Turn Calc Time
 

Hi all!

On my PC (400 Celeron w/ 160 Mb RAM) it takes upwards of 2-3 mins to calc the AIs turn! Anybody know of anyway to speed it up? Thanks!

-Hota

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

What else are you running at the same time or in the background? I play SE IV on a three-year-old Pentium II/233 with only 64M RAM, and most AIs take only a few seconds each for their turns.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

First, do you mean 2-3 minutes for ONE AI turn? Or for all of them? A few minutes for all of them is not surprising for a large game. How many ships and units do the AI races have? When they start to have hundreds of ships and thousands of units each it does add up to a lot of processing time.

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

It's late in the game with around 100 systems in the galaxy. It takes a few minutes for all of the cps to move. I have the number of ships allowed set to 200 and the only things running in the background are my virus software and nic. Are there any options to speed it up a bit? It gets kind of frustrating do move a fleet 1 space away from an enemy and then have to stare at the screen waiting for the battle to start!

-Hota

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

I routinely turn my antivirus shield off when I'm not Online, but if your system has an "always on" DSL connection, that wouldn't be a good idea for you to try. I'm not familiar with "nic".

------------------
Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

Hota,

My computer is similar to yours, and very late in a game it can easily take two or three minutes. Of course, at that stage it routinely takes me half an hour to run my turns. So that three minutes is a good time to grab a snack http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

LL
http://seiv.pbw.cc/

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

Unfortunately that's what I've been doing and I'm afraid if I try to finish my current game I'll put on 4 or 5 lbs :-)

-Hota

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Hota:
It's late in the game with around 100 systems in the galaxy. It takes a few minutes for all of the cps to move. I have the number of ships allowed set to 200 and the only things running in the background are my virus software and nic. Are there any options to speed it up a bit? It gets kind of frustrating do move a fleet 1 space away from an enemy and then have to stare at the screen waiting for the battle to start!

-Hota<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Now this sounds different from the AI turn. You are waiting for a MOVE to go through when you try to attack something? I'm not sure what could cause that. Badly fragmented disk? How many turns do you execute before saving and restarting the game? I think it's got some memory leaks that can fill up your system resources if you run hundreds of turns without a stop and reload. Does your disk run a lot when your turns execute?

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

See Monster AI

for a discussion of 9000 SECOND AI turns. I hope that I can suggest some easy changes to the engine based on my optimization and previous AI experience. If so then the changes should be in the next patch or two. In the meantime just focus on crushing any AI that gets big and let the small fry alone. Basically that is what you do anyway, isn't it ? I think when the hardcode was written he just assumed that no AI empire would EVER get that big, an unfair assumption that says the AI can NEVER WIN. I really hated the cheating in MOO2 by the AI, but at least on impossible setting the AI would whip my butt sometimes, especially the Saccra....

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>I think when the hardcode was written he just assumed that no AI empire would EVER get that big<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>I think the more likely assumption is that he thought no one in their right mind would mod the quadrant size limit above 100 systems. I've yet to finish a game in a "normal" large quad, and have trouble imagining that I'd want to bump that up to the 255 hard limit. Reading your reports of your Huge Game experiments almost frightens me sometimes.

------------------
Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

I'd love to try a 255 game with as many AIs as I can fit! Too bad my system can barely handle a medium game. Can anybody guess what the min specs would be for a huge (255) game with more than 15 AIs be? I'm guessing it would be somewhere close to top of the line (1.4Gz Athlon & 256 Mb RAM)

-Hota

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

I just get frustrated having it take 4-5 min to process the turn. Your right though, when there's something decent on the tube it's ok, but when there's commercials on every other channel I just find myself staring at the screen wishing it would hurry up.

-hota

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

One thing I found was that when I run SE4 without the CD in the drive, the ships moved very slowly on the screen. Now I just leave the CD and play music on the stereo, but it was weird.

