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[v22.9 GC] Carrier: long alien moves again


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About 2-3 minutes per move, even when only last alien remaining.

It wasn't so with undamaged cruisers and bases (compatible number of aliens).

UPDATE:

Long moves on farm map with adrons/haridans.

On industrial map with caesans/wraiths it's normal 25-30 seconds, including civilian animation.

Edited by a_beorning
(Update)
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It was not continued game: my 22.8 savegames were damaged during 22.8-experimental-fix, so I waited for 22.9 and started anew.

As I updated, bug (or just some unoptimized branch in AI algorythm) shows itself not on every carrier map.

Edited by a_beorning
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Did a little bit of testing.

Removing the animations definitely made a difference. On one test, I had a Cruiser alien turn over in six seconds (completely took me by surprise!). On what was the same map (although a different save, since I didn't think aiprops changes would carry through if GC was already saved), it took about 20ish seconds instead. (This was a Middle East map).

On another test, with animations on a turn took ~45 seconds, while with them off (again, same map but different save) it took about half that (25ish). These were industrial maps.

What I did notice - and I've noticed this before on other large UFO maps - is a massive lag spike during the alien turn. I didn't have the GC editor on for the first test, but on the second the game went almost entirely down to 0 fps at one point. This was true regardless of whether the animations were turned off. Indeed, aside from a couple of animations that played because I could see what was going on, on the animations off version this lag period pretty much accounts for most of the alien turn.

As I say, I've seen this lag issue before when testing other things where turns were taking up to 1.5-2 minutes. No idea what's causing it, but I'm wondering whether this is related to the slowdown issue.

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GJ's previous explanation:

The AI turn times were improved by several fixed/enhancements:

- Tiles which are considered unreachable are no longer taken into account during the value calculation. This solved turn times for maps which have a lot of "black areas"; bases defense, final mission.

- During path calculation; the AI is now a lot more selective in which locations it may target for pathing.

- A small caching layer was written around the pathing algo to ensure that if the state of the game doesn't change, it just returns the same path for a given source & target.

- Some animations are skipped when we are sure the player cannot observe them.

Which had previously fixed the problem. It sounded like the primary issue was pathing calculations, not animations. I can't imagine GH purposefully messed with this solution, which, again, had cured the lag issue.

I'm just....at a loss as to the reappearance of a major problem that was successfully addressed

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The primary slowdown during the AI turn is displaying / running through animations. It takes up 50% to 90% of the total turn time.

For missions with layouts which are hard to calculate for the pathing algorithm (large UFOs), this is around the 50% mark.

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