Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

Describe your experience with the latest version of FreeOrion to help us improve it.

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Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#1 Post by Guest »

Hello. A lurker and a player of the game since a bit, showing up to take some of your time pointing out a few things that affected my gameplay quite much and could use some attention from the features already implemented in the version listed in the subject.

I do not know what is exactly the standard of testing among the community members but I didn't see a mention of too many absolutely unmodified/non-experimental gameplays over longer period of time and since some of the biggest problems I've experienced pop-up then, I thought I'll let people know just in case.

The biggest issue is currently the turn length and generally, AI hogging resources like mad progressively over the span of the game. Using default world settings with somewhat less system (70, hoping it'd decrease the problem), at around 400th turn (and it's still far from both military or scientific victory) each turn takes between 3 - 7 minutes (it varies, presumably depending on how many ships some empires just lost), with CPU use among all cores (according to the Windows' manager) reaching stable 95 - 99% at nearly all times. With such use, one cannot even wait it out since trying to load any other application, even some music/video player makes the thing stutter or flat-out become non-responsive. Additionally, AI is mulling things over far into one's turn so even after I've done everything I was to, I have to wait a few more minutes before being able to save my game. Autosave just flat out stops working at times, too, simply not saving my game - and it only once informed me of failure to do so.

Another problem in the late-game like this is that without maintenance costs for deployed ships and with AI empires churning them out like mad all the time, one soon reaches a point where fleets on border worlds have nearly 200 of ships, with about 6k of firepower and 9k of structure which suffices to say is very hard for a player (at least player like me) to ever move without one having to gather up and throw even bigger fleet at them which often leaves both empires exposed and ripe for decimation by the others. But the alternative is being stuck in a state of forced, hard to disrupt cold war potentially forever (or at least till one of the races ascends into godhood over next dozens or hundreds of turns, again - each loading several minutes a piece).

I'd like to make a heartfelt suggestion to shift focus a bit here to optimization of that.

Aside of such stuff, most of the gameplay is smooth. Hulls would use a bit more of differentiation, because outside of the regenerative capabilities of organic and nanobot ones, they are basically all the same with different structure-to-price ratio from what I've seen. Also, either it's a matter of balance or AI working through the same steps but almost always sooner or later AI empires settle for asteroid/nano hulls for combat ships and asteroid/organic/multicellular ones for dropships (once or twice I saw spatial flux hulls used). Seems like energy, 'basic' or more advanced post-spatial flux ones are universally ignored. There are also merely several items for the core slot and in nearly every game I had hulls offering slots for those without having even a single core part. Having more and diverse cores, even some simple early game ones would be great.

Speaking of dropships, currently invasions are simple, but also kind of meta - for troop transport the cheapest hull with most slots is always the best, no exceptions - no matter how sturdy and high-tech the ship is it will drop and be unusable after all. Also, all soldiers, artillery pieces, tanks etc participating in the battle vanish in a thin air afterwards. Maybe at least make it that depending on scale of the battle vs ship's structure there'd be some percentage chance for a ship to get back to the orbit retaining the victorious troops?

Another problem regarding invasions is that troop ships and all other units that don't engage in fire exchange are basically ignored by planetary defenses outside of possibly minefields. They can fly around and they can invade the planet or they can hang out - it's all fine, which is silly. I'd like to be able to set planets to engage all hostile ships, even non-combatant ones that are actually 'holding' in the location. Currently I work around it by building the crappiest, oldest corvette which then opens fire on enemy ship and provokes planet to shoot at it as well - but it should be possible without such workarounds.

It'd be great if hulls/buildings would stop being racially-limited as long as the technology and facilities for their production are available. It turned out that I couldn't make, for example, nanorobotic ships without exobots even though I could build proper fully-equipped shipyards - if I can do that, why not? It's not like my organic citizens actually construct those things by hand, anyway, right? I mean, those tools and facilities are there to do that for them. It's even weirder because non-robotic planets with drydocks can easily fix the same ships, no matter the race.

