SEIV , CPU Usage and SEV

Atrocities · #1 February 2nd, 2005, 02:24 AM

The Ai has to make its turn too you know.

If it takes us an hour to make our turn then why not the AI?

Fyron · #2 February 2nd, 2005, 03:26 AM

The AI could play its turns in the background while you are playing yours. This would greatly reduce the wait time after you hit "end turn" because a lot of the work would be done already.

Kamog · #3 February 2nd, 2005, 05:32 AM

That would be really good if that could be done. The shorter the wait between turns, the better it would be. A part of the reason I have only finished a couple of games ever is because the A.I. turns take so long that I get tired of waiting and so I start a new game.

Mephisto · #4 February 2nd, 2005, 11:04 AM

My experience is that the AI turn isn't the problem but the huge battles with hundreds of ships. If there are no battles the processing is quite quick.

geoschmo · #5 February 2nd, 2005, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Mephisto said:
My experience is that the AI turn isn't the problem but the huge battles with hundreds of ships. If there are no battles the processing is quite quick.

Another thing that I find causes problems a lot of times isn't even big battles, but lots and lots of little ones. A big battle with hundreds of ships might only take a couple minutes to process. But when you have an unarmed ship blockading an enemy planet sometimes it will run dozens of combats where nothing happens but the blockade ship running for the corner and hiding. Multiply that by several planets, multiply again if the blockade fleets have 6 ships instead of one hiding in the corner, pretty soon you have a turn with dozens of combats where nothing at all happens. If the game could do a little pre-combat analysis and decide that nothing is going to happen, it could save some time by not having to process all those combats.

geoschmo · #6 February 2nd, 2005, 11:26 AM

Quote:

Imperator Fyron said:
The AI could play its turns in the background while you are playing yours. This would greatly reduce the wait time after you hit "end turn" because a lot of the work would be done already.

We could do some tests to see how much of the host processing time is taken up by giving AI orders and how much is simply processing the orders for all empires. We could run some simultaneous turn games and then run the same turns but go through and control the AI players and give them orders.

EDIT: Ok, I did a little digging. I think the particular game Tesco is so frustrated about is the Return to Hell 2 game. That's one that he's been having to run offline every turn because it takes so long to process that PBW times out on it. In that game there are 9 players and no AI. Of course occasionally someone will miss their turn and the AI will have to play for them, but for the most part they all do their turns and it still takes a tremendous amount of time to process. So at least in this case the AI taking it's turns isn't a factor. It's all processing of player commands and running through the combats that's taking so much time.