The Nation Overview and Related Problems

[Edi]

Hello everyone. There has been occasional mention of the nation overview (F1) acting up, not displaying properly, cutting short and other such annoyances. The problem is most pronounced on large maps. However, I have discovered it is not exclusive to the humongous ones (like Faerun).

The reason for all of these problems, in case it hasn't been pointed out before, is- *drum roll* -magic site display. The Nation Overview display also shows which province has what magic sites, and this is why it gets screwed up. Apparently the F1 display fetches each magic site as a separate object or something similar and embeds them in the display, and when there are a lot of sites, it clogs up all resources and then suffocates.

I and my friend have found (in the course of updating Sunray's Magic Site DB, our current project) that there is a limit of roughly 640 to 680 sites that can be displayed in the Nation Overview simultaneously before it keels over. The Overview also lets you see the magic site name by mouse-over, but this feature dies much earlier, at ~300 sites.

This is completely reproducable, Kaljamaha's Sitefinder test map (not publicly available) has 222 provinces, 220 of which are for site testing and two for national capitals, and the overview shows all provinces just fine when nothing has been discovered (so only autofound sites like Great Iron Mine are displayed), but when a lv 4 search is run (not even necessary, with #features 100, a lv 1 search is sufficient), the NO display becomes worse than useless and s-l-o-w.

It would be nice if something could be done about this problem in a patch, or at least that it would be fixed for Dominions 3.

Edi

[Zooko]

On a similar subject, if I have lots (say, around 50 I think) squads in my army, the military display "t" becomes very slow.

[Edi]

Zooko, that's something that probably can't be helped, because each unit is a separate object and needs to be loaded. The sites in the nation overview are a different matter. Besides, 50 squads?! How the hell is that even feasible? I never use more than 10 or 12 squads myself, it gets too crowded otherwise.

I just had an idea that could possibly solve the NO problem easily: If the NO display were to be divided into pages with 50 provinces per page, it would have no trouble loading everything, and some keys could be designated the next and previous page keys (or just use the number keys while in the NO display).

Edi