A couple of glitches I've noticed aren't big, but to report them (even though tye're hard to intentionally reproduce):

- when in bigger fleets with dozens of ships, somehow all the firepower stats of every fleet and ship claim 0.0, even if said ships have plenty of guns one can check in the Pedia entries. Usually after ending the turn it gets fixed and the ships work fine in battle no matter what is claimed so it's a minor thing.
- colonies created from outposts behave somewhat wonky. It happened to once that after construction of one as a building, it didn't actually turn into a colony and I had to scrap the building and requeue its construction for it to work out. Another time colony as a building didn't disappear after my exobots 'moved in' - it didn't change anything gameplay-wise, though. Fluff-wise I've assumed that rudimentary sentient robots in a go at creative thinking and artistic expression left colony prep modules as an a artistic piece, so it's all fine.

That'd be all when it comes to my lengthy report. Thank you for your time and effort put in so far - it shapes up to be a great game, on par with space 4x made commercially.

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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#2 Post by AndrewW »

Lag has been discussed some before see: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9691 Haven't seen it that bad though.

There is fleet upkeep. As you have more ships new ones need more resources to build.

There are plans for more core parts along with more parts for internal slots, just haven't been developed yet.

As for troop ships, remember every extra troop pod above what's needed goes to waste, so there is some possibility of using different sized hulls, or some empty slots on hulls). Also speed can be a consideration as well. Also where you build them if you don't have all the requirements to build a particular hull type at that planet / asteroid field. There is also race to consider, but that's not in the current RC builds.

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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#3 Post by Sloth »

Thanks for the long report Guest!
Guest wrote:It'd be great if hulls/buildings would stop being racially-limited as long as the technology and facilities for their production are available. It turned out that I couldn't make, for example, nanorobotic ships without exobots even though I could build proper fully-equipped shipyards - if I can do that, why not? It's not like my organic citizens actually construct those things by hand, anyway, right? I mean, those tools and facilities are there to do that for them. It's even weirder because non-robotic planets with drydocks can easily fix the same ships, no matter the race.
Hulls and buildings aren't limited to different kind of species, but there are (native) species that can't build ships at all. You're starting species should be able to use all hull types.
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#4 Post by Guest »

AndrewW wrote:Lag has been discussed some before see: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9691 Haven't seen it that bad though.
Yeah, checked that thread before posting. It's from around 280th turn, though and it gets progressively and non-linearly worse the further in game it is, that's why my report - to show how much worse it actually gets how much faster. Generally, the lag became really noticeable and bothersome for me around 300 - 330 turn.

I also now did notice there's a way to temporarily decrease the lag by letting the AI mull things over a bit longer - but being forced to keep the game running in the background for additional few more minutes every couple of turns isn't a viable long-term solution.

Other than that - eradication of the whole solar systems. There's a race of telepaths who goes on pseudo-nihilistic crusade because they cannot control their abilities and shield themselves fromt he mental chatter of other races and there's a race of coward herbivores wanting to destroy everything preventively as they are scared they'll be threatened in the future. Well, now there's a race in my gameplay - my race - that seeks destruction of all those hundreds-ship-spamming empires that lag the reality itself. Though I suspect that ships are only part of the problem.
AndrewW wrote:There is fleet upkeep. As you have more ships new ones need more resources to build.
It needs to be adjusted, then, or changed so it's not somewhat increased price of production as much as actual drain on resources/limits on number of ships available. The former would be probably easier on the coders but tricky in making it balanced. Anyway, in my game even relatively small empires churn out dozens of ships in groups of a few every couple of turns so the upkeep isn't preventing nearly eternal buildup of fleets and as I prove by not even noticing there's an upkeep - it generally doesn't do the best job.
AndrewW wrote:As for troop ships, remember every extra troop pod above what's needed goes to waste, so there is some possibility of using different sized hulls, or some empty slots on hulls). Also speed can be a consideration as well.
That I am aware of. I was more suggesting slight changes in the mechanics of invasions themselves in relation to the hulls. Like it's said, right now hulls matter only to an extent of being able to drop sufficient amount of troops at convenient point of time - but it doesn't matter if you do that in some old clunker or reinforced, hi-tech supership. I think that depending on the scale of invasion itself, there should be at least small chance or some algorithm to regain some of the used dropships if they were made extra sturdy to withstand hard landing.
AndrewW wrote:Also where you build them if you don't have all the requirements to build a particular hull type at that planet / asteroid field. There is also race to consider, but that's not in the current RC builds.
Sloth wrote:Hulls and buildings aren't limited to different kind of species, but there are (native) species that can't build ships at all. You're starting species should be able to use all hull types.
Apparently, race consideration is in or there's a bug. My starting default race (humans) cannot build some of the ships on human populated planets despite the facilities and technologies - exobot colonies are required. I mean, even in the description of, for example, titanic hull - one of the prerequisites is "that is Robotic" in regards to the empire.

