Slow Turns (yet again)

does saving the game, quiting, and reloading help at all?

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

50 turns eh? Do you know how extensive the AI empires are? Lots of ships? Lots of stuff to do?

From what I've read elsewhere on these boards, the AI is supposed to emulate how a player plays the game, so given that I'd imagine a decent player that heavily micromanages would take a fair bit of time on their turns at that point, its understandable that the AI would take a while too. The green bar, as I understand it, is to show the progress of the AI moving their ships, add to that the red bar for when they fight each other and 50 turns of development...

Plus, if restarting SEV only shaves off a couple seconds, I doubt it was the memory leak (which was largely fixed in 1.34 weren't it?), but if in doubt, load your task manager and see how the memory usage changes.

it could be combat... ships chasing ships around and never catching them before they retret, then chasing them again, rinse repeat. (aaron really needs to work the ship placement algorithem)

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

If you've got the time, and haven't tried it already, start a new game, but instead of limiting the number of ships and units to 200 and 2000, try 100/1000 or 50/500 and see if that makes a difference (it'll sure as hell make a difference to gameplay if you like to build multiple fleets of 20 or more ships ), as I think it is down to the AI having bucket loads of ships, but then I'm far from being an expert.

Do you happen to have any applications that run in the background, taking away from your CPU usage. I'm mainly thinking of antivirus programs (norton, mcafee, etc.). These programs tend to use way more cpu power than they should, and some settings in those programs like to scan files as they are read from the hard drive(extremely bad for video games). Basically if you were to disable most of your background applications, does the game run better?

Yup, that's the ticket.

Play smaller games, dude. I think a massive empire game by turn 50 should take 5 minutes per turn, but that's just me. It makes me really believe the AI is actually thinking about things and doing stuff, rather than just not even really existing until you meet them, like in some other games.

All that is done before the naked stars is remembered

Just to repeat what I said earlier, if its the green bar phase that takes ages to scroll across the page, it most definitely is due to the number of ships and units the AI has. Limiting them more severely that the defaults would be a step in the right direction if this is a major issue for you. Alternatively, it gives you cause to go beat the hell out of them even sooner

This takes me back to SEII with one AI, the pink one, had quite a few hundred ships, probably over a thousand ships. That locked my computer up so bad in turn processing. I was kinda sad when the turns started to speed up, it meant I'd nearly beaten the bugger... /nostalgia

In a perfect world the game needs configured to think while you think. As in the game plans its moves as you are making your moves, so when the turn runs it will either be done thinking or have less thinking to do. That would be perfect for Dual core machines if it could think while you did your turn. I have no clue how hard it would be to do that coding, but again i'm reffering to a perfect world.

Otherwise, the smarter and more challenging you want the AI to be. The more it must think and use CPU cycles.

I don't know why you are talking about a more "average home computer". If i've read your earlier post corectly a dual core FX-60 and 2 gigs of ram. That happens to be alot better than what is needed to play this game, and depending on your video card it sounds like a high-end system. Also your x64 version of windows (xp i'm assuming) is more stable than x32? I find that hard to believe because most drivers for vista are still beta's (even though they claim they are fully functional).

My system is a x32 xp pro, AMD64 3000+, 1gig of ram and x300SE graphics card. Now my system would be considered "average" and a low-end gaming system. I don't happen to have any problems (5 minutes is a problem) waiting between turns. My most recent game I played a large galaxy, high amounts of ai oponents and i play with the 200/2000 max sizes. Since I can play fine on this system (wait less than 2min/turn) there must be something about your system that has made the game slower. As someone has asked, where is the delay occuring? Is it with the green progress bar? The red progress bar? No progress bar yet?

If you are using windows xp, how many background apps are running? 40,50,60? Do you have anti-virus software or anti-spyware protection?

Bleh, tons of games like MOO 2 had AI that was wastly superior to this one, and used a few seconds on each turn.
Galciv 2 ...better AI, almost instant turns.
I could go on.

The error is that he's made the AI behave like a human, instead of making it just move units instantly and resolving ai vs ai battles with dicerolls and whatnot.

As such, the game is unplayable if you want really large scales, and you have to stick with pitiful amounts of ships, and wonder what a 'fleet' would be like.

He needs to make the AI more abstract in the way it controls it empire, and the results of AI vs AI combat, easier to interpret for the computer.

Thank you

Janster

btw, I have AMD 4400 X2 bells and whistles...

