This page covers methods of making the Starcraft application run faster. Note that the speed can also depend on the computer's processing power.

• Run Full Screen
• Disable Sound
• Disable CPU Throttling
• Change Game Speed
• Disable the GUI

Run Full Screen

Do not run in windowed mode.

Windowed mode uses software rendering which takes significantly more CPU usage than the fullscreen hardware rendering.

Disable Sound

Open the BWAPI config file in bwapi-data/bwapi.ini and set sound to OFF .

Muting the sound and music is not the same as disabling the entire sound engine. If the sound is muted, the functions to play sounds are still called and the sounds are still processed at Starcraft's level. When the sound engine is disabled, these are skipped entirely.

Disable CPU Throttling

Disabling CPU Throttling will increase performance but will increase CPU usage.

When CPU throttling is enabled, Starcraft will sleep for 1 millisecond between each draw to the screen in order to reduce CPU usage, and thus slow the game down if we are to immediately execute the next game frame.

Change Game Speed

Typing /speed 0 in Starcraft will disable the delay between frames. You can perform the same action from an AI module by calling the function Game::setLocalSpeed(0).

Disable the GUI

Typing /nogui in Starcraft will toggle the display of graphics. Disabling the Graphical User Interface (GUI) will prevent Starcraft from calling its drawing routines and image processing functions. The same action can be performed from an AI module by calling the function Game::setGUI(false).

Using this option will cause the game to remain inside of the game loop instead of returning after every game frame.