Build 4.4.257 Feedback

[RockinHarry]

ORIGINAL: wodin

Is there any chance that when a unit becomes slow on a certain type of ammo they automatically lower their ROF (Unless obviously they are in a massive firefight). Or we get a radio message telling us a unit is say at 25% ammo or something so we can go see if we need to turn the ROF down?

IIRC from reading the manual, it is already so that ROF goes down automatically, when a certain treshold (50%?) is reached.

[wodin]

ORIGINAL: RockinHarry

ORIGINAL: wodin

Is there any chance that when a unit becomes slow on a certain type of ammo they automatically lower their ROF (Unless obviously they are in a massive firefight). Or we get a radio message telling us a unit is say at 25% ammo or something so we can go see if we need to turn the ROF down?

IIRC from reading the manual, it is already so that ROF goes down automatically, when a certain treshold (50%?) is reached.

OK. been that long since I read the manual I forgot.

[dazkaz15]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

Just ran through the tutorial recording I was using for testing the resupply. I have fixed the cases of where endless resups were being sent when the unit didn't have any weapons of a particular type. It now seems to work fine with a lot fewer resupply runs and hence less losses from these as well. I'm happy. [:)]

That great news. Thanks for all your hard work on this Dave.
It's nice to know that my concern for it was not a waste of your time [:)]

It just didn't feel right.
When I first loaded the game up with the new patch, the Allies closed with, then overwhelmed the Flack battery at the factory complex near the bridge as they should have, but then the whole thing started to lose momentum, and I just didn't understand what was wrong as the close combat thing seemed to be working great at the start.

Then my investigations pointed to the ammo situation, and it just felt wrong that they should get out of supply so quick.

Would it be possible in future versions to have more control over the % of supply to arty, and front line forces with a user defined slider or tick box in the depot do you think?

[decaro]

Just played thru the Battered Bastards and Road Block battles and noticed that on larger scenarios my machine seems to strain even though I have a Pentium dual core and 2 GBs of RAM -- apparently there's a lot of processing going on, esp. when many units are present.

On the plus side, the AI opponent seems to be more challenging than ever.

[wodin]

Not sure if the games ues more than one core Joe..also 2 gig of ram if your using Win 7 means nearly all the memory is taken up by Win7..my PC struggled with 2 gig of ram with Win 7..so got 8 gigs quite cheap and it made a world of difference allround and not just games I noticed a big difference. 2gig of ram is really the min you need these days.

Whats the speed of the CPU? As if it is using only one Core then i reckon you need to be hitting 2.5 upto 3 ghz..I have a tri core (well it was a duo core but I opened up another core..tried for four but it didn't work..have it running at 3.4.

[MorningDew]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Pentium Dual Core with 2GB RAM isn't much of a machine today. You can pick one up on ebay for $115.

[Arjuna]

ORIGINAL: wodin

Is there any chance that when a unit becomes slow on a certain type of ammo they automatically lower their ROF (Unless obviously they are in a massive firefight). Or we get a radio message telling us a unit is say at 25% ammo or something so we can go see if we need to turn the ROF down?

That is exactly what happens except for the message.

[Arjuna]

ORIGINAL: Joe D.

Just played thru the Battered Bastards and Road Block battles and noticed that on larger scenarios my machine seems to strain even though I have a Pentium dual core and 2 GBs of RAM -- apparently there's a lot of processing going on, esp. when many units are present.

On the plus side, the AI opponent seems to be more challenging than ever.

Joe D,

A Pentium dual core with 2Gb RAM is not much these days performance wise but it should be adequate. Also be aware that if you have the autosave option turned on, it does a save every 5 minutes and there will be a slight pause while this occurs.

[Arjuna]

ramses,

I've been working through your save all day and to great effect. I was in fact able to track down why the boss waypoints were not removed. This was an oversight in the CalcFormationRoute(). If your boss' route only had the one waypoint then it wasn't clearing your task's existing waypoints. If the boss has two or more waypoints then it would. A trap for the unwary.

I also squashed another bug which was trying to create a new route for route recovering units if they got a reassessTask event. This should not have been happening but when I stepped in anyway I discovered another bug that could result in some errant behaviour. That's squashed as well now.

