Simultaniousness

[Ilitarist]

There I was trying to persuade myself to start Pride of Nations and live to see second turn again and I've thought: wait, isn't this game simultanious?

There was this game, Galactic Civilization 2, were they have simultanious turns. They made game multithreaded so AI thought about his turn while player made his. While player adds commands CPU is almost idle (let's imagine that in some games graphics are processed by GPU), so even on a single core PC you get AI that has everything figured out by the time player clicks end turn, so there's almost no waiting (except when player has nothing to do and he clicks end turn over and over again).

So what do you think? Is there any reason AGEOD games can't have such feature?

[Drax]

"Any reason", well yes, rethinking/reprogramming the whole game's architecture I suppose. Maybe for a future game, unlikely for this one given the small size (ie manpower) of AGEOD.

However, waiting the turn resolution isn't so hard nor make the game unplayable in my opinion. You just have to alt-tab and do something else for 2mn while the game compute. That goes fast when you're not staring at the screen waiting. I usually spend this time reading stuff on the game or the manual, or wikipedite stories of the time. Lastly I'm reading historic accounts pdfs of people from the time, thats really immersive and there's a lot available through google books.

[Ilitarist]

"Any reason", well yes, rethinking/reprogramming the whole game's architecture I suppose. Maybe for a future game, unlikely for this one given the small size (ie manpower) of AGEOD.

However, waiting the turn resolution isn't so hard nor make the game unplayable in my opinion. You just have to alt-tab and do something else for 2mn while the game compute. That goes fast when you're not staring at the screen waiting. I usually spend this time reading stuff on the game or the manual, or wikipedite stories of the time. Lastly I'm reading historic accounts pdfs of people from the time, thats really immersive and there's a lot available through google books.

Well, AGEOD makes new games, not addons, so I don't see a problem in little rethinking.

You do realise reading while waiting for turn resolution sounds like a joke? I'm very disappointed by Pride of Nations that I can't play even on first turn with unbelievable lags even when I just look on the map. On PC that runs modern shooters in high settings. That's just disastrous and excludes any possibility of new people playing the game so I hope they'll do something about whole engine.

[Aphrodite Mae]

I wonder if Ilitarist's idea could be used, in a fashion, by creating a cache of pregenerated data files for the next turn. These files would be those things which require a fair amount of processing time, but be independant of player decisions. For example, generating the weather.

[Ilitarist]

I wonder if Ilitarist's idea could be used, in a fashion, by creating a cache of pregenerated data files for the next turn. These files would be those things which require a fair amount of processing time, but be independant of player decisions. For example, generating the weather.

Kind of. Caching would be good for AGEOD. As I see in resource manager every now and then PoN tries to load something from HDD and process it (even map textures, I think). But it almost doesn't use RAM, just 500 mb while there's 2 Gb of free RAM there. Would skyrocket performance to cache some of those things, I think.