I've already "played" four of such games with me as observer and no other error/problem arised.
I've got FO crashes/unexpected exits when I first start FO after recompiling and starting a new game (few: maybe half the times), that does not happen again after I try to start the same game after the crash/exit. SO maybe this problem I got here was related to this behaviour.
dbenage-cx wrote:I assume by lag, you mean during the turn update/saving steps, if not can you describe the lag (and ignore the other questions).
Do the updates still take as long if you completely exit the client and reload?
Is there a noticeable change when saving between different save formats [...]?
The lag is as follows:
Right after I click on Start, the game begins and turns pass at around 2-3 turns per second without me doing anything else. In fact, I wouldn't know how to stop/pause the game, sitreps just keep coming (BTW, I don't know who's empire are the sitreps I see, so I base my considerations on what I can see from Pedia and statistics graphs).
As the game progresses, the rate at which turns pass goes down. By turn 150 each turn requires several seconds, from turn 250 onwards it may take 15 seconds per turn. This numbers depends on the number of AIs in the game and on the map size (obviously). The GUI is properly responsive during all this process, although the mouse my have some delay to move once the game is very advanced (more specifically, I notice no delay when moving mouse at the first turns, I notice it from turn 150 onwards, and the delay only applies for a pair of seconds when I start moving the mouse, then it keeps responsive if I keep moving it).
If I open to the save/load/options menu, I see the load and save options greyed out, and the game keeps going on behind the menu (turns keep advancing, ships move around the map, sitreps keep getting updated, etc.). If then I click on resign, the usual "save game is in progress" appears but seems to take a long time, and I just click on exit without saving. If then I go to the auto folder to check saves, there is no file at all (not even autosaves from previous single-player games). Looks like FO is trying to save files but that's is somehow overriden by the multiplayer setting?
Next game I'll set autosave rate to every 10 turns (instead of default 1) and see how this affects the lag, and repeat that using binary/non-binary-compressed/non-binary-uncompressed.