Any suggestions for speeding up turn processing?

[Uncle_Joe]

At an average of 3 minutes per turn (being generous)and say about 100 turns to get to having hundreds of ships fighting in a late game battle, I will have wasted over 4&1/2 gaming hours watching the turns process...umm, no thanks. I cant see that as being tolerable.

[Suicide Junkie]

It is only wasted time if you sit there in your chair staring intently at the progress bar.

Visit the IRC channel...
Check the forum...
Take a bathroom break...
Read some webcomics...
Check your email...

[Slick]

Too bad that the game won't continue to process the turn with the game minimized. I hear it will run in the background in windowed mode, but windowed mode sucks.

[Suicide Junkie]

I asked Aaron about adding higher rez windowed modes.
He liked the idea, but it couldn't hurt to remind him a few times.

[Slick]

Strangely, not being able to have a turn process with the game minimized (like SE:IV allows) is the single most annoying thing to me that I'd like to see changed. Yea, there are bugs and yea the UI needs lots of work, but not being able to browse these forums or do other things while turns process is unbearable to me. The fact is that it is inevitable that games will get big enough to require several minutes or more to process turns, even if the game engine is optimized. SEV calculates a lot more stuff than SEIV, so no matter how you cut it or how fast your computer is, turn processing will take time as the game progresses. Ironically, there are more things to like as turn number increases because of increased research, production, expansion, etc.; but waiting for turns to complete actually makes it less fun as turn number increases.

[Kamog]

I agree, if SEV could run while minimized, it would be very good. I have a musical keyboard beside my desk and while the turns process, I practise playing the piano.

[Spectarofdeath]

I'd rather see minimizing then the windowed thing

[Uncle_Joe]

Id MUCH rather see the turn processing sped up to something reasonable than either windowing or minimzizing. Although either of the latter would be FAR better than what we have now.

The fact is that it is inevitable that games will get big enough to require several minutes or more to process turns, even if the game engine is optimized. SEV

I could actually accept longer processing times if I was stretching the bounds of the game. But playing on a small map with 5 opponents, still being in the Scout phase with single ship combats and STILL getting 6-7 min turns? In the early game, there really isnt all that much to do every turn so actually entering your orders goes fairly quickly. I could probably blow through 25-30 turns in an hour without processing time (and that is still learning). But sadly, with processing time I can usually only play less than 10 in an hour (and less than that now that I'm seeing multiple combats every turn).

I guess the one 'good' thing out of this is that I have been so jonesing for space conquest fix that I'm actually going back and playing Sword of the Stars which I bought and never really got into. It doesnt have too terribly much depth IMO, but at least its playable...

[Fyron]

Just play in windowed mode until more fixes arrive... it isn't that big of a deal to not be in fullscreen, is it? Personally, I try to make every game I play run in windowed mode (including games like civ4).

[Phoenix-D]

For SE5, it is, because you get stuck into a rather small window. That also makes the GUI worse, as it takes up more screen space.

Oh, and some people have performance issues (mouse speed, FPS, etc) with windowed mode.