For the next version (currently 4.74) I have made a change to the way that Automated Turns works. The automated turn button has been replaced by a checkbox. When this is checked then any normal time increment becomes automated, rather than the existing day-long automated turns. So once you check the box then you can have 1-day automated turns, 5-day automated turns or 30-second automated turns just by using the normal time increment buttons. As in the existing version, time will halt when an interrupt event occurs for the default race. It will also stop when you uncheck the box, which is easier than trying to press the existing and occasionaly recalcitrant Stop button.
This should give automated turns considerably more flexibility and make them useful in a lot more situations.
Steve
An idiot (me) -proofing suggestion: put an fairly large upper limit (e.g. 120*requested increment size) on the total elapsed time in automated turns. Once this time has passed, an interrupt would be generated giving the player an opportunity to change the increment size.
What happened:
1) Even the checkbox has been somewhat recalcitrant for me - I've had cases where I just couldn't get it to uncheck.
2) I clicked on a 5-second increment while forgetting that automated-turns were turned on. Oops. Luckily, it only took me a half dozen increments or so before I was able to get the checkbox to notice me trying to uncheck it. Otherwise it could have been a LOOOOOOOONG time (at 5 second increments without the benefit of the in-memory optimizations you did) before an interrupt happened which would stop the automated turns for me.
My experience has been that I'm taking very long increments with the new interrupt system (3 hours was the shortest so far, and that was in the aftermath of an encounter with aliens when I wanted the internal timesteps to be smaller than the 30 minutes associated with a 1-day increment), which means I'll typically get some sort of interrupt after no more than a dozen or two increments. Putting a ceiling of e.g. 120*(requested increment size) on the total time of increments should protect against the 5 second effect without kicking in when a mistake wasn't made.
Note that it's very important that the cutoff be total
time of increments, rather than total number. This is because Aurora will often interrupt every 5 seconds when NPRs are fighting battle. When that happens, I typically just go do something else and let Aurora work its way through, which might take thousands of 5 second iterations. Assuming a request for 1-day increments, using time elapsed as the criterion would give a maximum of 120 days of Aurora time for the battle to play out; if you were to simply count increments it would only go 10 minutes of Aurora time, at which point the player would have to come back to the computer and push the button again to get another 10 minutes of Aurora time.
John