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Hota:
I'd love to try a 255 game with as many AIs as I can fit! Too bad my system can barely handle a medium game. Can anybody guess what the min specs would be for a huge (255) game with more than 15 AIs be? I'm guessing it would be somewhere close to top of the line (1.4Gz Athlon & 256 Mb RAM)

-Hota<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Not at ALL, because Aaron is VERY miserly with his use of memory. See the turn 60 post in the archive from the game I was playing against 19 AI with no mods just 50 sphere worlds added using the map editor. I have an old 1998 machine with only 64 meg of memory and there was no problem at all except it took about ten minutes for the 19 AI to do their turn. What the heck is your machine that it has problems ? The speed has gone up by over a factor of 8 and the memory provided on a standard machine has gone up by a factor of 32 in the Last ten years! My suggestions to Aaron will require about a megabyte of memory, but there should be 8 times that of free memory on a 16 meg machine, which I had thought would be the smallest ANYBODY would be using in 2001......

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by capnq:

Quote:

I think when the hardcode was written he just assumed that no AI empire would EVER get that big<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>I think the more likely assumption is that he thought no one in their right mind would mod the quadrant size limit above 100 systems. I've yet to finish a game in a "normal" large quad, and have trouble imagining that I'd want to bump that up to the 255 hard limit. Reading your reports of your Huge Game experiments almost frightens me sometimes.

Before I started saving my empire I had played a half dozen games in 255 quadrants with over 500 colonies planted by hand in each. I then colonized over 900 planets by hand in each of two 255 quadrant games to get my racial score up. This second test game of the AI planting about 1000 colonies has pumped the Clays race score above 600,000 points. I guess it depends on how much time you are prepared to put into a single game. An unmodded 255 quadrant fully colonized by hand ending about turn 150 takes me 100-150 hours depending on how much difficulty the AI causes me after I blitz at turn 120....

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

I have a PII / 350 Mhz w/ 192 Mb RAM (my 'funtime' computer) that I play SE4 on and I always play 255 max / large galaxies and as many AI's as the settings will give me (usually at least 10 AI's plus neutrals). In late games, it can take 4-5 min processing the turns, but I usually take at least 20 min myself for my own turn - not a big deal to me, but may be to others. Hey folks, its crunching a LOT of numbers....

As a side note, I can load the same game turns (same mods etc) on my kid's homework computer (a Dell P166 / 64 Mb) and it only slows down a little (about 6-7 min per turn in late games).

Personally, I think our standards are sometimes too high - anyone remeber PONG and how slow that ball seemed to move across the 'court' (even in the faster settings)????

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

This is just a gripe in general, and it could be a source of the problem.
The Celeron processor doesnt have any L2 Cache, so it could be slowing things down. Im never buying any processor without one. But still, like I said it might not be causing a problem.

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by rdouglass:
Personally, I think our standards are sometimes too high - anyone remeber PONG and how slow that ball seemed to move across the 'court' (even in the faster settings)????<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hear, hear! We're playing the game for the strategizing and the socializing, not for speed and reflexes. I'll sacrifice the responsiveness for a game with a sense of strategy. Take the extra time to think about your next move, or your next message to another empire, or a trip to the bathroom (hey, you gotta pee).

Which isn't to say I wouldn't love it to be quicker. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Quikngruvn

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Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.
--from the RPG Paranoia, now my PBW mantra

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Quikngruvn:
Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Be careful or you may be used as reactor shielding!

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

The long AI turns may not be a processor problem; they may be OS related. I'm running Win 95 on a 233MHz Pentium w/ 64M RAM, and haven't had an AI (that's single AI) take more than a minute per turn. Of course, I usually play with 10-15 "major" AI players (and 3-5 neutrals), so that can lead to a 15 minute wait between each turn.

BTW - I've also run this on an NT 4.0 platform, unknown proc & 114 MB RAM (it's an older system that's using scavenged parts, hence the strange memory size). And, again, no single AI has taken more than a minute or two. Even after they've planted 100 colonies, etc. (I had a game where the lead AI players had scores around 3-5M; but a new patch came out, and I haven't been able to play a game that far since then).

Re: Turn Calc Time
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Alpha Kodiak:
Be careful or you may be used as reactor shielding!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

In one game, I practically am! Hence the new mantra.

Quikngruvn

------------------
Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.
--from the RPG Paranoia, now my PBW mantra