Future of the series

[snelg]

Something I would love to see added would be multiplayer. Especially if it would also be possible to have several players on one empire (it worked great on Europa universalis III etc.). [:)]

[Data]

aha, a new recruit.
welcome to the forums, snelg

[Abraxis]

I'm usually not a fan of multiplayer in 4x games, but this one would probably be alright. No waiting for everyone else's turn, but with the automation, you could still get up, have a smoke, grab a coffee, or go to the bathroom without holding anything up.

[Igard]

ORIGINAL: Abraxis
go to the bathroom without holding anything up.

I beg your pardon? [X(]

[Data]

ORIGINAL: Igard

ORIGINAL: Abraxis
go to the bathroom without holding anything up.

I beg your pardon? [X(]

without slowing the other players turns

[WoodMan]

I'm usually not a fan of multiplayer in 4x games, but this one would probably be alright. No waiting for everyone else's turn, but with the automation, you could still get up, have a smoke, grab a coffee, or go to the bathroom without holding anything up.

Lol, but knowing my luck right at the moment where I'm about to go to the bathroom, grab a coffee and have a smoke Igard would declare war on me or something [:D]

Then it would just be a matter of time, how long until I have to accept subjugation so I can get up

(But don't worry, us Narn have been subjugated before, we can handle it)

[Simulation01]

ORIGINAL: WoodMan

I'm usually not a fan of multiplayer in 4x games, but this one would probably be alright. No waiting for everyone else's turn, but with the automation, you could still get up, have a smoke, grab a coffee, or go to the bathroom without holding anything up.

Lol, but knowing my luck right at the moment where I'm about to go to the bathroom, grab a coffee and have a smoke Igard would declare war on me or something [:D]

Then it would just be a matter of time, how long until I have to accept subjugation so I can get up

(But don't worry, us Narn have been subjugated before, we can handle it)

Yes, you were even beaten before the Emperor while Mollari watched. Give us a scream G'kar!

[Kayoz]

ORIGINAL: Raap

I'm basing my 'assumption' on the fact that graphics require a lot of the CPU. There are several ways we can confirm this. For instance the scenario suggested by another user on this forum who had performance problems; make 100 military ships, and one hostile space port with 200 area weapons using the editor. Attack the space port, and watch as the performance comes to a halt as soon as the space port fires its AoE weapons. Now do it again, but this time quickly move your view to an empty space in the same system so that you can't actually see the battle; this time the performance is completely smooth.

Comparing DW performance to Photoshop? Are you serious? That's your experiment? Your experiment proves nothing - those CPU killing graphical effects aren't rendered - they're sprites.

It seems pretty obvious that you've never written a line of code in your life. Discussing this is like trying to explain partial differential calculus to a 10 year old who's trying to memorize his multiplication table.

*sigh* Buy the book and read it. You're talking shite.

[Raap]

I was comparing DW's *graphical* performance to that of Photoshop's performance without hardware acceleration, which is a big difference from just 'performance' since that includes more factors than just the graphics. At any rate, while personal attacks are always fun, I'd rather you explain it to me yourself actually. You obviously know this stuff, so how is it, when the graphics are 'only a tiny sliver of the processing load', that the game runs smoothly when not looking at the combat, but struggles mightily when looking at it?

[Kayoz]

Photoshop deals with a lot of layers and transparency, so when you load a picture into Photoshop, what's displayed has to be computed first - each layer and transparency adds up to an effect on the final image. Without hardware acceleration, it's all being done by the CPU. With hardware acceleration, all the image layers are just being sent to the GPU, which sorts it all out. That's the reason you see a dramatic shift in performance when you turn on hardware acceleration in PS.

DW's dealing with the image should go through a similar process - but it's far more simplified than Photoshop - there's a pre-defined number of objects and layers, so developers can make shortcuts - and where hardware acceleration is concerned, it's pretty trivial to put it into C#. The AoE weapon firing shouldn't have much if any impact on blitting, with or without hardware acceleration. What it's more indicative of, is an inefficiency in looking up what objects are close enough to the AoE weapon - this might be a code bug, or something as straightforward as the devs using floating point maths to determine the distance. Floating point is atrociously slow compared to integer math. Pick up a copy of Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire - that's the version with the source code. You can see all the areas Chris Camfield put in integer math tricks to approximate floating point - it's not exactly accurate, but it's "close enough" for gaming purposes and increases processes like raycasting dramatically.

