Prerelease 3.084 (2 New AI Mods, Balance tweaks and bugfixes)

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, that seems to indicate that this was the "StartGame" sound, so perhaps the first sound effect it had played in a little while (the tab sounds on the main menu or lobby would have been playing earlier).

But the disabling of the sound device shouldn't have caused the null reference that seems to have happened, which looks like it had a null in an array of sound-file objects.

Of course, there could be a line skew between the stack trace and the version of the source file I'm looking at.

[Draxis]

I dont know if this is a new issue or not.  We had a 3 player game going, and we were trying to find the cause of what looked like frequent lag spikes (WAIT: 0 next to players for about half a second).  After a few dead ends, we tracked it down to changing the main view to a different system.  Each time one of us changes our view to a different planet, the client hangs for 600-800ms.  This hangs everyones game for the same length of time.  When you have 3 players franticaly mobilising forces, changing build queues, placing defences, and checking AI systems in preparation for a CPA, the game becomes a slideshow.

If I hit F3 to show processing times, then zoom to a control group in another system, the 'Max Process / Render MS' reads something along the lines of '21(1)/659'.  I can flip between 2 systems as much as I like and the situation does not improve.  Flipping between them twice a second stops the game for everyone until I give my fingers a rest.

When we found this, we tried disabling planet backgrounds, starfields, etc, but it didn't help.  The only thing we could change that had a direct effect on the speed to switch systems is the game resolution.  If we play in 1024x768, it takes about 150ms to change system.  1920x1080 takes about 700ms.  Why does it take so long to change system, and why is it directly effected to game resolution?

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, it could be related to the icon grouping stuff, did you have icon grouping on (Icon grouping distance != 0)?  If so, try it with it off to see if that makes a difference.

[x4000]

It might well be the icon grouping, but if not here are two things I will point out about what happens on switching planets:

1. It triggers a garbage collection on the client doing the switching (this causes a bit of load, but prevents worse load later and would not be affected by the resolution).

2. If there are images that you have never seen yet on that planet, then it has to load those from disk.  Depending on what is going on with your disk and how many new graphics are all onscreen at once, that can cause an IO-related spike of even a couple of seconds if it is early in the game.  If that was the cause, though, then subsequently switching back and forth between the first and second planets would then not cause any more lag after the first time, since the images would already be in memory.

So in the end my guess is also the icon grouping, but those other two I thought would be a good thing for people to know.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, could be the icon grouping since it's having to recalculate the groupings... but on the other hand it has to do the same work every time you change the pan or zoom of the viewport *at all*, so if that were it then whenever someone decided to pan the screen around everything would grind to a halt (since that would be executing much more than twice a second).

So dunno.

[x4000]

Actually, maybe it has to do with the starfield nebula calculations.  That gets signficantly more complex as the screen resolution goes up, and it does not cache those between viewings of different planets.  Perhaps adding the ability for it to cache those for starfield seeds that are actually still in the current game would be a good idea.  It wouldn't use a ton of memory, and it would prevent that issue on switching of planets if that's what it is.

[Draxis]

There is no disk activity when switching between systems (according to procmon).  Icon grouping didn't have a noticeable effect (this happens just as bad in a system with 20 ships as it does 2000).  We tried disabling all star backgrounds and it didn't have any effect, so unless its generating the background and not displaying it, I dont think that is an issue.

[x4000]

Okay, if you used "Disable Starfields" that would have made it do no recalculation there.  So... hmm.  That will take some more investigation, then.

[superspeck]

Pardon me for completely missing out on the discussion if there is one, but I couldn't find it... but has anyone commented that the Heavy Beam Cannon's beam looks a lot too much like a tractor beam?

[keith.lamothe]

I thought so too but wasn't sure what color to use.  Could go back to the red/orange of other beam weapons, I suppose.

[MaxAstro]

A nice solid green might be appropriate; was kind of what I pictured before I saw the thing in action.

[Ozymandiaz]

A nice solid green might be appropriate; was kind of what I pictured before I saw the thing in action.

I was thinking the same, inspired by the empires lasers in star wars 

[Mánagarmr]

Problem with greens is that it is very much like an engineering repair/build beam, as is red.

[Ozymandiaz]

Well, as long as its just different I am all good with it, I rather liked the bluish color now, maybe make it a bit thicker? Or just make it more whitish?

Since it blink on and off when its killing I don't see much of a problem with it currently either tbh

[Draxis]

Unhandled exception when trying to save my game

18/03/2010 20:50:15 (3.0.8.4)
-----------------------------------Application_ThreadException-----------------------------------System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.
   at System.Text.Encoding.GetBytes(Char[] chars, Int32 index, Int32 count)
   at System.Text.Encoding.GetBytes(String s)
   at AIWar.Compressor.CompressStringBig(String text, Int32 CompressionLevel) in C:\vcprojs\AIWar\Framework\Compressor.cs:line 15
   at AIWar.GameForm.DoFullSync(Boolean IsForSave, Boolean IsForDump, Boolean ShowDialogs, Boolean SendBeginFromLobby, Int32 JustForPlayerNumber) in C:\vcprojs\AIWar\GameFormParts\NetworkHandling.cs:line 1776
   at AIWar.GameForm.DoSaveGame(String Filename, Boolean ShowDialogs) in C:\vcprojs\AIWar\GameFormParts\NetworkHandling.cs:line 1631
   at AIWar.Windows.SaveGame.AfterSaveConfirm(Boolean IsYes) in C:\vcprojs\AIWar\Windows\SaveGame.cs:line 122
   at AIWar.Windows.ModelessConfirm.btnYes_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) in C:\vcprojs\AIWar\Windows\ModelessConfirm.cs:line 42
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Label.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)