A couple of simple ways to make it more friendly

[alexti]

Loren said:
The problem is that Dominions isn't recognizing that it's been switched away and releasing the video. I think it's not monitoring the message queue while it's thinking.

You don't need to monitor message queue to get hidden or brought to the background. I could see why there might be a problem bringing Dom3 window in the foreground in this situation, but hiding it should be working. And when you refer to 10 minutes, is it just 'AI thinking' phase or total turn generation time? I'd imagine some combination of map and nation may produce longer 'AI thinking' times, but 10 minutes seem to be way too much from my experience (for me vast majority of turn generation time is spent in 'resolving battles').

[Loren]

alexti said:

You don't need to monitor message queue to get hidden or brought to the background. I could see why there might be a problem bringing Dom3 window in the foreground in this situation, but hiding it should be working. And when you refer to 10 minutes, is it just 'AI thinking' phase or total turn generation time? I'd imagine some combination of map and nation may produce longer 'AI thinking' times, but 10 minutes seem to be way too much from my experience (for me vast majority of turn generation time is spent in 'resolving battles').

What I think is going on is that while it technically goes into the background, if it doesn't monitor the message queue it doesn't see what happened and know to release the screen.

And I do mean 10 minutes of AI think time--this on a 3ghz processor with oodles of ram. Admittedly the memory is currently in single-channel mode. I've been having trouble getting a response out of Corsair about the memory chip that died--I've come to suspect that something is wrong in their e-mail and I'm going to call them again Monday and try a different e-mail address.

[alexti]

Loren said:
What I think is going on is that while it technically goes into the background, if it doesn't monitor the message queue it doesn't see what happened and know to release the screen.

It shouldn't need to do anything explicit. OS should be able to take the screen over (or shouldn't allow an application to monopolize it).

Loren said:
And I do mean 10 minutes of AI think time--this on a 3ghz processor with oodles of ram. Admittedly the memory is currently in single-channel mode. I've been having trouble getting a response out of Corsair about the memory chip that died.

Oh well, maybe that's a reason somehow. Btw, does it happen in one particular game or you have it in every game of comparable size?

[Loren]

alexti said:

It shouldn't need to do anything explicit. OS should be able to take the screen over (or shouldn't allow an application to monopolize it).

But it does when using DirectX.

Oh well, maybe that's a reason somehow. Btw, does it happen in one particular game or you have it in every game of comparable size?

This is my first game of this size.

Incidently, I'm thinking my reason on why it's so slow is wrong. The undead are on the march and they have some *HUGE* armies.

I'm going to have to fight them soon. What ratio of priests to undead should bring to battle?

[alexti]

Loren said:
But it does when using DirectX.

Dom3 is DirectX-free AFAIK.

[alexti]

alexti said:

Dom3 is DirectX-free AFAIK.

Just remembered that I read somewhere that some video drivers implement OpenGL through redirecting calls into their DirectX drivers. Maybe that's the case for your video card and the cause of your problem?