Megaglest 3.3.2 beta1 (Outdated!)

[silnarm]

By the end though, it got super-slow.  There was probably a 1 second delay between mouse movement, clicking, etc. that made it hard to use.

I was wondering when the first such report would come in.

But yeah, happens to me a lot of times. Not a bug, I think, though. 

I suspect I know exactly what the problem is, and I would consider it a bug, a well masked one, but a bug none the less.

Let us know how this plays. Also I wonder why no-one mentioned if the sound problems have been fixed or not?? Do we only report bad things here or do we report if something has been fixed?

In general you should probably only expect bad things to be reported, for a dev working on Glest, 'Silence is golden'.

[softcoder]

Hi Silnarm, are you going to look into the items that you pointed out and possibly checking some fixes? IF not could you share what you believe the problem to be?

Thanks

[ultifd]

I suspect I know exactly what the problem is, and I would consider it a bug, a well masked one, but a bug none the less

Yeah.

vanilla Glest (v 3.2.2)

aka Original, wiiboy. 
We should say original... 

Right, one other problem: I'm using the vbros pack 4, and at roughly the same point in the games I play, the game speeds up like crazy (i.e. twice normal playing speed, so units are producing, moving, etc. faster).

Is that because of vbros pack, or megaglest.  I'll try using the debug switches as a test

Maybe you accidentally speed up'ed the game by pressing... the "+" key... 

[titi]

for the speedup problem:
This is a problem that always was in glest since i know it! Look at the bugs section you will find several posts about it.
It seems to happen more often on slower machines. ( I saw this error too on my old computers )
If anyone ( silnarm ?? ) knows whats the problem, please fix/describe it!
I think this bug has something to do with the automatik speedup of the game if something took too long, but I have completly no idea whats going wrong.

For slowdown in games with 8 players( happens with 4 players too). I think its maybe your computer which isn't fast enough for all these units ( pathcalculation unit ... ) ? But if its a bug, does silnarm has an idea whats wrong?

[silnarm]

I don't have any magic solution for slow machines, but this problem also affects computers that should be able to run Glest just fine, and will, as long as no one assigns too many workers to the same resource patch.

The A* frequently 'floods' on path requests from harvesters, what should be short and quick path calculations instead involve searching for an unreachable destination, a node limit stops such searches eventually.

With the node limit exceeded, the closest cell to the target that was found to be reachable is selected and the unit heads there. This is the 'well masked' part, the behaviour is correct, the worker heads towards the resources, and will more than likely end up next to them and start harvesting, but what should have been a very short and cheap path calculation, was in fact quite the opposite.

Further, in a congested resource gathering area, that path will often be thrown away because it becomes blocked, causing the whole process to repeat.  Get a few units doing this on a regular basis, and you have a lot fruitless path calculation going on.

I'll patch it up somehow, I've used a few different solutions for this problem, the latest is by far the best, but it's heavily reliant on a lot of code that I don't want to be moving into another codebase just now, as it may need some maintenance yet.  I'll dig up one of the old solutions.

Cheers.

[MJR]

As far as the computer slow down It is caused because with 4 or 8 players there are hundreds of units on the map eating up video ram then when you have a big battle and a lot of units are killed the video tries to catch up to where it should be and so everything for a second or two goes at high speed to catch up to where the places it was ask to be with the units left. So the problem is not enough video ram for the game play at high units engaged in the game. To solve this you need to limit the amount of units on the game at one time or go get a 2 to 4 gigabite video card that would only cost you about 1500 to 2500 dollars. The more video ram the more units it will support at normal game play.

[ultifd]

As far as the computer slow down It is caused because with 4 or 8 players there are hundreds of units on the map eating up video ram then when you have a big battle and a lot of units are killed the video tries to catch up to where it should be and so everything for a second or two goes at high speed to catch up to where the places it was ask to be with the units left. So the problem not enough video ram for the game play at high units engaged in the game. To solve this you need to limit the amount of units on the game at one time or go get a 2 to 4 gigabite video card that would only cost you about 1500 to 2500 dollars. The more video ram the more units it will support at normal game play.

Yeah, basically... but I'd rather have a laggy game than to spend 1500 to 2500 bucks... 

[MJR]

I was only letting you know why the slow down and there are only two ways to fix it either limit the number of unit that can be on the map at one time or get a bigger video card or you just have to live with the lag in the game.

[titi]

This has nothing to do with video ram. The units are calculated in the CPU and only if they are displayed the Graphics card gets something to do.
And there are several other games out there which are much more demanding concerning graphic power.
Like silnarm i think too the reason for the slowdown is mainly pathcalculation and unit handling in general.

[MJR]

All I know is both Glest and MegaGlest runs fine in the early part of the game but as the game goes on the game gets more choppy and if I was to end the game at the time it gets choppy by hitting escape on the end menu there are hundreds of units produce by most of the players and you can't tell me with over 1200 units it doesn't put a demand on a 1 gig video card. Because any other game I play where there are lets say a hundred or a hundred and fifty units on the board it don't  get choppy at all. And the 1200 units is only a 4 player game on 8 player it was over 4000 units.