I have also taken the opportunity over the last few days to expand the number of unit actions and SOPs used in the unit log and reports. So now you should see entries fore recacling route, stalled move and waiting, stalled move and replan and stalled move and bypass.

[wodin]

Dave excellent work. Sounds like you really had a good fay in the office. I do like the fact we are getting more log messages..the more info we get the more we can understand what is happening out on the battlefield.

[Phoenix100]

Joe D. I run with an i5 at 3.2 and 8GB of memory and I have the same experience - big scenarios, lots of units, the counter slows, sometimes 'stutters' (and freezes) whilst it thinks. It never gets so slow though that a 1:1 ratio (1 minute game time is 1 real minute) is actually achieved! It's always a bit faster than that on slowest setting. So not that bad (though I recall calling for an 'enforce real time' option once, I do think that would be a bit dull). Like you said, I think there's a lot going on. Since we've seen recently that the RAM used doesn't ever go much beyond 100MB I assume that many of the calculations have some kind of bottleneck effect, and get a bit clogged even though you have plenty memory left. Though I wouldn't have a clue, because I have no idea how these machines work, really.

[wodin]

Mr P where did you get the 100mb info? Seems to be very low....

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: wodin
Mr P where did you get the 100mb info? Seems to be very low....

wodin, see this post

fb.asp?m=3278258

that's roughly the figure for the Battle of the Roadblocks scenario, following from Ramses' savegame. The memory footprint of Command Ops is about 130MBytes for an scenario like that, having tasks set for most of the commands.

You can expect that figure to be higher in scenarios with more commands (or where you're micro-managing a lot, detaching many units from their HHQ's).

As Phoenix says: the name of the game for Command Ops isn't as much memory as CPU time. It's extremely intensive.

Maybe Dave or Paul might want to comment on their plans. But exploiting obvious resources - such as multi-core CPU's, GPU's, etc. - are major engineering problems. No "cheap and cheerful" solutions here, mate. It's more like winning We Fight and Die Here scenario with the Axis (good luck with that buddies [;)]).

[Panther Paul]

There are 3 areas where I would like to see improvements in performance:

1. Route finding - the fundamental code for this has not change in years, I'm sure we could do things better now.
2. Line of Site - consumes about as much time as route finding, especcailly when there are lots of units, again a while since we visited this last.
3. Threading - There is only one AI thread, more units, slower game, does ot matter how many cores you have, game is threaded but more than 2 cores does not help much.

No 3 looks like being my next big job, we are looking at diving the AI thread into 2 one per side. Stepping stone to having one per command, with multiple commands per side.

When will any of this happen, sometime [:)]

[decaro]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna


Joe D,

A Pentium dual core with 2Gb RAM is not much these days performance wise but it should be adequate. Also be aware that if you have the autosave option turned on, it does a save every 5 minutes and there will be a slight pause while this occurs.

I turned Autosave off for the Roadblock Battle, but haven't tried it off with a larger scenario; I did notice the game seemed to stall whenever daylight was adjusted on the screen.

Win XP
Pent (R) D CPU 2.8 GHz
2 GB RAM

[Arjuna]

Joe D,

Daylight adjustments shouldn't slow things down but hemorning resupply event that occurs at 0600 and the corresponding evening one at 1800 could result in a pause while ti does all those resupply routes.

[Arjuna]

Hey Joe D, I think it might be time you treated yourself to a faster more powerful machine. I'm sure the guys here would help out if you asked nicely. [;)]

[wodin]

If I had something worthwhile to send him I would..my PC is barely mid range. The only spare I have is a ATI 4870 card which is long in the tooth but still a fast card. Infact the 6850 card I have now was a big disappointment and it's the first time a new card has let me down. I barely see any speed difference between the 4870 and the 6850. I hear aswell there will be no new ATI cards this year which means no price drops.

[decaro]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

Hey Joe D, I think it might be time you treated yourself to a faster more powerful machine ...

I was thinking Win 7 for Christmas, though I'm not sure of what year [;)]

[wodin]

Win 7 is a great OS..stay away from WIn 8.