but would it not be possible to have the game count 'interesting' as being any interesting thing that your race can perceive.
I think the answer to your question is "that's what the game's trying to do, but the game has to (temporarily) stop if something interesting happens to an NPR so the NPR decision routines can be executed (they only work between updates)". For all the new folks out there, in case no one's told you, you should run with the "Events" (ctrl-F3) window open. Typically, you'll want to run with it set (the pull-down at the top) to your empire, but as a beginner you might instead want to look at the Space Master (SM) view (you'll need to go into SM mode before opening the window to have this view available - ctrl-S turns it on, ctrl-O turns it off).
There are two types of events:
1) "Interrupt" events - these are the ones that you might want to react to: things like detecting a new ship from an alien race; having one of your TG finish its orders, detecting a missile coming at you :-) ) that the situation needed to be fixed. At some point in there, Steve launched a heroic (I think it took him 4 months or so) rewrite of the entire movement update system within Aurora, which resulted in the current mechanics:
MUCH more performant updates, so Aurora can do a lot more (hence smaller) timesteps within a single update.
"Automatic" timestep mode where Aurora chooses this granularity. At present, I think it's 15 minute timesteps for a 1 day update; shorter for 8-hour or 3-hour updates.
The "automatic turns" button, which is a HUGE improvement. In the past, I used to spend about 5-10 seconds deciding if Aurora had stopped for a good reason, and then pushing the "do another update" button. This meant I was stuck at the computer waiting to push a button that 99% of the time the computer could just as easily push. Now I simply hit the automatic turns, and if I see it getting bogged down due to NPRs I go do something else.
C) Automagic turns: This is where "interrupt" vs. "informational" events come in, and it requires solving a hard problem: "what does the player consider an interrupt-worthy event?" If the program is going to go ahead and push the button for me if nothing interesting has happened, then it needs to be able to define "interesting" (your initial question). The biggest such problem is probably answering the question: "the state of my sensor contacts just changed - does the player want to know?". Originally, the program was interrupting too frequently - any time a contact appeared or disappeared (even civilians from your own race) Aurora would interrupt, requiring you to notice and push the button. The last release or so is MUCH better - Steve seems to have filtered out most of the "noisy" interrupts while leaving the important ones. The one spot I'm worried about is when a hostile ship that you're observing changes its behavior (i.e. it was just sitting there and now it's coming towards your picket ship) - I suspect that that won't generate an interrupt - but that's a really hard thing to get right from an AI point of view. The other problem, which Steve has done a lot of work to get rid of the last few months, is "yoyo" behavior, where an NPR gets stuck in an infinite behavior loop that generates interrupts on a really short timescale.
The reason that I went into all this historical detail was to give some context for the system:
1) Cutting the update short is necessary in order for the NPR AI to work properly.
2) The "automatic turns" buttons makes such interrupts relatively harmless - the program just tells you that it had to stop and then restarts the update again.
3) A lot of play-testing has gone into reducing the interrupts as much as possible, without missing interesting events. That being said, there's still room for improvement if you happen to hit a concrete case of "I don't want it stopping for that" or "Hey! It should have stopped for that".
Hope it helps....
John
