OK, first, the last stable release 2.2.1 is over a year old as the upcoming 2.3 is taking a lot longer than expected, although 2.3 has so many new features and changes its almost a whole different game.
Ooh, ouch. Does it finally have Psionics? *drool*
Third, to change how the game runs at the command line you don't use a slash followed by "low" or "normal" or anything
Oh, I was talking about putting this sort of syntax in a shortcut:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c start "UFO" /low "C:\Program Files\UFOAI-2.2.1\ufo.exe"
Is that wrong? In my experience doing it this way works on most everything (like every other game I currently have, for instance), except some Microsoft programs which, as is typical, think they know better. Well, and your game.
...OK. Try this:
ufo -set sys_priority 0
Hopefully that should work for 2.2.1.
That worked! Thank you. I mean it kind of worked, it's weird. It made the game hog much less CPU and allow alt-tabbing with ease - however, it still shows up as High in the task manager's process listing. Confusing!
Edit: If you plan on running other apps at the same time, you can also play with "sys_affinity" on a multi-core machine and make the game use only one specific core instead of all available ones.
Single-core here!
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Thanks again for your reply and for taking the time to check this out. I appreciate helping me out; but I am also glad to hear you say this:
Second, I remember in the SVN logs that at some point during the development of 2.3 (after 2.2.1 came out), the code was updated to make the game run at normal priority by default - I think - Its really been a while so I could be remembering wrong.
I certainly hope this is true and I encourage you guys to make it so if it's not. I posted about this in the first place only in small part due to wanting a solution for myself right now - but in a large part as feedback for the future. I strongly believe that non-critical programs should not behave this way.
I might end up trying out 2.3 - if I can figure out how the hell to download it, the link on the page isn't doing much for me...