General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

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

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Dilvish
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#16 Post by Dilvish »

biza wrote:I still think purpose of description is to show plain text not text that looks corrupted.
If you look at that same description in the Pedia panel entry for that ship design, which is *normally* shown on that screen (unless your last interaction was a single-click selection of a ship part or hull) then you will see the pretty formatted text. The panel we are talking about, however, is for creating and editing designs (and their descriptions) and so needs to show the raw text. Now, we could certainly consider having it *also* show the pretty text, like in a non-editable line labelled "Formatted rendering of Description" below the Description edit box. I'm not sure that would be a good use of screen space, though, given that the formatted version will generally already be visible in the Pedia entry on that same screen.

Another possible change could be to relabel the description edit box as "Rawtext of Description" rather than "Description"
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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biza
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#17 Post by biza »

lol, you are right!
This is edit field.... just it is in centre of screen and so dominant in relation to pedia window (small in top)that i was always reading description there :p

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adrian_broher
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#18 Post by adrian_broher »

> I'm still on 12, where there is no freeorion in the repos, I tend to pospone upgrades until is really unavoidable so that I don't disturb my C projects, since it's only me who use them.

Must be quite a pain to build FO as both cmake and boost is way below the minimum required version. Do you build the dependencies yourself?
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Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.
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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#19 Post by Oberlus »

adrian_broher wrote:Must be quite a pain to build FO as both cmake and boost is way below the minimum required version. Do you build the dependencies yourself?
Yes, a real pain. I got to the point where I had to download the boost library source code and compile it, got some errors, and considering I haven't yet started with cmake I said "fuck it, lets restart into Windows". If I can do that for some stupid stuff my collaborators and some journals force me to do (e.g. papers must be in recent .docx format, math equations in some M$ privative format) I can do it too to have some fun. In fact, I also play SC2 in Windows.
I'm planing to perform the upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 after proper backups this year, so it won't take long until I can enjoy FO under Linux.

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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#20 Post by Oberlus »

After several single-player games with 0.4.7 RC1 I'm really pleased with it. I lost 1 game out of 10, got huge advantage around turn 150 for 7 games (so resigned) and got a relative challenge in the other 2 games.

In the last game I chose mature Spiral 4-arm, 120 systems, low specials, monsters and natives, medium starlanes and planets, 3 maniacal AIs. We were one cray (I, left side), two Egassem (top and right) and one George (bottom). I played expansionist pacifist-but-not-idiot. George took production advantage from the start and cornered the two Egassems (the right one isolated in its capital system). Near turn 200 George began to pile up armies next to three of my frontline systems. I realised too late that George had more than twice my PPs and already doubled my army size. In a few turns I had lost one of my systems but managed to close two of the three frontier systems with comsats (cannon fodder) and defense-focused planets and gathered all my army in the other frontier system, so did George. We both had majority of Titanic hulls with almost ultimate tech (I had blackshields), but his stack was bigger than mine. At some point he had (IIRC) around 6k dmg, 60 fighters and 9k structure while I had 4.5k dmg, 54 fighters and 5k structure. Then he withdrew more than half his army and took it away somewhere else (the top Egassem still had some systems, although George had maybe 10x its army strength). I felt a bit bad for taking advantage of such an error, but swiftly attacked the suddenly weakened fleet. Lost just a pair of Self-Gravs and Geoger didn't come back in the next turn. 20 turns later I had conquered his two blackhole systems that he was planning to use for solar hulls production (plus it has the blackwhole generators) and it was me who constructed those badasses.

I wonder why he made such a silly movement. If he attacked instead of dividing army I would have lost nearly all my ships (despite playing at home, with three defense-focused planets) and his production rate was twice mine to recover like zergs.

Overall, I'm pleased with the AI, it's really more competent than any other I've battled.

Bilbo
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#21 Post by Bilbo »

Version 0.4.7 (build 2017-04-13.3efa627) (0.4.7 , Mac OS 10.11.6, MacBook Pro 2012, 2,6 GHz Intel Core i7

