Performance question

I don't have any complaints about performance. But then I'm using 1.3 GHz laptop

But then, I usually don't get into late game stage. I can tell the final outcome by mid-game stage. The way most strategy games work is that the stronger side gains advantages faster than the weak side. So once the balance is shifted significantly enough, there's really no point in continuing the game.
All the fun is early and mid-game, while the balance of power is fairly intact.

i'm moving into mid-game with a gigantic galaxy. performance is much improved.

however, i notice that habitable planets "everywhere" does not produce anything close to what i'd expect. most of the sectors are empty and many of the stars don't have 15 + planets. it seems more like what i'd expect for average planet concentration.

mid game on the current largest galaxy performance is noteably better than on beta4 and to be honset on my modest athlon900 I have never really had an issue with game speed. I can't comment on a crowded late game rush yet.

It is intereasting what Pierre says, there seems less traffic in recent builds, perhaps due to less habitable planets and perhaps this is speeding things up?

s

I am have been one of the first to complain about late game performance. Even going as far as email you a few games; saying that larger galaxies due add much to the game.

You know what else that could help when you play with something like an Enormous Galaxy is have more options to manage social and military queues.

Maybe have the planets queues managed by an AI governer where you only have to go into a planet management screen to make tweaks.

I would like I if 30 planets screens did not pop up late in the game between every turn.

Yoo reported the leak which I also noticed after several hours of play.

Can ship movement graphics be disabled or limited.

I set a tranport to go from 0,0 to 24,24
who needs to acutual watch a ship cross the galaxy.
It gets worse when there is a war or colonize rush and several hundred ships are moving all over the place.

Do not draw all of them between turns. Only draw ships that are going to attack something between turns or ships that pass through the currently selected sector.


The way I would like to picture a turn is as follows.

An optional event screen pops up.
You are force to handle the event.

Then Management Screen pops up as follows.

News Items,
The XXXX declared WAR or the YYYYY.
the XXXX attack and conquered planet zzzz
in sector 8,9(SHOW SECTOR)
Spy report we have heard rumours that the XXXX is
spying on us.

(MANAGE)Your plant DDDD is not happy the governer suggests more social programs be purhased.(SHOW SECTOR)


Social production

(MANAGE)Planet "!@@#{" built cccc and has started building dddd (SHOW SECTOR)
(MANAGE)planet "sgag" built cccc and started building eeee (SHOW SECTOR)
etc..

Military Production

(MANAGE)Planet "dagsag" built a defender and started building a constructor. (SHOW SECTOR)
(MANAGE)Planet "ssdgas" built a transport and is building a battleship. (SHOW SECTOR)
etc..


(SHIP Detail)
You have 36 ships in orbit,
You have 17 ships on auto pilot,
(MANAGE)You have 6 ships in space which need orders.

(MANAGE)You have research TTYWE and have started to reasearch IDEKD.


this is all you see between turns pressing the manage button allows you to override the governer or give orders to ships. Press the show sector button shows the sector in question.

Close this BOX shows you the last sector in focus.
You can move from sector to sector as always giving ships in motion new orders, checking out the Aliens etc...

Hit the turn button and only ships moving in the last selected sector is seen on the screen, the focus only changes to show a battle or when you are colonizing a system.

Next you see the optional event screen followed by the management summury screen again.

The planet screens come up is an option. Just have them not come up and have a governor run the planet. It's already in there.

Similarly, you don't have to watch auto pilot ships. This is an option.

Additionally, you don't hvae to watch all the alien ships. This too is an option.

Again: You can use just the event window on the lower right and click on the items you want to tweak. These are all in the options.

I have to admit I have not played with the governor option managing systems enough I will try a few games with the governor management on. It was my understanding the governor was not smart "just a queue" and it would do things like not build social project if a queue was empty... useless, unless you watch every planet anyway. Maybe I am wrong like I said I will have to try.



I still think one screen of events would be cool.

That is all the governor is... a queue. But I don't understand how this is useless? I always use governors.

I am running GalCiv on a P3 550. Performance has much improved, but turns, especially later in the game, do take "uncomfortably" long.

Generally, what I'd like to do that I can't do now is hit the turn button and Alt-Tab away to other things. Windows seems to start to respond by putting up a reduced-size task bar, but the resolution doesn't switch back up to my normal desktop resolution nor is the display cleared until the turn processing is over.