wheals
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#5 Post by wheals »

Guest wrote: Apparently, race consideration is in or there's a bug. My starting default race (humans) cannot build some of the ships on human populated planets despite the facilities and technologies - exobot colonies are required. I mean, even in the description of, for example, titanic hull - one of the prerequisites is "that is Robotic" in regards to the empire.
Your design probably added Robotic Interface: Shields. Those can only be build by robotic species, yes, but all hulls themselves can be built by any species, just not all parts.
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#6 Post by Guest »

wheals wrote:Your design probably added Robotic Interface: Shields. Those can only be build by robotic species, yes, but all hulls themselves can be built by any species, just not all parts.
That is the case, I did add that part to the design. Thanks for info.

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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#7 Post by MatGB »

Guest wrote: I do not know what is exactly the standard of testing among the community members but I didn't see a mention of too many absolutely unmodified/non-experimental gameplays over longer period of time and since some of the biggest problems I've experienced pop-up then, I thought I'll let people know just in case.
More than half the games I play are standard games that are just testing the latest builds, but I frequently end up finding stuff that needs fixing in it and then working on a fix for it with people better at that than I am. Regardless, most of the games that get reported or discussed here will be relatively standard, even if we are testing new features all the time. The problem is slightly different:
The biggest issue is currently the turn length and generally, AI hogging resources like mad progressively over the span of the game. Using default world settings with somewhat less system (70, hoping it'd decrease the problem), at around 400th turn (and it's still far from both military or scientific victory)
Regardless of map size, if it's got to turn 400 and I haven't 'won' yet something weird has happened, basically the game is effectively balanced for the game being 'over' by turn 300ish, the Experimentors will be out and about if they're in the galaxy and it's more than possible to have completed the tech tree except transcendance and conquered the galaxy.

Having said that, I'm very aware that I'm close to an "expert" level player now, it's almost impossible to ramp back my gameplay style and not achieve that, whereas a new(ish) player will have a longer job. We know lag is a problem, especially at the later game, and various things are always being done to try to reduce it, but part of it is caused by the nature of the game, it's fully modifiable with minimal scripting knowledge because all the content (including the AI) is done in text files the player can amend. That takes processing time and the effectsgroups can cause things to slow down as the game almost completes.
each turn takes between 3 - 7 minutes (it varies, presumably depending on how many ships some empires just lost), with CPU use among all cores (according to the Windows' manager) reaching stable 95 - 99% at nearly all times. With such use, one cannot even wait it out since trying to load any other application, even some music/video player makes the thing stutter or flat-out become non-responsive. Additionally, AI is mulling things over far into one's turn so even after I've done everything I was to, I have to wait a few more minutes before being able to save my game. Autosave just flat out stops working at times, too, simply not saving my game - and it only once informed me of failure to do so.
That's definitely a problem regardless and needs to be fixed, if it happens again can you open a dedicated thread trying to show exactly where you've got to, I've never had autosave not work for me and it absolutely has to always do so.