Also, DW seems to be riddled with hideous inefficiencies - some like the expansion planner, are quite obvious (if you send a colony ship with the expansion planner, why does it have to regenerate the entire list? All that's required is to drop the "colony ship sent" icon.). There's other areas which aren't so obvious, but most of them have been identified here and there in the forums. What the significance of these are, is the tendency of DW to have features added, without enough time and thought given to efficiency. It's a tendency that's pretty much industry-wide. Why bother to code more efficiently? Just scribble in higher specs!

Look at CPU cores - we're looking at 16-code CPUs, and Zarquon knows how many GPUs have. But how are universities teaching the students to code? It's still pretty much batch processing. But modern computers, with multiple cores requires chunking your code into multiple worker threads. This isn't a technique that's taught in computer dev courses these days. DW has a lot of imagination and innovation in it, but Code Force has to go through the learning process of gaming development. It's not criticism - it's something that everyone has to go through when they go into game development.

[Raap]

Thanks for the writeup, some interesting stuff there.

Still though, it's not all just layers and transparency which requires calculations, is it? I mean, let's take a pretty straight-forward and simple example. Here is a 1920*1200 resolution, or 2.3m pixels, wallpaper: http://www.ewallpapers.eu/view_wallpape ... -2499.html

If I open the task manager to watch CPU usage while scrolling up and down on that picture, I can get my usage as high as 35%( 20% for Opera, 15% for the CSR process). This is a qx9650@3.8ghz and it's idling at 0%. Now, that usage is actually higher than it gets in Distant Worlds, which is as you mentioned mostly single-threaded. Of course, Distant Worlds uses rather low res images; 250*250, or 62k pixels, I believe, for most ships. But still, do a hundred of those ships on the screen at once and it gets difficult. Now do 200 AoE weapon effects at once( which are also 62k pixels, + heavy transparency), and is it really a wonder we have performance problems, potentially bad coding aside?

It's these problems that I think hardware acceleration would practically eliminate, seeing how much faster the GPU could do this stuff than the CPU. This would again of course free up the CPU to put even more power into AI and other stuff, quite likely lessening the need for multi-threading, which I hear is very demanding to program( or as you said, many devs just don't know how).

Or am I going about this completely the wrong way, seeing as I've never programmed graphics?

[HectorOfTroy]

What I think it would be cool is to introduce a bit of RPG into DWs.

For example, since you can automate everything maybe you could have side quests that you would complete with one explorer ship. You could upgrade this ship just like
you would with fantasy RPG characters (more kills, more money) or you could use techs that your Empire has already researched.

Now this RPG element could consist of your explorer ship travelling into another galaxy and trying to solve a mystery of an ancient race, etc. And then actions in this RPG part of the game would influence the RTS part of the game (eg. your standing with other races, new technologies you discovered, etc)

But the problem would be how to implement this RPG element? Maybe enter a new map while the main map would be paused.

I know it might seem silly but I reckon it would be cool

[Data]

Hector, I had the same desire at some point and even if there is an element of difficulty in introducing rpg in DW I think it could be done. But the general impression on the forum at that time is that this would prolongue an already long game; not everyone enjoys it also.
I agreed with that but now that I see you also wanting this (it's not at all silly, I would love it also) I think we should propose it as an option to be checked: whoever wants the rpg stuff can do it and whoever does not want it can check that option and just get the results without the rpg part.

In case you don't know it already, check the Space Ranger series (especially SR2) - it's not 4x but it implements lots of genres in one nice package and rpg fits very well in that game.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: HectorOfTroy

What I think it would be cool is to introduce a bit of RPG into DWs.

For example, since you can automate everything maybe you could have side quests that you would complete with one explorer ship. You could upgrade this ship just like
you would with fantasy RPG characters (more kills, more money) or you could use techs that your Empire has already researched.

