Matrix Games Forums

Many things recently made me wonder whether it would be impossible to implement a 'real' real time setting - so that a second of game time was a second of real time? Is that too hard to do, Dave? I realise it wouldn't be used all the time, but I would prefer it a lot, to get a real feel of things. I hate it when counters go suddenly marching off at double speed, covering more ground than they ever could in real life (presumably because the processor has just dealt with them or something). Is it impossible to add as an option, in the patch, say? Others have asked for it too. At the moment, of course, though this game is flagged everywhere as a 'real time' game, it's actually not that at all. Usually, I find, on my laptop, a second of real time on slowest setting takes up about one minute to five minutes of game time. Then, as I said, there can clearly be bottlenecks (even on my bigger desktop) with periods of long inactivity followed by rapid changes, which are hard to keep track of.

Should add - I have read all the previous older posts on this, and I shouldn't, I suppose, accuse you of saying it's 'real time' when you insist it's 'continuous' etc. But my question really was, and stands - can't you just add 1:1 time in as an option, just put it in the new patch to keep me happy? I imagine that's really easy for you clever coding guys to do - you know, just write a little line of code or something to add the button....

Oh I see. First slander then flattery. Where will it all end? [8|]

Yes it is do-able but no it won't happen in the next patch. There is too many other higher priority items to do before that. Besides it is not a trivial thing you are asking since we never designed such a feature into the scheduling code. In effect we would need to pad things out - ie make the computer go slower. I'll put this on the wish list for the next game.

I would like to see this as well. I was envisioning that there would be a level of play that like the "painfully realistic" where you CAN NOT pause the game, study the situation and issue orders. Instead, should you wish to study the situation or issue orders, one would click a button and go to actual time speed. Pausing the game however would lock out issuing orders and blank the screen leaving only a return to game button. Bottom line is commanders never get to freeze the battlefield. Wouldn't this be fullfilling the vision statement of Panther Games?

Thanks Dave. Look forward to the Russian front. Two years?

Careful with this, there are certain order settings which currently only 'take' if set while in paused mode (delayed orders, changes to order durations etc), also examining the Estab/database - changes to detection 'kick' the user from the Estab panes if the simulation is running.