I find 2 mins waiting for turn = 30 turns an hour ..no fun whatsoever.

5 mins a turn = horrible truly horrible, and happens whenever I want a bigger fight.

small maps 2-3 AI max 200 ships ..I guess you can play at some speed, but seriously..what then is the point with large maps and tons of ships and BIG fleets?

Janster

Well have you ever tried running this game on a x32 system (if you have that version of xp to run). Since this is a 32 bit game, running this in x64 requires an 'emulator' for the software to run. This means for every cpu command that is executed, the emulator needs to take the command, interpret the command into 64 bit code, then execute the command, then convert back to 32 bit for the games software. Basically that means that a 32 bit application would run roughyl 1/4 the speed as if it were running in a 32 bit environment. Don't take my calculations as defacto computer processing, but that could be an explanation for ~4 times the length processing time (there are other things in emulation software that should hopefully streamline the process).

I've looked into using x64 many times, but there are several things in the computer market place that just don't make going to 64bit effective. Mainly older 16 bit installers won't run in 64bit xp.

Now the only part of your statement I don't agree with are firewall software. That is probably your best defense against many viruses/spyware. I would actually recommend a hardware firewall (router) for that protection, but it doesn't really matter. Anti-virus software is basically useless bloatware that doesn't help very much.

When's the last time you reinstalled your os?

That must be something with your machine , My computer is an old Pentium 3 (not even that since the processor is a Via samuel 2) with clock speed at 666 mgz, my video cars ia pci Ati Radeon 9200 at 128 megs and 768 megs of ram , kaspersky 6.0 and kerio 2.1.5 in the background ,after 81 turns and including myself the more it takes to complete a turn is 1 minute and a half or 2

Maybe if u run a memory booster it would solve your problem , Give it a try

Good Luck

Couldn't agree with you more. Eevery patch release I starta new game. Already toned down the number of starting AI's to 9. It's no use, because after a while the turns take indeed more than 5 minutes to complete. This and the weak AI's make me go back to SE IV after all

So how many AI players in your game?

The turn length is not related to AI difficulty level as the actual script execution is quick. However, since most of the turn time is movement or combat, increasing the bonus level increases the number of ships and usually battles for an AI, which does increase the turn time.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Hum, well this increases the need for the AI to make combat AI vs AI much more simplified.

We don't need hi-tech solutions of ai combat, it doesn't make any impact on our game.

As for movement of ships, he should move all ships everywhere in less than a second honestly, don't make the AI suffer from having to trace lines, just take x movement and where it will end up.

Janster

There is a lot of instances where following the movement path is important. Mine fields, warp points, attack seek orders in simultaneous, obstacles revealed by sensors etc. So you can't really skip over it.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

AI game actions are just a series of calculations. Out of sight of human players, there's not a reason in the world why those calculations should not be executed at the greatest possible speed. Slowing the execution of those calculations down a billion times neither increases nor lessens the margin of error. It just slows down the execution.

There's no reason to slow down stuff happening out of sight of the players. An AI doesn't rely on sight to orient itself. If you're correct Kwok - and I have this nagging suspicion you might be - then this needs to be addressed before anything else. Right now.

If MM actually did this on purpose, then of course it's not a bug. Whether MM is, however, most likely has an altogether different answer.

A 5 minute wait for a sandbox game, is pointless. Sandbox games are meant to be playgrounds where AIs and other game components, don't get in the way.

I'd suggest the second most important thing, is to enable the AI to crawl out of the sandbox. But it absolutely takes a backseat to the 5 min cig break that is the end-turn button. There's even some logic to this; while we wait for the AI to become.. Well, an AI.. We can explore the features of the game at a leisurely pace. So when we - some day, in a galaxy far, far away - do get an AI, we'll be ready with brilliant strategies and not get continually wasted by it, because we're still trying to learn which thing does what.

Of course, with 5 minute waits, exploring a sandbox game isn't very tempting... And with no AI on the horizon, there's no incentive to do it anyway.

It's rather tempting, however, to send MM a copy of Dominions II. Not because I never want a playable SEV, but to show that it really is possible to make this kind of game for one dedicated programmer, without deliberately designing it to be unplayable.

It is just calculations - but for each hex moved it has to recalculate the path and adjust accordingly for each ship/fleet - which is the time consuming part. It's not being artificially slowed down or anything like that.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Oh, OK. I misunderstood you.

So how does it work exactly? And is there any way to speed up the process?