Now this RPG element could consist of your explorer ship travelling into another galaxy and trying to solve a mystery of an ancient race, etc. And then actions in this RPG part of the game would influence the RTS part of the game (eg. your standing with other races, new technologies you discovered, etc)

But the problem would be how to implement this RPG element? Maybe enter a new map while the main map would be paused.

I know it might seem silly but I reckon it would be cool

I really like the way Imperium Galactica II handled side stories. They were of little relevance to the main story, but definitely an interesting distraction.

The Solarian pirate war for example...depending on your decisions you could have a never ending pirate infestation, or end up controlling the pirates.

If DW could allow for such things, and have it be player written (IE the 'Triggered Event' the modders want) there would be limitless possibilities.

[Data]

oooo yeesss, that would be AWESOME
++++1 to Shark's idea

[J HG T]

Aye! That, leaders and commanders (probably coming in expansion or big patch)  + enchanced diplomacy (new options discussed all around here) would be all I dare to ask currently. After these, anything else would be icing on the cake.

[HectorOfTroy]

ORIGINAL: J HG T

Aye! That, leaders and commanders (probably coming in expansion or big patch)  + enchanced diplomacy (new options discussed all around here) would be all I dare to ask currently. After these, anything else would be icing on the cake.

Have you guys played Conquest: Frontier wars?
They implemented Admirals pretty well there. Admiral would bring bonuses to the fleet, special abilities and you could order all ships of the same kind in the fleet to perform their special abilities simultaneously (eg fire gravioton beams, etc).
Admirals made it really easy commanding fleets in that game (I loved that game, still got it ).

Also, would love the ability to create fleet formations (wedge, scattered, tight, etc) so the ships in the fleet won't just fly around aimlessly.

[J HG T]

Aye, I have Conquest: Frontier wars. Haven't played it for years but I liked it back in the days when I still played it.  

[Gareth_Bryne]

Diplomatic ships!!!

USES:


* Any spy on a foreign mission should generally take the nearest freighter/D-ship to a planet, and from there route using real ships and waypoints to intended target. James Bond takes American Airlines sometimes, not only private super-jet infiltrators.

* A diplomatic ship in a system with shared planets should move around these planets, resulting in a lessening of relations penalty for sharing a system. Ditto for military ships "just visiting".

* A diplomatic ship can conclude mission:local treaties for a small research\trade\happiness bonus to the participating sides(skewed to the advantage of the owner of the D-ship)

* A D-ship can do passive espionage and "my sweet empire" promotion missions, leading to the message "We are in awe of -empire's- colonies reputation", & increasing chances of a peaceful switch to your empire.

* Other nice\nasty things to be done more interestingly than with the generic, raceless, invisible-on-map-and-in-life-until-captured spy.

A restatement of my idea from the wishlist thread. Distant Worlds, as I see it, is very much about ships, so you can mess with your opponents with an armada, or with one, insignificant speck[:)]. Combining spying with diplomacy is realistic, can be tied with the event system and is usable for roleplaying.

[Kayoz]

ORIGINAL: Raap

Thanks for the writeup, some interesting stuff there.

Still though, it's not all just layers and transparency which requires calculations, is it? I mean, let's take a pretty straight-forward and simple example. Here is a 1920*1200 resolution, or 2.3m pixels, wallpaper: http://www.ewallpapers.eu/view_wallpape ... -2499.html

If I open the task manager to watch CPU usage while scrolling up and down on that picture, I can get my usage as high as 35%( 20% for Opera, 15% for the CSR process). This is a qx9650@3.8ghz and it's idling at 0%. Now, that usage is actually higher than it gets in Distant Worlds, which is as you mentioned mostly single-threaded. Of course, Distant Worlds uses rather low res images; 250*250, or 62k pixels, I believe, for most ships. But still, do a hundred of those ships on the screen at once and it gets difficult. Now do 200 AoE weapon effects at once( which are also 62k pixels, + heavy transparency), and is it really a wonder we have performance problems, potentially bad coding aside?

It's these problems that I think hardware acceleration would practically eliminate, seeing how much faster the GPU could do this stuff than the CPU. This would again of course free up the CPU to put even more power into AI and other stuff, quite likely lessening the need for multi-threading, which I hear is very demanding to program( or as you said, many devs just don't know how).

