Speeding up battles

[Sand]

The only part of battles that is "too slow" is the "arcing" effects: arrows, shard spells, etc., each of which take 5 seconds or so. There's no question in my mind that this is an issue which should be improved on (someday, even if only for dom3). I have a fast (3.0 GHz, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 gig RAM) machine. It's clearly not an issue of calculation time, but a choice on the part of the developers.

Possible solutions:

-- hitting a key ends the volley and goes straight to the damage effect animation
-- a slider bar to set speed of volleys
-- a switch to eliminate the volley animations entirely
-- enhanced source and target indicators
-- a rewind / slider bar
-- a text log of effects in combat (like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, where you can go back and review each die roll and modifier)

I'm compiling a list of feature additions/changes I'd like to see, and this is a big one.

[Gandalf Parker]

PS: RE-windable combat "replay" isn't possible, as in fact it isn't a re-play, but a re-calculation. Saving all combat data or a video into a savegame is impossible for e-mail game. So essentially a combat is stored as initial random seed and troop setup.


The "jump to the end" and "replay" might be achievable by having the computer run thru the calculations without trying to display it. I dont know if that would be fast enough to be useable. It would probably have to be tested.

[ March 03, 2004, 17:04: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Arralen:
I'm running DOM2 on a P2/400 with 384 MB and W2kSp2, Ge2Ti card, detonator 41.09. Most times I have a mp3 player running too, but still missiles need only 3 sec to cross the whole battlefield from end to end. This is windowed at 1080x810 and low detail, normal filters. So if they take 10 on your 2 GHz machines, you're doing something wrong.

Heh, nice to see I'm not the only one to find 10s missile volleys 2-3x too slow. I run a 2.1GHz AMD, 512k RAM, GF4 4400. Dom windowed 1280x1024, at very high graphics detail, with a half-dozen or more apps, including Mozilla, Photoshop, and WinAMP in the background and arrows at most take 6s to reach their max range, usually only 3-4s for a hit at range ~25-30.

You're running it on a system that's only 100MHz faster than the minimum spec, and it blows rings around that P4 2.4 (that has 6x the speed and 20x the CPU power, nevermind the 2 full generations of GF video) ...

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
PS: RE-windable combat "replay" isn't possible, as in fact it isn't a re-play, but a re-calculation. Saving all combat data or a video into a savegame is impossible for e-mail game.

Good point, I keep forgetting about the MP aspects. Thanks.

[Sand]

It would be quite possible if you had to view at normal speed first, but could rewind to anything that you'd already seen (since it would have already been calculated locally). That alone would be a big help -- instead of having to repeatedly rewatch an entire battle for one key point, you could rewind over that one point.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's easy to program.

[Arryn]

That's a great idea, Sand! They could write a new "movie" file whenever a battle is first viewed once through (perhaps even running the first pass at a faster rate). One movie file could be created per each different battle viewed that turn. The movie files would be excluded from MP turn transmissions, and would be deleted by the game whenever you 'host' another turn (so they don't stack up on your drive).

[Gandalf Parker]

Oooohhhh and just think of the fun we can have if the movie files could be viewed outside the game! put up on web sites. made part of walk thrus and AARs. Be the starting basis of the Dominions Saturdy Morning Cartoon Show (different thread)

Im not being sarcastic. I really think it would be fun. Does anyone happen to know if there is a 3rd party program which can be used to record the battles to a playable file?

EDITED: I googled and yes such software exists. I will play with some and post what I find to a new topic. Maybe tomorrow

[ March 03, 2004, 17:59: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]