FreeOrion

I've seen mention on the forum, and experienced myself, the pause at the start of each turn later in a game, apparently caused by all the AI processing.

Does anyone know whether it might be sensible for me to put some timers into the AI script, to cause them to pause for a few tens or hundreds of ms between steps? Would this perhaps free up sufficient CPU time to keep the UI running more smoothly?

I thought I'd ask before spending long mucking about with it, in case it has been tried and failed, or there are specific objections to this approach.

An alternative which had occurred to me, was for the application to call the AI several times instead of just once, to break up the turn processing. This is perhaps less attractive as is would complicate the application code and AI interface.

Trust the above makes some sense, let me know if I'm barking up a wrong tree

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--Steaker--

If you know an easy way to put some delays into a python script that don't just use CPU cycles doing nothing, but actually return CPU time to be used for other things, feel free to try it.

There's also an item on the programming work wiki page about modifying the process class to make the AIs lower priority, which might help make the UI more responsive.

You could possibly also tell the server to only send turn updates to one or two AIs at a time, and wait until the others finish their turns before sending out the current turn's update to the others. That would ensure only one or two are actively processing at any given time.

I think I have figured out non-busy pauses in Python, will try and report back

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--Steaker--

This solution suggested on the programming work wiki page would be the most elegant one IMO.