Prerelease 3.163 (Bugfixes, Perf+, ForegroundObject refactoring)

[rubikscube]

x's mission is to make ai war playable on a puny processor such as the ipad (or at least ultraportables)

[Weapon Master]

Just played my Bug.sav again and noticed a big improvement in the time it takes to repair all of the fighters. I never checked but it might have taken about 10 minutes in the old version, in this update it took about 30 seconds. Its nice but the throttle on the engineers drives me crazy knowing that I could save about half a second if they would just change.

[keith.lamothe]

Its nice but the throttle on the engineers drives me crazy knowing that I could save about half a second if they would just change.

Yea, the difficulty is that having even 9 non-frd engineers out of range of anything it could help, on a planet with about 4000 friendly units made the difference between 20ms sim cycles and 60ms sim cycles (the difference was observable by putting the engies into low-power mode).  So they got the throttle

[Buttons840]

Let me ask this here before submitting a bug report.

Currently the fortresses will focus all the firepower on a single bomber, while it's friends plunder the system.  One volley could probably kill 80% of all enemy units in the system, but instead of sparing that one volley, the fortress opts to fire a dozen or more volleys against that single bomber.  Once it's done with that sole bomber, only then does it fire the two volleys necessary to kill every other enemy unit on the planet - unless it gets stuck on another bomber.

Now that I think about it, this could be quite a boon if I make the AI's forts do the same.

[rubikscube]

targeting is always hard to really make ideal for every situation and we did have a big discussion about that.

[Volatar]

I was playing with Infiltrators earlier, and was really wishing they would spread their fire around, as they do engine damage.

Oh well 

[x4000]

It depends on how much comes into range, and when.  You should observe your forts starting to kill all sorts of things at once as the battle goes on.  That's certainly what happened to me against a fort in a recent test I was doing.  The first few volleys may be overly concentrated, the next would not be, depending on when stuff comes into its range, etc (and how).  That's definitely something we're always tuning, too, the balance between performance and... well, a different kind of performance... is always the ongoing fight.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, there's lots of competing goals with the autotargeting.  One of the things that won a DLC poll a while ago that we implemented was logic so that "if you only have overkill targets in range, go ahead and shoot them anyway", which is what you're seeing there:

1) The fort asked for a target list, got one, and the only thing actually in range was the bomber.
2) It processes the list, and the "oh, I've only got overkill stuff actually in range" logic kicks in and sets the fort's IsIntentionallyOverkilling flag.
3) It actually does the firing logic, and the IsIntentionallyOverkilling flag makes it suppress the usual "this thing is going to die, take it off the list" logic and it unloads the full clip on that poor bomber.
4) The fort asks for a new target list roughly every 2 game-seconds, but due to the throttles it's unlikely to get one immediately unless you don't have many ships asking for lists or they aren't having to search/sort lots of targets... anyway, it will wait 10 seconds before actually escalating the request to the higher priority throttle (or if it actually kills everything on the in-range list, it gets a different priority), so other stuff may come into range in the meantime, and the fort may or may not have them on its target list, and if it's not on the list, it don't get shot.

One thing I did add recently was another alternate-priority throttle for ships whose in-range lists are composed entirely of overkill targets (note that engine-damage-priority ships like spider turrets and Riot shotguns consider something overkill if it's engine-health-after-shots is less than or equal to the engine-damage-floor of the weapon), and that has helped a lot for some cases.

I guess, for irony and style points, I could add a control node for "don't intentionally overkill"   That wouldn't solve the problem outright but it would probably get the fort a new list faster once it cleared the list, and it wouldn't waste as much reload time (though a while ago we did change it so that "wasted" shots that don't even reach a target before it dies actually "refund" most of the reload time if it was recently shot, etc).

Anyway, I could go into more detail (there is actually quite a bit more), but I think that should do to demonstrate the complexity of the situation

[Giegue]

I've noticed that engineers don't auto assist all at once anymore. they do so one at a time, which takes up more time.

[x4000]

Updates in 3.163:

    *  More internal optimizations that make loading savegames faster than ever, reduces RAM use a bit more, and somewhat lowers the overhead of having a lot of ships moving around in the galaxy. Also makes rendering lots of ships on the screen slightly more efficient, and corrects a few display-related bugs.

    * With these latest changes, the positions of harvesters loaded from past savegames will unavoidably be off by a small amount (this has little effect other than visual), but new harvesters that are placed will be in the proper locations. Other ships may also be off by a tiny amount, but same thing with them.

[Buttons840]

I've noticed that engineers don't auto assist all at once anymore. they do so one at a time, which takes up more time.

Depends on how you look at it I guess.  If you have 10 ships needing repair they will all be repaired in the same amount of time whether the engines focus their efforts or spread out.

3 updates today.  I am reminded of the first time I though "if zipping a file reduces it's size, what if I zip the zip?"  Seeking the holy grail of compressing terabytes of data into 2 bytes.  Is this what your trying to do with AI War's ram usage?

[x4000]

Heh, you forget that stuff is cumulative -- so for these insanely huge games that some people play, they now use less RAM, etc, and perform better.  And on smaller computers it's more compatible, etc.  There's only so far this can be taken, but these are some updates I've been wanting to do for a while.

[Buttons840]

Just to make sure you see this, I will link it here:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5724.msg42163.html#msg42163

The icons in the game setup minimap are not aligned.

[keith.lamothe]

Is this what your trying to do with AI War's ram usage?

This will run on a toaster!!

Er, well, what I mean is: as we add stuff, it generally consumes more RAM, sometimes quite a bit of it, sometimes way more than it needs to.  Our optimizations focus on that last category, basically cleaning up the messes we've made.  Though sometimes it's cleaning up messes that have always been there.  And sometimes it's taking an already "tidy room" and doing something insane to make it like 500% cleaner (that's when you get things like "my Riot starship has ants in the pants!").

So it's kind of a balancing act, much moreso than games that don't get much in the way of new features.

On the engineer auto-assist thing, I'm not uncaring I can tweak the throttle to be better at recognizing "this engineer only had to scan 10 targets, not 4000, so don't crank the throttle as much".  I just didn't know how big a deal it would be until the player feedback came in.  So thanks for that

[Volatar]

Just to make sure you see this, I will link it here:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5724.msg42163.html#msg42163

The icons in the game setup minimap are not aligned.

A screenshot would help.