On the cusp...

[Gandalf Parker]

Background processing would be difficult for a game that is built on PbEM. Turn processing is often done on a different machine than the person is playing on.

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[Foodstamp]

curtadams said:
An interesting idea for SP would be to have the computer pre-compute the turns with background threads. First plan the AI turns. Then, once that's done, calculate all the battles as the player sets them up. Because the turn calc time is small compared to the playing time it should be pretty easy to stuff most of the work into the background from a time viewpoint (the programming, admittedly, isn't so easy).

Actually this is not a bad idea. It is usually not a good idea to put something like the AI in a seperate thread, but in a TBS it should work fine. I am not sure how cpu intensive playing the background music is, but I think it would be a good candidate to receive it's own thread as well since it only changes during combat it seems..

Using a method like you describe, all that would have to processed between turns is the battles. You could even process most of the battles before the end of the turn as well, and reprocess the battles that include the human player/players during the space between turns.

[Lasu]

curtadams said:
An interesting idea for SP would be to have the computer pre-compute the turns with background threads. First plan the AI turns. Then, once that's done, calculate all the battles as the player sets them up. Because the turn calc time is small compared to the playing time it should be pretty easy to stuff most of the work into the background from a time viewpoint (the programming, admittedly, isn't so easy).

Now there's an excellent idea (though it indeed might be a bit hard to program). As for the PbEM issues, perhaps it could be done the old way in PbEM games (since the turns last so long anyway)? Of course, if the majority of people play PbEM, it might not be worthwhile to spend too much time on this matter (though I doubt that is the case )

[Sindai]

Gandalf Parker said:
Background processing would be difficult for a game that is built on PbEM. Turn processing is often done on a different machine than the person is playing on.

Well, it's not an issue in MP in the first place. He was proposing the change specifically for SP.

But I bet it wouldn't help very much in SP anyway. GalCiv 1 and 2 are suited for background processing because most of the work is in the AI and it's igo-yougo, so it can "think" during the player's turn. Dom3 is wego and most of the turn processing seems to be spent in battles, which can't be calculated until you know whether or not the player's orders will disrupt or change them in some way, so it's very ill-suited to background processing.

[thejeff]

Not so much that the majority of games are multiplayer, but that the majority of the developer's interest is.

This would require a very different model for turn processing and probably use up a lot of memory, since so many things would have to be done conditionally.

About the only thing that could be done ahead of time is planning the AI orders. Once mages start casting spells, pretty much anything may change based on the results of ritual attack spells, new globals etc. Everything preprocessed would have to be held in memory waiting it's turn to actually happen. I doubt you'd get much time savings in any moderately complicated game, which is where you'd want it.
Nor would it be a simple programming task.

[PhilD]

curtadams said:
An interesting idea for SP would be to have the computer pre-compute the turns with background threads. First plan the AI turns. Then, once that's done, calculate all the battles as the player sets them up. Because the turn calc time is small compared to the playing time it should be pretty easy to stuff most of the work into the background from a time viewpoint (the programming, admittedly, isn't so easy).

Yeah, I think making this kind of change would be a major reworking of the code - and from what I've understood, the skills in the mammoth "Illwinter development team" may not be that specialized in multithreading an AI (time to get Brad Wardell on the team )

[curtadams]

A couple of comments -

Yes, I know the programming is complex. A plan - which doesn't require changing the basic model - is for "turn end" procressing to go in the background. The catch would be allowing changes to turn orders - the background process would have to figure out what to back out and redo for each change. Because of "wego" AI choices could be precomputed as is but that seems a relatively trivial amount of time. A crude start would be to precompute and cache each possible battle and redo if anything would change the battle setup. When the background thread finishes, it jumps back to the beginning and reruns the whole turn (if the player has changed anything), consulting its cache of prerun battles. In the most complicated games I suspect there's a lot of AI-AI interaction which would not be affected by most player action - so the turn processing would shorten dramatically. If the player's last action is to pitch a global, oh well, that turn may last a while.

Obviously the change is only relevant and possible for SP.

[Lasu]

Exactly.

[Taqwus]

Er, "every possible battle" would be insanely numerous.

Think about 800 units neighboring 800 units. *Any combination* of those 1600 units could be involved... AND summons and fliers, AND the gems could be changed, AND commanders may or may not have been killed through earlier spells...

[Gandalf Parker]

I think that background processing is fantastic. Many games use it. But I dont think it will work here. Personally I feel it would be moving in the wrong direction.

In a way, we are background processing. The game allows you to do your turns and send them to a server. The server processes everyones turns and sends them back. This allows for larger maps, larger armies, more nations, more events. I would rather see it move farther in that direction. Make MORE use of basically unlimited processing time. Id be fine even it took turn processing up to an hour or more.

And thats with me bing a solo player. I easily play Dom games where doing one turn a day is fine with me. Taking months to finish a game is fine with me. It allows me to do other things and makes dominions the game that lasts forever on my machine. Changing it into something that plays faster might be ok but its not anything I will push too hard for.