Frogboy Frogboy

Beta 4 status report

▼

Beta 4 status report

from Stardock Forums
There's a lot going on this week and we're trying to decide whether to release beta 4 this Friday with updates after that or wait longer.

The last beta 3 beta we're not terribly happy with because of the stacking problems and general slowness.

On the AI side, things are going quite well. The diplomacy aspect of the game is maturing very well. One controversial thing we're doing is that we're going to have the AI be able to do things in diplomacy that you can't do. But I think you'll understand why (or at least most of you). We want the AI to be able to come to you and..well just talk.

Example: Say things like "The Drengin are slowly taking over the galaxy. You and us aren't allied but we should try to counter balance them by constructing star bases to limit their influence. Let's work together informally"

A more controversial example is that I will have the AI complain about things you're doing in the game. But we can't think of a straight forward way to let the human player do the same that doesn't seem really lame. I.e. What would we do, have a "Whine..." where you can select a half dozen things to whine about?

Visually there is a lot of stuff getting put in. The cut scenes and such are getting completed. Most of which won't be part of the beta testing.

Performance has been greatly improved. I do a lot of the AI coding at night on my 600mhz laptop and the drawing performance was just driving me nuts so I spent an evening rewriting some of this and the frame rate trippled. The ships move much smoother now.

Additionally, Cari modified the path finding to be much faster thanks to Red sending us that saved game.

So there's a lot of stuff convering but I'm not sure they'll make it together by this Friday or not.

We'll keep you up to date.
841 views 29 replies
Reply #26 from Stardock Forums Top
Regarding your AI speed and such, one of the great features of the OS/2 version was that you had the AI thinking while the player was making his turn decisions and such. Was there no way to implement this on current windows systems? One would think that a thread for each AI could be running in the background.
Reply #27 from Stardock Forums Top
Kvim, it already does, the Wait symbol on the button means the AI hasn't finsihed for this particular turn. You can do anything while the AI thinks, just not finish your turn until the AI is done..
TouchTasks - Access tasks with ease on Windows touchscreens.
Reply #28 from Stardock Forums Top
The AI in GalCiv is multithreaded.

The only thing that has to be done while you sit there and can't do anything is the pathfinding for the ships. And we hope (after release) to be able to find a way to make path finding take place in a background thread as well.
Reply #29 from Stardock Forums Top
That is a tough problem, from what I gleam from the behavior, You need to do the path finding in the main thread cause the player might be moving ships around and you can't pathfind if you don't know where the players ships are going to be.

Only thing I can think of that can be done about it (with out changing game play of movement) to lockout squares where the players ships can move to. DO all the pathfinding in the background, only do not commit moves that ocure through the locked out squares. Once the player moves a ship allow move commits happen through those squares (unless one of those squrares is where the ship ended up. Then re do path finding for those affected ships) And when they hit next turn comit pathfinding in the forground before you give control to the player.

Clear as Mud? :)

Doesn't completely remove the problem and you may have to overhaul path finding (again.. heh)

But then this may not work since i haven't a clue how the internals are all setup. I always find it usefull to get a fresh perspective on a problem I'm working on, and hope this is usefull for you. Or at least makes you think in a different way as to find a solution.