Author Topic: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010  (Read 44092 times)

Offline x4000

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #105 on: July 23, 2010, 08:46:31 am »
Many thanks on the congrats!

And, makes sense on the Mac version, it seems like the intel Mac version ought to be a closer fit.
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Offline AlexV

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #106 on: August 07, 2010, 12:32:35 pm »
I've been playing Tidalis a bit now. They are completely different games, so this is probably a hugely unfair comparison, but is there anything to infer from the much longer load / startup time of Tidalis? I'm hoping it's just because it loads more (or bigger?) stuff than AI War, rather than being a limitation of Unity's resource loading...

For comparison, on my system time from launch to menu for AI War is ~2.2 seconds; for Tidalis is over 4x longer at ~9.5 seconds.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #107 on: August 07, 2010, 12:35:59 pm »
Tidalis has to load a surprisingly large amount of stuff, whereas AI War has historically done a lot of delayed loading on ship graphics and whatnot.  I'm not exactly sure what to expect with regard to loading time, but I wouldn't worry about it.
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Offline eRe4s3r

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #108 on: August 07, 2010, 02:38:52 pm »
Load time seems to be 10s for me too, and i am on a Six-Core DDR3 4GB ram system which i would think means.. that the loading is somehow having an issue with the many small files.

I think this could be fixed by having a large pack file with an file index
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #109 on: August 07, 2010, 02:42:30 pm »
Sure, and Unity's normal way of doing things would have pretty much everything packed up in the assets bundles, but then it would take unpack/pack (or even compile) actions to add, remove, or modify any art or sound asset.  Which means more dev time, and makes it harder on graphic/sound modders.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #110 on: August 09, 2010, 09:04:48 am »
Actually, it makes it impossible on graphics/sound modders. But yeah, tidalis actually has about 4x the graphics bulk in size that ai war does. We do a fair bit of delayed loading (and unloading, to keep ram usage reasonable) in tidalis, but all the stuff we know we will need in tidalis we load from the start, which is where that bar comes from.

In the case of ai war, most ship graphics we never know which you'll need, so we'll continue loading them as-needed as you play. Actually, unity will so a far better job with that than we were doing with raw .net; we will be able to easily stream those in behind the scenes rather than causing the lag and hitching that you otherwise see on an ai war first load of a savegame.

Should be good!
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #111 on: August 09, 2010, 09:08:09 am »
Actually, it makes it impossible on graphics/sound modders.
Don't underestimate the determination of modders ;)  Most of them will bounce off the wall, but my guess is that (if motivation was present) within a couple months one of them would find or write an unpacker/packer to work with the format.  But it would make things a major pain, to be sure.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #112 on: August 09, 2010, 09:11:07 am »
Well, fair enough. ;)

Oh, and we didn't even mention the other downsides like difficulties distributing minor updates and tracking version changes, etc. For games that change frequently, the benefits are many and numerous to having large numbers of individual small files.
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Offline AlexV

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #113 on: August 09, 2010, 09:56:41 am »
Not that I'm saying it's necessarily the right approach here, but for a similar requirement of mod-friendliness vs. load performance on a bit of software I worked on, we just checked the last modified stamp of the resources folder at startup. If it changed, then we ran a compilation step over all the small easily user-modifiable files to produce a single non-modifiable file, then loaded that. Every time the files in folder changed it would take a comparatively long time to launch, but after that was much quicker. Resources did not change often (unless you were working on a mod, of course!)

It wasn't for loading graphics files, though, so who knows whether it would have any beneficial effect with those. With web development there's a technique for loading a single large graphics file then clipping the smaller images out of it as needed, but whether that's helpful or not with Unity I've no idea.

When you get right down to it, though, if Tidalis has about 4x the resources to load, and is loading about 4x slower than AI-War, then that sounds about right to me.

Offline x4000

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #114 on: August 09, 2010, 10:23:04 am »
Yeah, nnormally I'm all for jit precompiling, too. In this case, the other challenge with graphics  loading is that your graphics card can't actually natively use any useful format as a texture. We store graphics in png format because they are full quality, compressed, common, easy to use, etc. But in order to load the graphics into a usable format, they have to be loaded from disk, decompressed, converted to the native graphics card format, recompressed as part of that process (to make sure as much as possible fits on the gpu ram), and then it's ready to go.

In the case of how unity handles things normally (not what we do with unity), it does a precompilation step on the assets as they are added to the project, and then stores them in a big single-file blob of some sort in the native graphics card compressed format. It's very clever in many respects because they can just load that one file and then they are ready to go -- no format conversions at all. But it's also got a lot of drawbacks for games of the sort we make. If we just released games and then forgot about them, the unity way would be the clear choice, but thankfully that's not so. ;)

That said, I do hope to have a hybrid solution at some point in the future, but for now it's relatively low on my priority list for the reason you mentioned.
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Offline RCIX

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #115 on: August 23, 2010, 03:57:41 am »
I'm curious; have you guys actually started with the Unity port, or are you still gearing up?
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Offline x4000

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #116 on: August 23, 2010, 09:41:44 am »
Still gearing up, in the main.  Our goal has been to get all the other tweaks we wanted in (that's about done), all the CoN stuff in for at least the first versions (that's basically done), and to get through the most important parts of the bug reports forum, which had grown rather large (that's getting close).

In related news, the v3 of Unity is getting pretty close from what we hear, too.  We're on something like beta 4 or 5 from them, and those are getting a lot more stable, etc.  So hopefully that might coincide with AI War 4.0 being fully released in early to mid October, which is the current goal.  Hopefully we'll have AI War pre-4.0 unity versions out in mid-September, so that public beta testing can begin on them then.  We shall see.

That said, some of the work we've been doing in the last few weeks also doubles for the unity port, such as the lobby redesign.  That was a good 6ish hours of work right there that was easier to do BEFORE the switch, and which saves us at least that much time off the switch.  There have been a few other things like that behind the scenes, both on the AI War and the Tidalis side; the new Tidalis sound subsystem that was added in 1.003 for that game is what will be used for AI War, and it's finally robust enough to do what AI War needs.

So... we're getting there.  But in a lot of real respects we can only do one thing at a time, so it's a rather specific order of operations to get all this done.  I also wrote out a big honkin internal conversion notes document for the code, so that if Keith is working on that while I'm out on paternity leave (which is likely to be the case), then he'll at least have design notes in hand!
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Offline RCIX

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #117 on: August 23, 2010, 06:30:29 pm »
8)
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Offline x4000

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #118 on: August 25, 2010, 03:46:20 pm »
Incidentally, we started on this on Monday and are solidly into it now.  Still a ways off from having something we can provide as a playable beta, but it's at least getting some notable progress1
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Offline Spikey00

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Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010
« Reply #119 on: August 25, 2010, 03:47:53 pm »
Excellent to hear, nonetheless.  I'm sure us players can suffice with waiting for until October.  ;)
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