Defeating an AI or three will, of course, reduce the problem there ;-) But having that number of ships in the sky is going to cause problems, I find over 200-250 of my own causes a slowdown and if the AI has too many as well it's an issue. But again, that's due to the design of the game, all the ships have multiple cool, scripted, parts that need to be worked through each turn, more ships = more effectsgroups. Fixing that in some way is beyond my abilities, but it's worth talking about.
Another problem in the late-game like this is that without maintenance costs for deployed ships and with AI empires churning them out like mad all the time, one soon reaches a point where fleets on border worlds have nearly 200 of ships, with about 6k of firepower and 9k of structure which suffices to say is very hard for a player (at least player like me) to ever move without one having to gather up and throw even bigger fleet at them which often leaves both empires exposed and ripe for decimation by the others. But the alternative is being stuck in a state of forced, hard to disrupt cold war potentially forever (or at least till one of the races ascends into godhood over next dozens or hundreds of turns, again - each loading several minutes a piece).
Again, it's difficult to test for this because, well, I'm not a player like you nor are the other devs, we know the game backwards.

One thing I've found when I do face a massed AI threat at a border is they can be tempted to split that fleet up into smaller units if you withdraw your threat to that specific location and instead threaten multiple other systems instead. Doesn't always work, geography plays a part, but they won't keep the fleet in one place indefinitely if there are threats elsewhere to deal with.

We are constantly talking about the best way of doing upkeep, with a strong agreement that whatever we do we need to keep it simple, I'm going to be testing, soon, a switch from per hull upkeep to per part upkeep which would make having a balance of smaller and larger ships more optimal. Testing a system where instead of a cost multiplier you had a production drain would be worth doing at some point as well, but I think the cost multiplier is actually a bigger 'drain' than a production penalty would be.
Aside of such stuff, most of the gameplay is smooth. Hulls would use a bit more of differentiation, because outside of the regenerative capabilities of organic and nanobot ones, they are basically all the same with different structure-to-price ratio from what I've seen.
The main balance on the costings is cost per external slot, I then adjusted each cost a bit depending on other factors such as speed, structure, self repair, etc. I'm never sure I've got it right, but it's a lot closer to'right' than it was when we started the project to rebalance.

The AI is fairly simplistic in it's approach, because it doesn't "think", it works out which hulls to go for on an algorithmic basics with a cost/benefit formula I don't really understand. It also tends to not go for the more complex, location based hulls like the energy line as they're a lot harder to 'teach' it to use (it does use them, and uses them well, at times, but it's uncommon, you and I can plan colonising a red star, collapsing the sun to form a black hole and having an energy compressor in place, but the AI hasn't been set up for that sort of advanced planning).
There are also merely several items for the core slot and in nearly every game I had hulls offering slots for those without having even a single core part. Having more and diverse cores, even some simple early game ones would be great.
Core slots are a relatively new feature, and when introduced there were only a couple parts and only one hull that had a slot. We changed that about a year ago giving far more ships core slots and also introducing a few more parts, a new one was added last month and more are planned. Given that the ships that use them aren't available till the mid to late game that's where we're concentrating on adding them, I have many ideas in mind about what to do with them but they'll be for the next release cycle, want to get Release done before getting sidetracked, again.
Speaking of dropships, currently invasions are simple, but also kind of meta - for troop transport the cheapest hull with most slots is always the best, no exceptions - no matter how sturdy and high-tech the ship is it will drop and be unusable after all. Also, all soldiers, artillery pieces, tanks etc participating in the battle vanish in a thin air afterwards. Maybe at least make it that depending on scale of the battle vs ship's structure there'd be some percentage chance for a ship to get back to the orbit retaining the victorious troops?
But who would garrison the planet for the years it'll take before the rebellions are over and they're assimilated? The troops become the core of the planets garrison, etc.

We've considered having reusable troop ships, but working out where/how they could replenish troops was considered too much like micromanagement, it could be done, but we already have a problem with too many ships in the air, having you need tor ebuild them, and thus having upkeep costs apply to build costs, is the way we're currently working, that could be changed but the system as is works partially because it's simple.
Another problem regarding invasions is that troop ships and all other units that don't engage in fire exchange are basically ignored by planetary defenses outside of possibly minefields. They can fly around and they can invade the planet or they can hang out - it's all fine, which is silly. I'd like to be able to set planets to engage all hostile ships, even non-combatant ones that are actually 'holding' in the location. Currently I work around it by building the crappiest, oldest corvette which then opens fire on enemy ship and provokes planet to shoot at it as well - but it should be possible without such workarounds.
That's definitely been discussed and I broadly agree, I want a planet set to shoot option, but it would need to be tied to a better handling of stealth for scouts than we currently have. Having said that, you can't invade an owned planet without a warfleet, any shields at all prevent invasion, there is an AI issue where they sometimes send troopships to 'follow' a fleet that's already been destroyed, but any spare warship'll do the job of killing them.

