Author Topic: Time step and inconsistencies  (Read 2127 times)

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Offline jseah (OP)

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Time step and inconsistencies
« on: March 31, 2011, 09:14:17 AM »
Using a different timestep seems to have different effects.  

Currently, I'm in my 2nd year of a 5.42 game and hurriedly trying to prevent my empire from getting in debt.  
I have one non-homeworld colony in the same moon system as the homeworld.  
The construction interval is 86 000.  

There is this very curious effect.  
My income is net +10 to +40 per 24 hours if I use auto-turn and hit 8 hours.  
My income is -20 to -30 per 24 hours if I use auto-turn and hit 1 day.  

After watching my civilians run about for a few weeks in game, I think I've tracked down the problem.  
Essentially, whenever cargo freighters dock at my homeworld to pick up infrastructure, they take 1 time step to go from [move to colony Nilosia] to [Load trade goods at colony Nilosia].  
If I hit 1 day, that is 1 day, if I hit 8 hours, that is 8 hours.  

So I'm currently playing at 8 hours timestep since that's the only thing keeping my empire above 0 wealth (currently at ~40 wealth)
At least until homeworld runs out of infrastructure, but I should have the next economic tech done by then.  

Is this behaviour a bug?  Or just a necessary concession?
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2011, 07:45:28 PM »
Using a different timestep seems to have different effects.  

*SNIP*

 Is this behaviour a bug?  Or just a necessary concession?

I'd say "Feature".  There are a lot of orders like this that don't refresh until the increment (as opposed to "sub-pulse") boundary.  Another example is e.g. "Survey next 5 bodies" (unless Steve's changed it).  Part of the reason for this may be that, for performance reasons, Aurora doesn't hit the database during sub-pulses.

I'd go ahead and put it in the official bugs thread - Steve might or might not be able to fix it.

John
 

Offline jseah (OP)

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #2 on: April 01, 2011, 09:34:37 AM »
From this post: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,3348.msg33038.html#msg33038

I do understand that clicking 5 days with an 86k construction cycle time does advance 5 days properly.  I have used 8 hours then 1 day to get stuff that finish in 24 hours + a bit to finish without sucking up a whole extra day. 

Which does point me to another cycle time inconsistency that makes me use the 86 000 construction cycle time. 

When you advance 5 days, and your current construction/research finishes in 2 days, you "waste" 3 days of construction time. 
This effect is just a few hours in the 1 day cycle.  Losing a few hours off the end of each construction project is small.  Losing 1-4 days means you lose a few % in the larger projects to more than 50% when building small ship components. 
 

Offline Beersatron

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #3 on: April 01, 2011, 11:15:23 AM »
In regards to losing time you can reduce this loss by queuing installation/component/missile/fighter construction and be queuing research. You can not queue the production of ships though, which would be nice but I imagine there is a programming/technical reason for this and not from lack of Steve wanting it.

Queuing research can be trickier since the next thing you want researched could be only available when the current research is complete.

Could always RP it by abstracting some bureaucratic file shuffling errors :)
 

Offline Brian Neumann

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #4 on: April 01, 2011, 11:31:27 AM »
For queing scientific reasearch I when I need the reasearch I am working on to be able to work on my next item (ie power plant before engine)  I will often pick a related tech that I will also want to upgrade (fuel efficiency), or the cheapest tech available.  You can also cancel a project and the reasearch points remain for any other reasearch to resume, but only on the planet it was started on.  Ie I have both mars and earth as reasearch places.  I reasearch 200 points of uv laser out of 8000 on earth and then cancell the project.  If I start it back up on earth I will only need 7800 reasearch points, where if I started reasearch on uv lasers on mars it would be 8000 points.

Brian
 

Offline jseah (OP)

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2011, 11:32:35 AM »
Queuing installation construction does not alleviate lost time.  

Try queuing 10 1x infrastructure at 100% and it will take 10 construction cycles to complete.  
 

Offline Ziusudra

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #6 on: April 01, 2011, 01:23:41 PM »
Queuing research can be trickier since the next thing you want researched could be only available when the current research is complete.

Currently for me, the Queue Top button is still active when viewing All Projects. This allows me to queue the next, though it's probably a bug as it allows me to queue things it's shouldn't like plasma torpedo techs. (What's weird is that yesterday when I looked at All Projects none of the buttons were deactivated.)
 