This might just mean that I need a faster machine, or that more processing can be handed off to a new thread, or it might be something DirectX or my video driver is doing that you have no control over, but if there was anything you could do to make the program more responsive to the outside world while turn processing was taking place, that would make me a lot happier. (And being able to run it in a window without having to change color-depth, as an option, would also be nice, but I know I can't have everything.)

Otherwise, to think about for 2.0 since we are discussing it, some automation later in the game would be cool. For instance, if I could specify rules for planet maintenance, like make sure everyone gets two defenders before building constructors, turn off military projects if morale falls below 65% (and turn them back on appropriately), alert me to any planets that have dropped below 40% morale, or always update me when these checked (or unchecked) planets have built something, automatically build something from a list of morale-builders when morale falls too low, or external rules, like dedicate two-thirds of all constructor production to maximizing selected resources to pre-determined levels (always do mining upgrades but don't do defense upgrades until everyone is at basic, etc.), and then split the remaining third between building along trade routes and adding mining upgrades to each sector, etc., etc.

-Robert

I am using the governor on the current game I am playing it is not much but better than nothing. You still have the to go in tweak.

As far as ship movemrnt is concerned is that too much seems to be happening at once. This is what is slowing everything down. Must be great fun to debug such a program.

Great article on performance on the news page. I love to get hold of one of the new P4s but have to have a good reason to buy.

The problem is too many threads each taking increasing more time to process when the intellegence of the
AI increases.

The solution is to dummy the AI and/or reduce the number of background threads or have really smart AI and warn the users the game will slow under certain conditions.

I wonder for all us poor souls running only normal P4s the game can sense to slow processor and dummy down.

Or if the game has to slow down can Stardock at least put some sort of indicator out showing the progress of the AI and the AI is doing something. Maybe a bar like you see downloading a web page.

'Generally, what I'd like to do that I can't do now is hit the turn button and Alt-Tab away to other things. Windows seems to start to respond by putting up a reduced-size task bar, but the resolution doesn't switch back up to my normal desktop resolution nor is the display cleared until the turn processing is over.'

Task switching from GalCiv doesn't cause this problem for me, although CTDs do occasionally do so in both GC and Diablo II. Might have something to do with the fact that the Drengin.net Start Menu entry is empty, for some unknown reason, and thus I have a Explorer window open that I started GalCiv from. I can't imagine why that would matter, but it wouldn't be the first time Windows has done something totally illogical for no particular reason.

On the little machine p4 1.6 the performance has been very good, except if yo are foolish enough to watch 900 ships flying around. Sometimes you want to watch ships if you are looking out for the enemy or the sensor drones are all seeing things. Maybe a selective watch only these selected ships would help out. But generally without watching alien ships or the autopilot ships the turns aren't lasting more than 6 seconds. But i have many occasions not seen the turn button bar change and continue to click away oblivious to the fact that something else is happening. I wonder if the a.i.s are watching what we do, could all of this clicking while its the a.i's turn could slow it down? if they are doing y based on the cuurent turn of events and we all of a sudden click and do x could tht change affect everything they are doing? I think i'm seeing a smarter red a.i. He played smarter even at idiot and dumb levels. What did you do LOL LOL

"But generally without watching alien ships or the autopilot ships the turns aren't lasting more than 6 seconds. "

but 6 seconds between turns is too long.


I do not watch alien ships it turns out I never had the ships moving around are my own ships.

If I have 4 survey ships hunting anolomies I get to watch them, and get those pop ups which tells me what the anomoly is. The pop ups get tiring fast and why would I want to waste my time with all those boxes.

When a colony ship hits a system I have to select the planet I want then give the planet building instructions. Another waste of time why can not such a trival thing be automated. Land at a system colonize the best planet higher than a predefined limit and have the "Governor" build the military project and social project automatically.


When a constructor reachs a starbase or destination there is no reason why I should not be able to set a rule for that as well and automate that process.

Then after all that sometimes I have to go through dozens of planets, pick a new ship to build, or social project. Set up a queue for the social project you still see the planet management screen and have to press next, next, next......

lets see 6 second delay which I think can be longer but the again it was stated if you play many hours at a time which I do there is a leak that can be fixed by exiting and restarting the program.

plus a few mintutes watching your survey ships, constructors, war ship, and colony ships.

plus a few minutes going through all the screens.

plus a few minutes checking to make sure the ships are
moving and all the systems and anolomolies you know about will get a constructor or colony ship or the freighter is going to the Alien system.

plus a few minutes checking to make sure all you planets are building something, checking moral, changing orders.

plus a few minutes checking up on the Aliens maybe offering a trade.

plus a few minutes tweaking your our domestic policy tax rate, ratios, etc...




