Performance

hmmmm

tough one - when I played some of the parger games - it seemed reasonably fast - my guess - try and speed up computer on computer combat.

On an 800 MHz Pentium 3 I find myself noticing delays when the game is processing the AI turns, presumably ship movement.

It's only _really_ noticeable later in the game when there are large numbers of ships moving about. Even then it normally takes a large galaxy to be a pain on this front.

I dunno. I EXPECT to witness large battles and things in the mid-game when there are a lot of ships out there.

If I don't want to see that stuff I'll turn the graphics off for it.

In the OS/2 version you used multi threading to make the AI do movement calculations while the player made his/her moves. Do you also use multithreading in the Windows version.... I guess you do, but I have heard somewhere that Windows has a lousy multitreading performance?... but I don't know it.



Peter

I would say performance. I watch the Yor move 200 BattleHammers against 12 Alterian Avatars. the moves were sluggish, the explosions were out of sync with the sound. You also need an indicator when ships on autopilot are moving.
Exposure need improvement. Your WindowBlinds got a good mention in PCGamer. Nowhere is GalCiv mentioned. Not even a line in the 'Games due in Jan/Feb 03' chart in this month's issue.

I'm fairly happy with the performance at the moment. I'd just like to see the remaining bugs squashed.

Paul.

Where there are a lot of of ships and one ship gets destroyed, there is a very noticeable pause in the middle of the explosion animation..

Where there are a lot of of ships and one ship gets destroyed, there is a very noticeable pause in the middle of the explosion animation..

Regarding exposure/marketing, that's really Strategy First's area. Stardock does WindowBlinds itself, Strategy First handles GalCiv's marketing. We can't do too much on that. We're doing what we can, I did an interview with Toms Hardware on hyperthreading.

With regards to explosions during the computer's turn. Sigh yes, it's something I notice too. Here's the deal:

The game IS very multithreaded. That means during the computer's turn it's doing a tone of calculations at the same time as moving and such. So the problem is that on some systems (most systems) you get some chunky animation when battles take place during intense background threading.

THere are things we can do. It doesn't happen to me at work since my work machine is a dual CPU machine.

woah.. finially a reason to have a dual CPU machine in the home ;} Hmm wonder how good MojoWorld does on a multicpu machine. Santa.. is it too late?

sound performance on my Athlon 900 with Audidgy 1 is wery broken up and pops and wheezes. Ihave the latest Ctreative and Directx drivers, run xp and close down all tsr's before playing

One other thing is the explosion animations for ship combat stay static on my screen for about 4 or 5 secs after a ship blows up, it would be cool if they animated away and disipated realistically before the AI updated processed the ship file (if that's what its doing?)
Performance otherwise is fine on my modest system. Except as I have already reported I have had B3z1 go out of synch on me twice.

s

Autopilot and next turn processing time are my big wishes for performance. When my gigantic galaxy gets fully explored and I am sending ships out all over the place the game seems to get bogged down. I have been assuming that when you remove all of the debuging stuff for the final release that it will pick up, but since you asked, ....

On ship movement it can bog down when you get ships that can move 10 or 12 squares. It seems that it is still drawing the ship once it gets offscreen and you can watch the movement counter go down one step at a time. Not a big performance change, but would be nice.

Next Turn performance is really slow on a 700 MHz P3 with 128MB. On a 1.4Ghz Athlon with 512MB, it's acceptable. Judging from the disk noises, at 128MB, there's plenty of thrashing going on.

I'm running GalCiv on a P4 1.8GHz with 512MB PC800 RAM and having performance lag in mid game with AI battles and moving the cursor around the mini-map. Will GC take advantage of the new Intel P4 HT ?

Any program that is threaded (multiple threads of execution that run effectively simultaneously) will benefit from an HT chip, though not as much as they would in a true-multiprocessor system.

-Robert

Time once again to go to www.dell.ca ?

But really I think Stardock has some work if users with a P4 1.5GHz like my computer or Ted's P4 1.8Ghz machine notice a performance hit in mid game.

The newest Beta seems better but that may be because the number of star systems has been reduced.

I have to admit that I rarely notice a performance hit. I am using a 2.66GHz, but even so, I never get longer than 1-5 second turns (depending on number of ships). Is it just the speed or could there be more to it. My machine is very new so I have none of the usual extra rubbish that builds up over a few years or installing and removing programs. Also, is there a variation with the operating systems. It would be very interesting to get the same saved game played on the same speed computers with different operating systems. Mine runs XP.

Paul.

I run Windows XP Pro, 512 Meg RD Ram, 64 Meg NVidia GForce 3. As far as extra rubbish is concerned, a do not as a rule install a deinstall alot of programs. Do not run BETAs as a rule being hooked on GC I made an exception. I run Norton Utilities all the time to keep what rubbish I have on my computer from causing problems.

It has taken me 5-20 seconds with lots of ships in play between turns.

If a system such as mine is marginal then I hate to play the game on a P3 800Meg machine with 128Meg of memory on Window ME.

I would think the target machine would be something like a P3 1.2GHz machine with 128Meg of memory.

They got to do something to reduce the time between turns. Maybe the goal should be 1 to 5 seconds on the average 2002 machine.

I I am not sure If this is possible but maybe they can tweak down the number crunching.

Tune back animation. Draw ships which are only critical for game play. For example the Torians sends ships to the Drengin empire. Just have a news item the Torian have sent an invasion fleet the Drengin world "@@@@".

The mico managing of your systems can be done while the computer in the back ground is dispatching ships to their locations.

If you have a saved game where it takes more than a second or two between turns then send it.

We're not seeing this, not on the largest galaxy at any point in the game.

Even on that 40x40 test galaxy we did it was never longer than 5 or 6 seconds between turns here.

Brad,

I should of said above on older Betas I noticed a 5 second delay betweem turns.

I will Email you a game if I ever notice a 5-6 second delay between turns but I do think you guys seemed to improve performance quite abit in the last few Beta's.

My comments above are likely out of date.

As per the thread where you released the "galciv.exe" file some users notice an improvement uninstalling and reinstalling Galciv. Maybe it will help me if I did the same.

No I will not reinstall the game I did notice the comment on reinstalling does not help anything.

Yea, I don't think reinstalling will fix things.

Here's what was causing the main crash:

If your approval rating got under 50% the yearly news dialog would pull one of the pre election coverage items but there was a bug. And voila, boom, crash.

Woudl take about a 100 turns or so into the game ypically but it would eventually get you. The update I put up on my website (mentioned elsewhere) should take care of that.

But in terms of per turn speed, it should be very very fast now. That's where the bulk of my work went last week.

ah ha! So playing good (keeping morale up as a populist party) i'd not see the crash. I'll play evil for a while and see what happens

The updat is now causing crashes when attempting to trade
Techs to other civs. Didnot have crashes before update.
Do notice that the shoips late in the game, when I get there, do move slow and turns do take longer to complete.
Guess it is time for a Dually on the game machine.

Also, influence seems to be a mjor factor, even in areas not controlled by various races.

Why would 70-90 % approval rate system defect just because of alien influence?