I get the impression from your post that the AI moves a piece 1 hex, re-evaluates what it's doing, moves another hex, and so on. If that's the case, perhaps it would be an idea to just have the AI plan what it's going to do, and only re-evaluate it's decision if or when certain conditions are met.

I don't know how it was done in IV, and I know the switch from squates to hexes, and the addition of things like sensors must make for some differences, but still... Perhaps it's worth considering if the old mechanics can be re-invented?

With SE:IV, all objects were visible in a system so it was easy to plot a course and just follow it. In SE:V, it's probably the same calculations as SE:IV but they have to be updated each move to account for new sensor info. Not sure how that could be sped up without knowing the actual routine.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Hmm. What happens with simultaneous turn resolution then? I'm tempted to fire up a game and have a go at it, but fearing disappointment... Does it work like Dominions? Or does the AI get some sort of break to repeatedly change it's mind about what it's doing?

it works exactly the same way as it does for players in similtanious turns.
everyone gives the orders, then it processes the orders.
I'd be curious to know which ends up being faster though.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

I just stopped playing a game with 6 enemy empires on a large map. I agree. It's totally unplayable.

Even if that simultaneous mode was faster( which I don't think it is, but at least it's more fair to the players than sequential turns ), it would be held back by another problem; each time you press end-turn in a Simultaneous game in SEV the game saves your current game session, closes it and the data files, reloads it and all the data files, processes the current turn, closes the game session and the data files, and finally reloads the processesed save game, the data files and the bitmaps so you can play again.

Sort of unoptimized. At the start of the game all that reloading takes far longer than the actual turn processing.

Another fundamental thing we tend to forget is to defrag frequently. I didn't clock it, but my first defrag after I started playing quite a bit cut things down by a lot, probably 1/3. I play on a P-III dinosaur and autosave every turn.

I don't mind minimizing and getting in a few rounds of free cell. I'm an old table-top wargamer, and even 15 min. turn processing doesn't upset me. Beats doing it by hand! But for the sake of popularity I suppose this issue's somewhat important.

I wish just once all us old-timers could get into the same game at the same time so there'd be enough of us to ignore the new generation and their graphics & speed obscessions.

Now I could be mistaken, but I think the moddability is one reason this game's so slow. Much of the game is written in a form which must be interpreted as it is processed. Other games have these things compiled and the interpretations's already been done, right? If any of you've ever run programs under an interpreter, you know how much slower they are.

I kinda doubt that the slow turn speed is due to the modability of this game. Basically all of the script files that you are refering to are compiled. This means that there is no interpreter time used to compile the script as you go along. Not to mention that the turn time of other modable games is far quicker, for example CivIV is very modder friendly. There is even the use of Python (which is a pure scripting language) in the coding, and IMHO the turn times of that game are very fast compared to the amount of things done.

On a side note, though I'm likely as old or older than you, and happen to be an avid tabletop gamer, I couldn't possibly disagree more with your general observations.

SEV's looks are as attractive as something hot & steaming that sounds like a bell. If the 3D was to please the eye candy crowd, it was a pathetic attempt. Thus my guess is that it was a completely successful attempt to clean up the cluttered starmap of SEIV. IV may have been prettier, but less clutter's more functional - a gameplay improvement.

3D may result in loss of frames per seconds, if it's too heavy for your hardware, but it has no impact in AI performance. One uses your computers graphical capabilities (VRAM, GPU) the other uses your raw processing power (CPU).

Some of the reasons why slow turn resolution is an issue, are the lack of transparency of empire management. You can either keep a log, or sit glued to the screen. Otherwise you'll lose track of everything you're doing, and regaining perspective is far more time consuming than any amount of moving around pieces on a table.
Keeping a log is probably a great idea in a multiplayer game, but personally I would've become a trucker or a captain if I wanted to do that sort of thing.
Some more, are that unlike your mates, the AI won't get a couple of beers, won't discuss tactics, babies, the weather and whatnot, and in general; won't do anything at all. That means the waiting's gaming oblivion. Nothing happens. And if you engage in any sort of activity outside the game, you've just added 30+ minutes to your next turn - all of which will be spend covering old ground.

Finally, I don't see what the fuss is about. SEV is presumably meant to be played. So let's. Don't just keep us waiting for it, let's play the damn thing. Staring at a wall don't hold that tantalizing prospect of perhaps, one day, if I'm lucky, getting to colonize space. But right now, that promise is the only difference between SEV and watching paint dry.