Birth of the Federation

Hello,
while doing some modding I experienced the typical game slowdown in very untypical manners.
Right now I have a game where at turn 310 or so the game didn't really slow down (starting tech level 2, actual tech level 4 to 5).
With vanilla game values the game slows down around turn 100.
Some other mods where new tech levels were reached faster than with vanilla, game speed also slowed down earlier.
Every time I have increased the thresholds more than I was producing science points per turn (compared to vanilla), game speed slowdown was not that heavy as with vanilla (subjective impression!)
The number of ships never seems to have an important influence.

That would mean that the bugs which slows down the game are located in the code part where tech level is managed.
I am not sure if this assumption is right, but all my testing indicated this.

My experiance of slowdown has been a little different. I usually encounter a small but noticable amout of slowdown every 100 turns or so which i assume is related to the old memory leak problem the game suffered so badly with. Also when a major race is encountered, even if you cannot see much or any of there territory the fact that you know have to deal with said major means that per turn more equasions and such have to be processed to execute how the major responds to all your actions etc.

Slowdown has always been a problem for BOTF, Thunder and co have done a lot to improve this but i dunno if it can be complete abolished. >.>

This depends on what type of slow down,

1. old memory leak problem (mouse jerky) this is bad. but most newer system not very noticeable

2. slower Processing between turns, this is good thing IMHO. This just tells me the AI is busy and doing a good job.

thunderchero

thunderchero wrote:
2. slower Processing between turns, this is good thing IMHO. This just tells me the AI is busy and doing a good job.

This happens to me all time.... It takes 1-2 minutes to be done. It happens after turn 400. my highest turn is 574 in medium map with UDML.

What should I do? Start over?? or what?

@29BQ:

I fear as soon as those processing turns start to take 1-2 minutes, there is little that can be done. You can though turn off all unnecessary information in the galaxymap view, and it also helps to save and restart the game from time to time, but don't expect wonders. The only good thing would be that with a reasonable PC system it stays around max. 1-3 minutes until turn 890 (at least as far as I can report). Maybe someone else has more hints in this regard.

Its likely that UDML and any other large galaxy mode Mod may increase the processing time, since naturally your PC will have more data(Systems, Ships, Combats, Buildingqueues) to work on.

Best thing to do is start taking out major empires. And stop playing around lol

thunderchero

After rethinking of the problem I guess my assumptions have to "redeveloped"...
Maybe there is a relation between memory leak and combat?

in my xp: more AI ships= slower game.

The ai redeploys almost everything in every turn (+sets new courses for all ships) and this slows the game down mainly in later stages.
It is also because almost every empire has the greatest amount of ships in later stages.
Imo this continous redeploying is also a source of crashes.

I didn't see it often that the AI built groups of 9 ships. If I want to count all the ships the AI has I usually have to scroll down for a long time. Not always but often.

Had this in a game where I fought 350 ferg ships. It was hard to take a guess where the next sector was I could've attacked them at once. Wanted to have one mega fight but only got 5 fights á 70 enemy vessels

But the speed of the game was almost normal after the devastation

Can't tell much about the other "memory leak" with the mouse slowdowns. Long time ago that I noticed this one.

I'm testing out a 1.03 large map a bit atm. In my actual game everything is quite fast but I haven't met anything, as yet.

So if you don't know anyone and the AI doesn't know anyone, too... I assume the quicker speed has to do that some "subroutines" of the AI aren't activated as yet. It just plays standard-colonization. Guess it will be interesting when I finally meet someone to play with (then the big redeploying will start all over again )

Hope that I will see a new personal record of maximum ships in this game. And the fact that I play a large map should slow down the game a lot, too. Will see. It's some time ago that I played a game.

The turn time is the AI's thinking time.

Think of it like chess.........

you think long and hard about your move, then you make it. Now your opponent looks at your pieces, trys to work out what you are going to do, then thinks long and hard about their next move.
If you both have all your pieces, this takes longer, than if you both only have 2.

Now think about how long you take with a botf move, you re-order your fleets, issue move orders, check your systems and assign build tasks. you may check you intel and research screens. Then you take one last look over your scan range looking for enemy fleets creeping up on you. Now you click turn.

Then the next AI does the same, then the next and so on for all empires.

Before anyone flames, you must assume that there are at least 6 destinct AI's. 1 for the minors and 1 for each empire. If they were all controlled by just 1, they would not fight themselves.

That is turn lag. It can only be improved by upgrading your computer, mainly your processor.


Mouse Lag, is caused by the memory leak.

when you open a build screen, all the necessary graphics are loaded into the ram. When you close the screen, the graphics stay there. Now when you open the screen again, botf loads fresh copies of the graphics into the ram again. This means that if the graphics take say 168kb (don't know actual value), every time you open a build screen, 168kb gets added to your ram. This then happens for every screen you look at.
Now imagine how many screens you see in a 100 turn game.
No matter how much ram you have, eventualy, it will fill up with junk.

Solution is to use a Ram Manager program. This monitors your ram, and any files which are not being used regulary, gets pushed out of the ram into your Paging File (make sure to increase it's size). I have mine running all the time, along with "ebooster", a program which simulates Vista ReadyBoost on XP. I have never suffered from this type of lag on my laptop, even though I only have 512mb Ram.

think i have a new idea to make the game faster....

i am certanly playing "all the ages"(normal,not large) and i was very angry about the fact, that the game slows down about turn 200...
(GAME: medium map, start at tech 1 all empires, playing the romulans, at turn 200, there a many ships and many outposts, lot of minor races & planets)

so i have turned of the system-boni, starnames, terretory colour, ect... suddently the game was as fast as at the beginning, especiallity when i scrolled around the map.
but when i turned on the system names, the scrolling-speed slows down.

the next step was to go into UE and took: (f.e.) cardsn9.fnt, cardsn15.fnt, cardsn20.fnt and cardsn28.fnt, extracted them, copy them four times and rename them to
ferngi9.fnt,.......
human9.fnt,......
klingn9.fnt,........
romuln9.fnt,.......
and bring them back into the sbotf.res-file.
at the end: all empires have now the font of the cardassians.

and (surprise, surprise) the scrolling speed was as fast as at the beginning of the game =D =D =D

the conclusion i make is: the different fonts must be making the difficults during the game, don't know if there is a changing of speed while the turn is calculating....will this test soon in UMD-Large(have to play until there are five empires at war, with huge fleets and a lot of planets ^^)...

The other shown things like systemboni, way of the ships, terretory-colour, range and so on, cause no problem with the speed during the game.

yes, it looks ugly...all have the same fonts (little boring)
also i don't know if there is a problem with the different colours of the fonts or if there is a problem with the different font-styles o_O?
perhaps sombody can find out, because i have no experience in changing fonts for botf, not to speak about font-colours

think this will help...
will keep in toutch with this (but not today....it a little bit late)

greetz& gn8^^

P.S.:

this seems to change all fonts...thought this would only change star-names-fonts.
because of that, the whole game is faster than befor changing...also at round 200 with the map full of ships (have load an old savegame)

but this seems to have no influence on the "turn-time-think-time" =(