Game speed issues

[dustman]

I've played the game on two different machines, an Asus netbook and Lenovoo laptop. On latter, with bigger memory and SSD, gameplay is smoother, but... let just say, I make some choices, press 'Go' button and switch to another window to read while waiting for a turn end.

 

This is really hard to explain. Few dozens of NPC students don't have any random events, so few rolls required should go relatively fast. Choice of activity for NPC? It's bit limited, and simple logical check should speed up the process quite a bit. So, main problem is prolly with player's. But why? Again, checks for activities are straightforward, adventures are mainly pieces of text with rolls attached, and random events are quite limited in numbers. All in all, whole DB could be loaded to memory at (almost) no problem on any nova-days iron. Even w/ simple associative arrays it shouldn't be as slow as we have it atm... Although if everything is stored as plain text and text parsing is involved at every check

[Legate of Mineta]

dustman;

 

Although I'm sure it can be optimized further, there are a lot of actions to process, store and evaluate, and it's done serially for each Students, via initiative. It does take time.

[dustman]

dustman;

 

Although I'm sure it can be optimized further, there are a lot of actions to process, store and evaluate, and it's done serially for each Students, via initiative. It does take time.

 

Legate, I've been playing Hanako games for a week or so. While their games are much simpler, almost everything happens in an instant. With, lets say, a hundred students in Academagia, you'd need probably few dozens checks per usual day, and with GHzs CPUs I'd expect it to be fast.

[Schwarzbart]

Hm I dont know what kind of computer you have but my turn times are just a vew seconds even near the end. (but I didn't try the CP3 so fare)

[Legate of Mineta]

dustman;

 

As I wrote, I am sure it could be optimized further. But...it is slow. It is not a matter of dozens of checks, but many hundreds, and each are checked against the next.

 

Hanako's excellent games do not require more information than the player's character sheet and flags, and so it's much faster. Scheherazade, for instance, is also blindingly fast in comparison to Academagia. They are dramatically different kinds of games, I assure you.

 

Undoubtedly Academagia could be faster, though.

[freespace2dotcom]

hmmm.. Legate, is the game capable of utilizing multiple CPU cores?

[Legate of Mineta]

Free;

 

It's not written to take advantage of multi-core processing in the way that I *think* you are thinking of, no.

[freespace2dotcom]

Well I don't think it's such a critical thing for now, but if future years progress down the path I think it will, You might want to consider it since by the time Y3+ is released I suspect the vast majority of folks will have at least dual core PCs. Even now, single core PCs are pretty uncommon so that might solve a good deal of the speed issue in the future without having to focus on perfect optimization....

[Albert]

I'm playing on an Asus laptop and each turn barely takes any time at all. Unless I missunderstood that somehow.

[Nyaa]

so few rolls required should go relatively fast. Choice of activity for NPC?

From what I see from the mod tool, each turn every single npc seems to be rolling percentage chance for their action. They seems to first roll for the list of AI magnitude, then roll the chosen AI magnitude from the combination of Goal, interest, personal, studies, and vendetta to ultimately decide their actions (Vendetta seems to be additional roll but it have to be unlock first). Somewhere between these, the NPC also roll for their personality preference which seem to determinate bonus expand for their action. Finally they roll for their actions. So they would at least take four phases of rolling for each npc to take their random action for the sake of very randomness.

 

Then there seems to be a overall memory thing that player and/or npc accumulate that eventually slow the game down, could be bad memory optimization, but it's hard to tell without some testing.

 

I think it might be possible to psudo-remove the random action and replace it with static stats growth via the modtool by removing some entry and mod a section to 100% success to cut down a little loadings, but that would have to assume it's the npc fault for slowing down late game, although it's mostly them for slowing down each turn. How much it would cut is probably negligible unless your cpu is old.