Or am I going about this completely the wrong way, seeing as I've never programmed graphics?

You're looking at two completely different software packages, and expecting similar behaviour. You might as well compare DW to Big Blue - and say that Big Blue would run remarkably faster if it used hardware acceleration. However, chess calculations aren't something that a GPU can handle (or not without some pretty interesting tinkering) - but that's essentially what you're assuming.

You pointed to an image you loaded to compare results - on the assumption that a single-layer image would be the simplest and require the least handling. But did you check the memory usage? My Photoshop CS4 goes from 90meg memory usage to about 190meg, on loading a 2meg picture. Clearly there's a heck of a lot more going on in Photoshop than loading the bitmap into memory. What is it doing, how is it behaving? You'd need a profiler and the source code to say for certain. Similarly, what's taking up the most CPU time in DW? You'd need to go through it with a profiler to see what's taking up the most CPU time - otherwise, you're just guessing.

As an aside, the generalization you're making is nothing new. Aristotle categorized bats as a type of crow. It's black, it flies, it has wings - so a bat is a type of crow, right? His observations stood for many years, till people finally took a closer look and realized that bats are mammals and not avian.

What happens in DW when you're watching a battle?

1. Attempt to close with target.
Since there's no pathfinding, nothing to go around, it's fairly simple here.
2. Fire any (if any) weapons in range).
3. Display graphics for weapons fired.
#2 and #3 might take a while, depending on how they handle the actions. Does DW raytrace from origin to target and then calculate the positions to successively display the weapon firing (eg: missile, beam or whatever)? Does it individually rotate and scale each image to orient it on the path? If this is done inefficiently, and you have 100+ ships shooting, it could be an enormous amount of work.
4. Locate any other potential targets in range and fire remaining weapons.
In addition to the steps above, now you're looking at the coordinates of each and every object in the system - from fighters to stations, ships, you name it. How does it choose, how does it prioritize? I suspect that the coders didn't test their combat code against hundreds of ships going up against each other - so the code here is very unlikely to be optimized for the situation you describe.
5. Assign damage to targets, display shield glow, update ship graphics for damage taken.
Again, this step can be time consuming. DW tries to place the shield glow for the direction of the attack - so with hundreds of attacks going off - you might be dealing with horrifically inefficient calculations, which are in most cases good enough - but your testing parameters display as being inefficient.

Now, there's the AoE weapons, which go through the above steps, but since they may effect any/all ships in range, what then does DW do? Does it bubble sort through the ships and assign damage till it hits the range limit? It might be fine with 10 ships - but 100, and bubble sort is horribly slow - but it might have been good enough and quick enough to code for the purposes they had in mind.

So you have a lot of potential CPU hogs right there - taking place hundreds of times a second. Will utilizing the GPU help this? Nope, it'll have nothing more than a tiny effect - the vast majority of the work is happening before the image is even being blitted to the video.

And what of the video performance? DW doesn't have to do any graphics work if you aren't viewing the combat, right? So if the whole combat is taking place around the sun, and you put the camera close up on some asteroid on the edge of the system - then ostensibly the performance should shoot up, right? But does it? And what is the performance if you have hundreds of ships peacefully floating around, as opposed to shooting each other? Given the engine sprites, the rotation animations and all - it shouldn't be too much different to have a load of ships flying around, as opposed to half the number shooting each other.

Do you see how the graphics performance is only the tip of the iceberg? Nothing I've seen has identified GPU usage as being a bottleneck in DW performance. Would it benefit from it, assuming it isn't using any hardware acceleration? Probably - but how much might it affect the situation you described? 1%? Perhaps 2? Once again, you're making a large number of assumptions which you don't have nearly enough data. It's like taking a look at someone who has a rash, and saying it's such and such. Is it an insect bite? An allergic reaction? A scrape? Or is it skin cancer? Bubonic plague? You have no data to support your conclusions - all you have to go on, is the "I see inflamed skin" case. Perhaps you can see now, how your acceleration argument is far too premature.