Late in the game this a can take me approx 10 - 20 minutes.

SO at 10-20 minutes a turn and I need 8-15 turna for the next technology. Wow the game gets slow,

To make matter worse the Alien also always want to start wars. During the war sending orders to war ships, next extra animation and invading planets doubles the time between turns. I do not find the game at this point playable.

To ammend my comments slightly--I will play the biggest galaxy you give me in spite of performance. Maybe its an inadequacy thing, I dunno: my feet are plenty big.

-Robert

I guess I'm the opposite of Technician... I WANT to be informed of what each anomoly I get is.. I WANT to be able to pick what planet I colonize... making everything automated seems to take away from the game for me... sometimes I'll play a whole game without governors and I still can finish a Gigantic galaxy in a reasonable amount of time....

Much much much faster late game. However on a related survey ship note (by they way there should be an option if you want anonmallies to popup)

Survey ships can and do interfere with one another and seems to be what produces the the hangs. Evertime I've had a hange I've had one or more survey ships on autosurvey and stacked on one another.

I typically have 10 survey ships out in the galaxy on autosurvey.. and got lots of hangs, however last game I only had one survey ship and not a hang yet.. (both on gigantic galaxy)

Tje trick your doing with the pathfinding.. heh crude but effective.. makes it kinda easy to blockade though.. But preformance is more important late game i think

Jotun and Wyrenn should ask Frogman for his super-sized galaxy. 18x18 is largest in beta but he has played 100x100!

I played tonight for a few hours and the game lock solid and for some reason autosave did not save any progress, it may be the survey ships stacking still causing problems.

i reloaded the last long game and the preformance with 800+ ships was 2-3 seconds. Maybe this leak really slows it down?

Lately i have been playing with multiple govenors. One for regular building, One for boosting morale up. One for building ships and going to war. But i still look at each planet, usually with morale selected. That way i can see early on which planets are in trouble

i'll play another tonight to see what happens

I'm mostly with Wryenn. I like to see and micro manage everything. I did use the governors sometimes in the OS/2 game, but mostly to switch the system resources to research or to military production. The OS/2 governor's window also had the option to switch all planets building project A to project B (e.g. change all planets building Avatars to building Excaliburs instead). Looks like this version lacks that.

BTW, hit a hard lockup earlier today when I assigned two colony ships to auto-pilot to the same planet. Couldn't reproduce it though when I reloaded the game.

On the subject of performance, I see mid-to-late game pauses, but I'm also running this on a CPU 400 MHz and three generations older than the listed minimum reqs, and with a shortage of 32MB RAM on top of that, so I can't say appearances on my end really hold much weight.

Even given the noted handicaps, I haven't had a wait of more than 30-45s between turns that wasn't caused by being stubborn and trying to watch all 900+ ships in sensor range move.

'The OS/2 governor's window also had the option to switch all planets building project A to project B (e.g. change all planets building Avatars to building Excaliburs instead). Looks like this version lacks that.'

This can be done specifically for military projects in GC/Win on the Governors screen (there should be a 'Military' button on that screen to change between the governors and the quick change military building), but I haven't tried to use it, and in past betas it was reported as not always changing everything, so I don't know how feasable it actually is to use. There is no way that I know of to do so with social projects.

The actual pause while the AI is processing does improve on a save and reload.


I maybe a minority here but when the planet management screen cycles through 40-50 planets to tell me a social project or military project is completed I get bored fast. I end out clicking on anything to try and speed through the planets. Then I still have to go back it and tweak the Major planets where most of the productivity is, see if I can help planets where moral is low.

Larger maps = more planets and more micro management.

If I can personally manage only the strongest and weakest planets and not be bothered by managing the majority of the planets game play would improve greatly.

I am the ruler of a major Galactic power, local matters should be handled by the local government.

Doing all the trivial time consuming things I think is my performance issue. I micromanage because early in the game I like to watch everything but late in the game, it is too much.

There is already the governor I just which it did more and was stronger. Anybody that wants to manage everything late in even the Enormous galaxy can leave the governors option off.

The military governor still doesn't change everything.

-Robert

last night's and todays game, i'm mid heading towards the end game, 406 ships and the end of turn is taking under a second. Interesting in this game i had 3 class 26 planets near me. Playing as the mercantile party (ist time for me) had to sweat a lot to survive the start, but using the minor races saved the day (so far LOL ). Performance hasn't slacked off at all and it's been 7 hours today