New to FreeOrion. Fantastic! I have been looking for a turn based strategy game for pass time since AnnoDominari stopped working years ago. Been playing online games but they get too time consuming when you get involved. Thanks for all the hard work so many of you must have been doing. The diversity of all science and ships and buildings are amazing and the AIs are smarter than my limited experience has seen before.
I love to be able to designs my own fleets. I will be learning for a long time before I beat the AIs most of the time.
I played some 4.6 and it was annoying that the turn lag got significant after turn 300. A game with 100 planets and 3 AIs took for ever. At turn over 700 one could make a sandwich and eat it between turns.
The problem seems to persist in 4.7 after 300 even if the lag has become shorter. I just finished a very small game, 70 planets, 3 AIs, no monsters. I got almost beaten a couple of times and it took to turn 750 before the last AI was killed. The lag varies from just 10 seconds (acceptable) to a minute and more (annoying).
I followed the computing on activity monitor and it seems the AIs keep thinking a long time after me. Over all the game does not seem to use all the lap tops CPU resources, only about half.
On old Macs there used to be a way to assign more RAM to applications. Cant find that anymore and don't know if it would help.
I really hope you lovely nerds find a way to fix this lag issue. I really love the game! :D

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#22 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Bilbo wrote:On old Macs there used to be a way to assign more RAM to applications.
FreeOrion is generally not RAM-limited.

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MatGB
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#23 Post by MatGB »

There have been some significant reductions in lag during this cycle, but it's still a problem.

Best/most useful suggestion: scrap old ships when they're obsolete, the more objects that generate effectsgroups there are the bigger the lag, you don't want to eliminate colonies but you can get rid of unnecessary ships.

Second: when the lag gets too great, save the game and restart the app, some players have reported that this can substantially reduce lag.

Third: get better at the game/play more aggressively ;-) More seriously, the balance is that the game should finish by turn 300-400 when you know what you're doing, but while you're learning everything takes longer to learn so it takes more turns to complete, as you learn to finish games in fewer turns the lag'll get less annoying.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#24 Post by Oberlus »

In a previous game in which I had the will to finish all the map off (around turn 300 or 350, I have the end game save if we need it), I kept clicking next turn after all the AIs where obliterated (not even a scout ship remaining) and I'd got the Victory message. So it was just me and the Void, with no fleets moving, only research left was the Transcendence one and can't remember what was in the production queue (for sure some Solar Hull batches). Well, that was the point where I was having more lag from the whole game, around 15 seconds. So I would not blame the AIs for that lag, and maybe the source of that lag (whatever it is) is the same causing trouble to Bilbo.

defaultuser
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#25 Post by defaultuser »

MatGB wrote:Best/most useful suggestion: scrap old ships when they're obsolete.
Or cannon fodder ;)

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#26 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Oberlus wrote:...I have the end game save if we need it...
Yes, please.

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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#27 Post by Oberlus »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Oberlus wrote:...I have the end game save if we need it...
Yes, please.
It turns out I didn't have that save. I thought I had it because when I exited that game it was the very first time I saw that pop up saying game was being saved. But it's nowhere to be found (bug?). So I loaded one of my more advanced game saves and replayed it until victory. Attached. Interestingly, I can't save (button is greyed) if I forward more than two turns after getting victory, so I saved the turn after getting victory (321, victory message was on turn 320). The first turn you advance once loaded the game save (from 321 to 322) will have "normal" lag (in my rag it is around 4-5 secs), the extra lag begins after that (from 322 to 323 and forward, lags around 14-15 secs). So the save name should be "Victory_lag_after_turn_322", but I'm lazy to change it now.
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[The extension sav has been deactivated and can no longer be displayed.]


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MatGB
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#28 Post by MatGB »

The greyed out save button indicates that nothing has changed since you last saved: this will include autosaves, give a single ship an order and it should ungrey.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Bilbo
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#29 Post by Bilbo »

Thanks for all the good advice. I deleted all ship designs that I dont use right now. Restarted the game.
Sadly no improvement. Turns take 3-4 minutes to finish at turn 340. Now I play a 100 planet game with no monsters. Playing smaller systems improves speed but then you never get have production enough to build the larger ships like Dreadnoughts and Solars.
Activity monitor tells me that processes named freeorionca and freeoriond take most of the processing power (close to 100%) and turns finish when they calculate less. I imagine that those are AI brains.
I am still learning but I dont understand how you can be faster and still use the games features. It takes to turn 75 before one can colonise poor robotic planets. It takes to about 150 and then much more to have any decent kind of fleets. The AIs tend to have a lot better production and research until you have black hole generator and terraform your planets. If the buggers build up stealth it takes a lot of time to research detection. I tend to be at 300 before the game really starts.
Oh well, I know you are working on the game all the time and it is still fun. I drink and smoke a lot when I wait for the turns. Fun!

Starionx
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#30 Post by Starionx »

Minor issue.
Systems that have all Spacial bodies occupied with a colony/outpost, still give you the option of creating an outpost base. This is pointless as you will not be able to use it.

Bug?

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