AGEOD Engine 3.x vs 2x ?

[Don Powell]

Is there a list of Engine versions used on AGEOD releases?

It may be my imagination but PON seems to work better and is much more stable than the other AGEOD titles that I own so I'd like to pick up more titles that are closer to that programming.

Perhaps it does not make sense ? As PON is not even listed in the more current releases section of the forums?

But it is my personal experience so far.

[loki100]

its more iterative than that to be honest.

There are a set of isolated games that have some features that were retained, say the first iteration of civil war or unique like WW1:Gold

There is a large group of games that saw (and gained) from modifications of the game engine, but each at some stage got fixed. They dip in and out of rules like march to the sound of guns, complex/simple supply etc but are the cluster from NCP up to PON/AJE.

The engine then got a major update and that spawned the suite from Civ war II to WoS. Again a lot is from the earlier set but innovations like the battle planner, limits on movement in provinces etc never got back ported to the earlier group.

I think the generation say NCP, WiA, RUS, RoP, AJE, PON all gained from almost limitless development time. Some of them got 17+ patches with that addressing both issues for that game and the underlying engine. So some, like say WiA are incredibly well polished (and still one of my favourites for PBEM).

Of the most recent, the only ones I have found with a lot of replay value are 30 Years War and Civ War 2. Thats more a comment on the focus and that I find a few of the others not quite there. Also I fear that Athena was stretched thin which makes vs AI play less fun.

edit: worth noting that the upcoming Empires is based on a completely new game engine with no links back to AJE.

Other wider point, all the games benefit from really innovative game play concepts, one reason that PoN works is it is so inventive in its mechanisms. Same say with RuS, it just captures the conflict brilliantly and elegantly.

[Don Powell]

Thanks for the extensive history Loki.

I am looking forward to the new engine, despite my minor grumbles in other threads ....

AJE is a good example of the performance issues I see between PON and other games. PON - being global has a lot of map assets to scroll through - yet it is not really sluggish on my system. With AJE - even with the best practices advised in the forums, it still crawls when scrolling.

Likewise - when I play WON, I see more frequent crashing than I do with PON - which I thought odd, as PON seems like the heftier, more complex game.

So I was just trying to figure if there is any pattern here that can be discerned that could guide future purchases - in terms of performance and stability.

I'll experiment a little more with EAW as that seemed to be pretty stable but not as smooth as PON.

[Pocus]

PON is the sole game running in DirectX 9, with a work from an external developer. The PON map has its own thread (this you can see, regions are blurred then get a better definition once you stop scrolling) and there is no hiccup when you zoom.

The rest is DirectX8 based (yes that's old). Several external developers did not manage to reliably convert our Dx8 Delphi-powered engine to Dx9 alas, so we kept the good old horse.

[Don Powell]

Thanks for the additional info Pocus.

I spend about 95% of my gaming time in my PON Empire .... so I'm happy that title got the extra grease


... until perhaps ... when FOG Empires rolls off the presses ....

[Citizen X]

PON is the sole game running in DirectX 9, with a work from an external developer. The PON map has its own thread (this you can see, regions are blurred then get a better definition once you stop scrolling) and there is no hiccup when you zoom.

The rest is DirectX8 based (yes that's old). Several external developers did not manage to reliably convert our Dx8 Delphi-powered engine to Dx9 alas, so we kept the good old horse.

I always wondered why it acts so diferently under Wine, compared to other titles of that era.

[Fatus]

The PON engine is not as glamorous as it appears. In its current stage, it is slow due to development design. Its scripting language is a debacle, making files excessively large by repeating lines of code on commonly used commands(you can ignore this, but the engine will start crying; you might see programming dragons). At the same time; it writes 100,000s lines of code while concurrently reading a million lines of code. I am at awe on how fast the PON engine runs at its current stage.

I have recorded 1,000 hours on its script files. First 200 hours done by hand, the next 100 hours utilizing vim script files (which I had to code). The last 700 hours, I found bento's tools; which I am currently re-coding with proper memory code safe guards. Will eventually translate bento's scripts to its C99 base. I have not touched the executable to fix the ship bug since I despise reversing Delphi code, I despise Delphi and it's going to be years overhead development before I understand what I am looking at. That's too much coding to justify a couple bugs and performance issues. Not worth my programming time when there's other github projects that need my attention.

So, TLDR; I stopped playing ageod games and settled on refactoring its script files for fun.

[Nikel]

No idea of programming, just curiosity.

Are you able to rewrite the engine code in another language (better than Delphi) and make it capable of using multiples cores?

[Fatus]

That's a decades project for a one-man team. I have no interest in recreating AGEOD's engine since AGEOD is doing a great service to humanity by creating these games. I just wished they utilize these free 30+ year-old unix tools to produce better code quality. Any programmer worth his salt would be able to utilize these free tools.

[Pocus]

There is always the possibility that you get a deal with Slitherine that would open to you all source code. Much better than reverse engineering them, right?

[Nikel]

You are a good person Pocus, are you not ?

My salute sir

[ERISS]

You are a good person Pocus, are you not ?

But is Fatus a good new user, despite being a good old one?

[Nikel]

Pocus is a gentleman, no doubt of that.

What the others are, they will know.

And I even less know what you are meaning with old one!

Is Fatus a reincarnation?

[Fatus]

There is always the possibility that you get a deal with Slitherine that would open to you all source code. Much better than reverse engineering them, right?

If it entails fixing PON; I might do it.
I was being overtly dramatic with reversing. A memory scanner, a save state and a little bit of knuckle-head brute force might fix the ship bug.

Pocus is a gentleman, no doubt of that.

What the others are, they will know.

And I even less know what you are meaning with old one!

Is Fatus a reincarnation?

Who is "said" reincarnation? Is it the Unnamed One?

[ERISS]

I even less know what you are meaning with old one!

Confidence is built with time.

[Fatus]

I even less know what you are meaning with old one!

Confidence is built with time.

If you're confusing individuals because of programming literacy and overlapping opinions. Maybe something is truly wrong or nebulous.

Just saying.