[MJR]

In fact have you ever looked at a map played by you and the AI the AI has dozens and dozens of buildings of the all types plus it makes about 75 to hundred workers that in the end game is so crowed that most can't harvest anything no room to move between the buildings and workers not to mention the fighting troops no wonder my video card gets over taxed with such stupid out of control building and mass of mostly useless units. It looks like a ant hill but instead of moving out into the map they stay pretty much in there starting location so it gets way over populated very fast. I say about 20 minutes into the game is where I start to see the choppiness and the longer the game goes the worse the choppiness gets. And only a mass attack with lots of units destroyed does it ever get any better and then only for a few minutes until they rebuild the buildings and useless units.then the choppiness is back.

[titi]

Only those units get rendered which are currently visible on your screen! So if they are not visible, it doesn't effect the videocard.
But if its slows down if lots of things are displayed it might be a problem of your video card. But I can't imagine that any videocard which can handle glest has problems with memory usage. We are really using tiny textures ( compared to other games )  and don't have lot of vertices.

[MJR]

Well when I play other games with let say 100 or so things on the screen at a time no problem in choppiness and no problem with Glest either until you get to about 500 units. See 500 small units would be about 100 medium units. And the choppiness in Glest doesn't get really bad until about 800 units now you see a little choppiness in the fluid movement but after 800 it starts to get really bad. And by the time it gets to 1200 and beyond it looks like the old strobe like films. You know back in the 19 teens the hand crank movie projectors well that is about the way Glest and MegaGlest looks like and I've had 3 different video cards since I found Glest all about the same accept the more video ram I have the longer it takes for the choppiness to happen. Now on average don't see it for the first 20 to 25 minutes. At first I had a 250 megabit ddr 3 video card and it would be choppy after only 5 to 10 minutes. Then I got a 512 ddr 2 video card and it took between 14 to 17 minutes for it to become choppy. Now I have a 1 gig ddr 3 with 256 bit interface and like I said on average 20 to 25 but not really bad until about 35 minutes into the game. Now all these numbers are base on 3 AI and my self in regular Glest  and a little shorter time with 7AI and me playing in MegaGlest. There is also depends upon the faction I use for me and the AIs some factions build buildings and those workers earlier in the game and some take more time. So I am giving you a average not exact times.

[-Archmage-]

MJR, please do not go on with the stuff about lag.
I don't really think that there is all that much you can do about it.

[MJR]

That was my point in the first place that with this game and the lack of video memory you will get it it is everyone else that says it is the game and needs to be fix please read what I said and not assume. But the sound on the other hand in regular Glest is fine MegaGlest it sticks badly. In fact the last version of MegaGlest it only stuck once in a while this version it is almost all the time during the game.

[jda]

and I've had 3 different video cards since I found Glest all about the same accept the more video ram I have the longer it takes for the choppiness to happen. Now on average don't see it for the first 20 to 25 minutes. At first I had a 250 megabit ddr 3 video card and it would be choppy after only 5 to 10 minutes. Then I got a 512 ddr 2 video card and it took between 14 to 17 minutes for it to become choppy. Now I have a 1 gig ddr 3 with 256 bit interface and like I said on average 20 to 25 but not really bad until about 35 minutes into the game.

Did you change any other hardware in your machine during that time?

[softcoder]

Regarding sound (and performance in general) check glest.ini and set the following values for best performance (only turn them on if you need to debug some problems in glest):

DebugLogFile=
DebugMode=false
DebugNetwork=false

To enable game type debugging to a logfile set:

DebugLogFile=debug.log
DebugMode=true
DebugNetwork=false

To enable full debugging to a logfile set:

DebugLogFile=debug.log
DebugMode=true
DebugNetwork=true

Let me know if that helps at all.

(this is for mega-glest)

[MJR]

No other hardware was added and all debug logs are off will try a game and let you know.

[MJR]

I just played. I was Magic my AI partner was Indian the enemy AI was Tech and Egypt. All was going well until the Indians started there war cry then the sound stuck and chattered. but only during the war cry.

[ultifd]

I have a weird bug, I can't assign a "number" to any of my units for some reason now. 
Like (Ctrl + #) ...

I try to assign them a "number" then it automatically de-selects the units that I just selected.

[MJR]

I believe it has to do something with the sound of the factions. Like the Indians war cry also when they talk it sometime stick but not when it is just the background music. Only when you add the background music with a unit talking or the war cry like in Indians does the sound start to stick and all the sound background and the war cry gets choppy like a stuck record or skipping record.

[ultifd]

I believe it has to do something with the sound of the factions. Like the Indians war cry also when they talk it sometime stick but not when it is just the background music. Only when you add the background music with a unit talking or the war cry like in Indians does the sound start to stick and all the sound background and the war cry gets choppy like a stuck record or skipping record.

Yeah, but I think we already know that, see? 

Ultifd, for me there is a pattern to the glitches...

when units say acknowledgments the background music glitches

Well, what do you mean by acknowledgments?
You mean like when they "say" like attack sounds?
Yeah, I checked. Same for me. I'm not sure if that's the problem though...cause it seems like there are other reasons.

But uh, I'll see If I still have that (Ctrl + #) problem... 

[kris9700]

sounds cool im going to try it out.

[MJR]

So is there any hope of figuring this sticking sound problem out or do we have to just live with it.

[ultifd]

C'mon titi, I tried to quote your post but...