Any suggestions for speeding up turn processing?

[Captain Kwok]

That said, we've see a number of improvements to the movement phase of AI turn processing, but I do think further optimization needs to be tune in running the AI combats at a higher speed.

[Raapys]

Seven minutes does sound completely unacceptable. With 5 AI players my turn processing takes about 10 seconds at turn 20 with no combats. I pushed forward a few turns until two of the AIs were involved in combats, and suddenly the processing time went up to 40 seconds at turn 24.

It's obvious that combat needs alot of optimization. Not sure how possible it actually is, though: to make it faster you most likely have to sacrifice some calculations, which in turn is going to affect the outcome of the battles.

[Uncle_Joe]

Hmm, what kind of a rig are you getting only 40 second turns with? 40 seconds would be completely acceptable IMO assuming combat were being resolved, but 7 minutes is truly unplayable.

And no, it cant be compared to Civ or GalCiv per se, but IMO there is something wrong with the game design if its going to resolve combats in such detail that it takes more time to process the turn than it does to take the turn!

[Raapys]

It's only a 3ghz P4 HT, so not much to brag about.

Perhaps it would be possible to make SE one of the games that could take advantage of dual CPUs, but I guess that's a long shot given we only got one programmer.

[Uncle_Joe]

It's only a 3ghz P4 HT, so not much to brag about.

Hmm, thats what I've got too. I have 1gb of RAM if that makes a difference. Graphics card shouldnt matter at all for this type of calculation since it isnt actually displaying the battles (I've got an ATI9600 if for some arcane reason it DOES matter).

This is what makes me think I have a different setting or something than others. I cant imagine anyone actually playing this game with the wait times I'm seeing.

Have you adjusted anything with combat in your Settings?

[Raapys]

It's basically the original Settings.txt file that follows with the Balance Mod.

I've made two changes. I've disabled combat replays, although that particular change hasn't made much of a difference, and just for fun I turned the "Main System Display Icon Move Speed Points Per Second Very High" setting up to 50000, but that didn't( unsurprisingly ) have any effect either.

I'm sort of wondering if modders could make a difference by making all ships move twice as fast( in combat only) and fire at double the rate: but this would only help if AI combat is limited to 8x time rate like human combats, which I'm unsure of.

[xierxior]

Raapys said:
It's only a 3ghz P4 HT, so not much to brag about.

Perhaps it would be possible to make SE one of the games that could take advantage of dual CPUs, but I guess that's a long shot given we only got one programmer.

actually, not its not its a 3ghz athlon 3800+ venice running at 3ghz on water without thermal thorttling which IS something to brag about.
see link http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...g?t=1170793296

[AAshbery76]

I like big epic games with 15 empires.The game is unplayable with these torrid turn times unless you have tiny games.I hope more work is done to speed the game.

[Suicide Junkie]

Well, combat does take a while. 2 minutes on my PC.

I suspect that the processing time is mostly independent of the number of ships involved.
Which seems to imply that it processes at a fixed timerate.