Or simply using a scout hull or 'decoy' base hull and setting it to fight, that prompts your planets to fire as well.
It'd be great if hulls/buildings would stop being racially-limited as long as the technology and facilities for their production are available. It turned out that I couldn't make, for example, nanorobotic ships without exobots even though I could build proper fully-equipped shipyards - if I can do that, why not? It's not like my organic citizens actually construct those things by hand, anyway, right? I mean, those tools and facilities are there to do that for them. It's even weirder because non-robotic planets with drydocks can easily fix the same ships, no matter the race.
As observed already, this isn't the case, the Robotic Interface Shield is Robotic species only, but that's the only part currently so limited, use standard shields (or just MOAR ENGINES) instead.
- when in bigger fleets with dozens of ships, somehow all the firepower stats of every fleet and ship claim 0.0, even if said ships have plenty of guns one can check in the Pedia entries. Usually after ending the turn it gets fixed and the ships work fine in battle no matter what is claimed so it's a minor thing.
I've never seen that happen, having said that the new meter showing ship damage is, well, new. If it happens again a screenshot, a log file and a savegame would be very much appreciated, we may need to bughunt.
- colonies created from outposts behave somewhat wonky. It happened to once that after construction of one as a building, it didn't actually turn into a colony and I had to scrap the building and requeue its construction for it to work out. Another time colony as a building didn't disappear after my exobots 'moved in' - it didn't change anything gameplay-wise, though. Fluff-wise I've assumed that rudimentary sentient robots in a go at creative thinking and artistic expression left colony prep modules as an a artistic piece, so it's all fine.
I've never seen, or heard reports, of either of these things happening, please do provide screenshots and logs, if it is happening it's a bug and we need to squash it.
That'd be all when it comes to my lengthy report. Thank you for your time and effort put in so far - it shapes up to be a great game, on par with space 4x made commercially.
Thank you for all the feedback, it's always very welcome and useful. As I said above, it can be very easy when testing to forget what it's like for a new players and problems you encounter at turn 400+ simply won't hit me as I don't get that far in, but they're still problems and we definitely need to do something about it, not sure what though.

We do, definitely, welcome bug reports, screenshots and savegames are especially useful, as are the logfiles, both the bugs you highlight are new to me, we need to hunt them.
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#8 Post by AndrewW »

MatGB wrote:As I said above, it can be very easy when testing to forget what it's like for a new players and problems you encounter at turn 400+ simply won't hit me as I don't get that far in, but they're still problems and we definitely need to do something about it, not sure what though.
I have hit 400+, but doesn't happen often. But even then, haven't seen as much lag as was mentioned even at that point.

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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#9 Post by MatGB »

AndrewW wrote: I have hit 400+, but doesn't happen often. But even then, haven't seen as much lag as was mentioned even at that point.
I suspect it's a combination of a large number of ships within the game (each one needing effectsgroup processing every turn and I think every time you do something in the production window ) and a larger number of unconquered AIs in the game, each needing time and processor power to work out what they're going to do.

But it's harder to test.

One thing that does occur, I recall being told there were ways of running a multiplayer game and having it advance X turns with the AIs just doing their thing, then stopping. I never bothered doing it before but you can load a multiplayer game and take the place of any of the empires, so setting it to run to, say, turn 350, then saving and loading in taking the place of one of the empires that's doing OK might be an interesting thing to test and a different sort of gaming challenge.

