On the cusp...

[NTJedi]

kimmitt said:
Yeah, my tone was a bit grumpy; I was disappointed by the demo for Dom3.

I agree that the map generation is probably not a big deal; it just shocked me with the 3 minutes it took to do so. But the turn processing time means that I just can't justify buying the game to myself. I spent more time watching turns process than playing them, and this on the first few turns of a 5-person game in the demo.

My machine's a 2 GHz with 768 MB of RAM; my graphics aren't the best, but my problem isn't with graphics processing.

Well it sounds like there's something wrong with your system. The first few turns on a very similar system my brother owns typically takes about a dozen seconds to process the early game stage turns and this is with 500+ provinces and 10+ AI opponents.
The more complex a game becomes the longer it will take to process a turn within a TBS game. Honestly the issue is definitely your system running the game slow.

kimmitt said:
Anyways, I played the heck out of Dom2 and probably will continue to do so. I'm even enamoured of the "no save" aspect. I just can't justify shelling out for (or recommending to friends) a game that I won't end up playing due to the fact that I won't want to wait for turns to process. I figure Ilwinter deserves to know that.

Dominions_3 is vastly more complex than 99% of the TBS games which currently exist. I suggest you try fixing your system since that's the main issue. I figure you deserve to know that.

[curtadams]

Taqwus said:
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...

Every possible battle that gets set up that turn by the AI orders and the current state of the player's orders. No, not the factorial abstract possibilities.

[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:

Well it sounds like there's something wrong with your system. The first few turns on a very similar system my brother owns typically takes about a dozen seconds to process the early game stage turns and this is with 500+ provinces and 10+ AI opponents.

Which again leads me to suspect that Illwinter needs to look at filtering how often they update the graphics during turn processing. The graphics queue can wind up taking more time (and CPU time) than the actual processing - I looked at something by a professional colleague of mine (he'd been doing graphics programming for 15+ years, X-Windows for 5+), and in less than half a day (counting debugging & profiling) had the program doing in 30 seconds what used to take 15-25 minutes. All because of the way he implemented a visual progress bar.

On my machine (64-bit Athlon, 3500+ Mhz, 2 gigs ram), turn 2 for a 6 player game with 45 provinces takes two seconds. A turn for year 5 of another game takes 32 seconds. I'm guessing that my Radeon 800GT video card is slowing things down a bit, but not nearly as much as a slower card (possibly with worse OpenGL drivers) would do.

IMO, 2 seconds to process turn 2 with 5 normal AIs and 45 provinces is excessive. Not that I can't live with 2 seconds - it's the way the turns keep taking longer and longer, and _either_ it's the graphical status chewing up the time, or (my favorite gripe/peeve) calculating the age on each troop (including independent troops) and its fleas is.

Similarly, getting to view battles takes way too long now - 7 seconds for the black screen to go away, province fades in, fades to battlefield, etc. Since there doesn't seem to be any way to skip the graphical fade in, that's 7 seconds wasted _every_ battle, or worse - multiple viewings of the same battle waste 7 seconds every viewing.

And since you can't pause the battle until _after_ that fade-in is complete, even trying to watch a scout scripted to retreat to spy out indy strength can take 2 or 3 viewings. *mutter*

[kimmitt]

Cainehill's got it on both issues; I cranked down my graphics settings, and turn processing massively improved. They shouldn't be related. My understanding is that this is the sort of thing which is commonly fixed in patches; optimization issues often don't come out in playtesting.

Certainly, Civ4 was unplayable on most machines before its patches. I'm hoping Dom3 follows the same pattern -- slow on release, followed by patches which take advantage of player notation of bottlenecks.

[Daynarr]

Ok, so if high graphical setting caused slow turn process time then it needs to be reported in bug forum. It may not be noticed in this thread by devs.

[Daynarr]

Cainehill said:
Similarly, getting to view battles takes way too long now - 7 seconds for the black screen to go away, province fades in, fades to battlefield, etc. Since there doesn't seem to be any way to skip the graphical fade in, that's 7 seconds wasted _every_ battle, or worse - multiple viewings of the same battle waste 7 seconds every viewing.

Press ESCAPE to skip fade in.

[Graeme Dice]

Cainehill said:
Since there doesn't seem to be any way to skip the graphical fade in, that's 7 seconds wasted _every_ battle, or worse - multiple viewings of the same battle waste 7 seconds every viewing.

You can press escape while it's fading in.

[Gandalf Parker]

Its also in the options?
At least its in the switches. I have music, fades, animated backgrounds all turned off on the icon that I click to go into Dom3. And on the special icons I have to take me directly into blitz games I also include switches for no sound effects and fast graphics.

Here is part of the switches list....

-w --window Run Dominions 3 in a window
-u --fullscreen Use the entire screen
--bitplanes X Try to use a color depth of X bits per pixel
--zbuffer X Try to use a depth buffer of X bits per pixel (default=16)
-T --textonly Use this with --tcpserver to get graphicless server
--gamma X Set gamma function (brightness) 0.1 - 5.0 (default=1.0)
--opacity X Set gui opacity 0 - 100
-r --res X Y Set screen resolution / window size (default=800 600)
--animback Use animated backgrounds
-a --noanimback Don't use animated backgrounds
--fade Use fade effects
-f --nofade No fade effects
--nopopups No helpful popups
--fps X Aim for this nbr of frames per second (default=20)
--maxfps X Maximum nbr of frames per second (default=50)
--filtering X Quality of OpenGL filtering 0-3 (default=2)
--maxtexsize X Max texture size in pixels 32-4096 (default=unlimited)
--treequal X Tree quality 1-5 (default=3)
--texqual X Texture quality 1-5 (default=3)
--nolightfx No light effects in battles
--partamount X Max nbr of particles 0-8 (0=none, 4=default, 8=max)
--nograss Don't draw the grass
--noarcade Don't draw floating damage numbers
--noglext Don't use any OpenGL extensions
--vsync Enable vsync
-V --novsync Disable vsync
--renderpath X Use different optimizations 0-1 (0=good for low mem cards)
-x --fastgrx Faster graphics (use 3 times for best performance (-xxx))
-p --perftest Run a performance test and exit
******* Audio Options *******
-s --nosound No sound effects or music
-m --nomusic No music

Turning off any features that you dont want is bound to improve the results. I know that Windows people arent used to looking at the command switches but it is a linux-created game so I tend to look there first.

[Cainehill]

Gandalf Parker said:
Its also in the options?
At least its in the switches.

--fade Use fade effects
-f --nofade No fade effects

... I know that Windows people arent used to looking at the command switches but it is a linux-created game so I tend to look there first.

As a *nix and Windoze programmer, I am used to looking at the command line switches. Unfortunately, I'm also used to those switches not doing anything - which is exactly what "-f", "--nofade", "-nofade", and "-f --nofade" all do, at least on the Windoze version.

Similarly, hitting "Esc" is still a PITA, because on Windoze it doesn't accept the keypress until _after_ it's already zooming / fading in : during the 1.5 - 2 seconds of blackscreen, Escape does nothing.