Offline jseah (OP)

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #7 on: April 01, 2011, 03:01:14 PM »
Oh look, that does work.  
Definitely a bug.  (although would be nice if Instant worked in All Projects for SMs)

I'll try backing up my database and re-researching an earlier expand civ economy tech.  Perhaps when I have time.  Apparently I do have time. 

EDIT
3rd level expand civ economy finished.  
Research started on 1st level expand civ economy.  No problems detected.  

Canceled the project to assign an SMed 171 RLs to my 65% bonus SM promoted researcher.  
Project not available.  Queued fighter production 1st level and queued top expand civ eco L1 again, it apparently remembers I spent ~50 points on a tech I shouldn't have.  
Gave myself max level in applied research, this should only take 4 days.  Base pop. income before: 41.47

Nothing happened when research completed.  No notification of research complete, no increase in base pop. income.  
It appears that re-researching completed techs doesn't do anything but the game will let research things you aren't supposed to.  
« Last Edit: April 01, 2011, 03:19:20 PM by jseah »
 

Offline Beersatron

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #8 on: April 01, 2011, 05:25:16 PM »
It hides the research projects that are complete and should only show those which are immediately available for research by default - the option to view all projects is really only to show you what went before for reference. Add it to the bug thread though, hopefully Steve can get around to working on that area - i've noticed the NPRs doing funky things with research projects before and reported it so maybe a few more 'bugs' will prompt him to dig into it.

I had always thought that queued construction would use the remainder of a previous time increment the same way that research does. I specifically remember Steve mentioning that was the way research worked but maybe he never implemented into construction?
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #9 on: April 01, 2011, 08:00:42 PM »
I had always thought that queued construction would use the remainder of a previous time increment the same way that research does. I specifically remember Steve mentioning that was the way research worked but maybe he never implemented into construction?

My recollection is that it used to work that way for construction, when we had the single queue of 100%.  When Steve flipped to the multiple queues (with variable percentages), that capability went away and has been gone ever since.  My observation is that queuing DOES apply research points to the next project (or even the next two projects in the next one is really small) for research queues, but excess points are lost for construction projects.  I don't know if you pay for the wasted capacity....

I think I made a suggestion in the suggestions thread a long time ago that the construction queue would be better if it were a single prioritized list with a "maximum percent" for each item.  That way you'd get rid of some of the wierd behaviors where if you have an 80% project that's higher than a 20% project and an 20% hole opens up, the (lower priority) 20% project gets worked on first.  You'd also need a "reduce total capacity" capabilities in case you wanted to cut back on manufacturing due to e.g. a wealth crunch.

John

PS - Thanks for moving the discussion here.
 

Offline jseah (OP)

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2011, 08:24:40 PM »
Why did we need multiple queues?
I know about it since I played with the interface to work it out.  But it striked me as pretty useless functionality. 

To be frank, I never use multiple queues unless I really want to rush a ship out ASAP without wasted time (then I calculate how many percent to use to get all the components to finish at the same time)

Logic is as follows:
Rather than split up between two projects and have both done at 2 months, you'd rather have 1 at 1 month then the other at 2 months.  Then you get 1 month bonus use of the 1st project. 

This applies even if you're building construction power and a large project (eg. lab) at the same time (IIRC there was some percentage of construction power increase that makes your lab actually build faster than if you went 100% lab). 
You build the construction power first then build the lab.  That is even faster.  (because construction power helps build construction power, although the effect is pretty tiny)

And if you want to just continuously build factories, you intersperse 20 CF inbetween all your other projects in the ratio you want, it's the same thing. 
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Time step and inconsistencies
« Reply #11 on: April 02, 2011, 12:13:49 AM »
Why did we need multiple queues?
I know about it since I played with the interface to work it out.  But it striked me as pretty useless functionality.  
*SNIP*
And if you want to just continuously build factories, you intersperse 20 CF inbetween all your other projects in the ratio you want, it's the same thing.  
Aaaah - that's because you never did it the old way :)
With the present method, I can set the ratios of mines/factory/other once, and just let them go ad infinitem.  The old way (which is exactly what you describe), I was always shoving new things into the queues.  Go look at Steve's old post when he introduced it if you want comments from when they were introduced.

John