagues. If you compare the speed of the different games, please keep in mind to use the same settings and parameters!

There are some easy ways to make OOTP simulate faster:

- Big leagues -> many teams, players and stats -> lot of RAM needed. If you're using a computer with Windows 2000 or XP, running a lot of background programs, and having only 512 MB of RAM, then OOTP will be much slower as with 1 GB of RAM. If the league is too big for the RAM, Windows will start to use "virtual memory" which means it will use the harddisk drive as memory. But drives are MUCH slower than RAM, so that's not the best solution. Try to give the game more RAM. A background picture on your desktop in hi-color and hi-resolution might use a lot of RAM for example.

- Do not disable the virus scanner. At least not completely - but try to disable the virus scanner for the /data/saved_games folder in your OOTP program directory! That will make OOTP much faster. For example Norton AntiVirus has an option in the AutoProtect settings to exclude directories from being protected by the software. If you add the complete path to your /data/saved_games folder to that list, the files in this folder will not be checked for viruses. You can still check the complete folder manually from time to time of course.

- Disable the MS Index Service for the /data/saved_games folder in your OOTP program directory. That's very important if you want to increase the simulation speed. If you have the Index Service enabled, it will add all the news files, game logs, box scores and so on to the MS Windows full text database. That does not make much sense. But it costs a lot of CPU power and simulation speed. How to disable the Index Service for the folders depends on the Windows version which you're using. Locate the /data/saved_games folder using "My Computer", then right click on the saved_games folder, and click on "Properties". Then deactivate "Create index for faster full text search" in the "Advanced Settings" for this folder and all the sub folders and files inside the folder.