Dilvish (or anyone) is that possible? If so, how do I set it to go through X turns then stop?
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#10 Post by Dilvish »

MatGB wrote:Dilvish (or anyone) is that possible? If so, how do I set it to go through X turns then stop?
the option is the somewhat unwieldy

Code: Select all

auto-advance-n-turns n
where that 'n' is the number of turns you want to advance. But I'm pretty sure it will only work with single player games. For a multiplayer game I'd recommend doing it as a moderator and putting the auto-advance button on for approximately as many turns as you want-- an observer game can be hard to get saved when it's cranking along, and at least for me autosave in a multiplayer game causes a crash.

Now I'm also remembering that Morlic and I have observed some strange corruptions happening with the AIs ship design cache after a long period in multiplayer auto-advance, which doesn't seem to happen in single player games. So far we've been unable to figure out what's causing it. But I'm pretty sure it gets cleared up after a game reload so I think the multiplayer AI route can still work out for you OK. You might want to stop, save it and then reload every hundred turns or so to help keep that cache issue clear.
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#11 Post by Winterwolf »

MatGB wrote:
AndrewW wrote: I have hit 400+, but doesn't happen often. But even then, haven't seen as much lag as was mentioned even at that point.
I suspect it's a combination of a large number of ships within the game (each one needing effectsgroup processing every turn and I think every time you do something in the production window ) and a larger number of unconquered AIs in the game, each needing time and processor power to work out what they're going to do.
When I last killed all enemy and experimentor pixel, about ~10-20 days ago or so, the turn-lags didn't change - even when I scrapped all my ships after hunting down the last random spawned guardians/monsters.
The good thing was that it didn't get worse :) PS: I let it run until turn +800 (while doing housework).

PPS: The ingame FPS seem a little bit better for my old laptop in early and mid game since ~1 or 2 weeks. Feels like they are 10-20% higher now. So for whatever you did on that front: THANKS! :kiss:

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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#12 Post by MatGB »

Winterwolf wrote: PPS: The ingame FPS seem a little bit better for my old laptop in early and mid game since ~1 or 2 weeks. Feels like they are 10-20% higher now. So for whatever you did on that front: THANKS! :kiss:
Awhileback a bug report turned into a diagnosis that the way the code was rendering circles and curves in general (the details went over my head), Geoff's been going around and rewriting various bits to improve things, the various circles on the map, especially the detection ranges, were the recent thing and yes, improvement noticed on my laptop as well.
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#13 Post by Morlic »

Guest wrote: The biggest issue is currently the turn length and generally, AI hogging resources like mad progressively over the span of the game. Using default world settings with somewhat less system (70, hoping it'd decrease the problem), at around 400th turn (and it's still far from both military or scientific victory) each turn takes between 3 - 7 minutes (it varies, presumably depending on how many ships some empires just lost), with CPU use among all cores (according to the Windows' manager) reaching stable 95 - 99% at nearly all times. With such use, one cannot even wait it out since trying to load any other application, even some music/video player makes the thing stutter or flat-out become non-responsive. Additionally, AI is mulling things over far into one's turn so even after I've done everything I was to, I have to wait a few more minutes before being able to save my game. Autosave just flat out stops working at times, too, simply not saving my game - and it only once informed me of failure to do so.
If you have a savegame where you experience this very slow AI, could you load it and then post the AI logs? (Make sure they have actually finished their turn).

If you have too many AIs or too large log files to upload them all: I am mostly interested in the slowest (probably biggest) AI, however, the log file names do not correspond to the ingame names.

To find the correct log, do the following:
Open the Log File and search for "with Encoding Empire". There will be a number behind that phrase, e.g. "2015-08-18 09:25:37.334048 [debug] AI : Universe::serialize : Swapping old/new data, with Encoding Empire 3
". Now subtract 1 from the number and you have the ingame AI number. So in this case, this is the log of AI 2.
So if looking for the log for AI 4, you would want to repeat the procedure until you have found a log with the encoding empire 5.
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Re: Feedback for FreeOrion_v0.4.5-RC1_2015-08-24

#14 Post by Dilvish »

To add a potential shortcut to Morlic's instructions for matching empire to AI name, if you are actually ingame you can simply enter 'help' as a chat message and one of the AIs will respond with some info that includes the empire : AI name matchings (courtesy of Cjkjvfnby).
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

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