Update on Rewrite and Musings on Sub-pulses

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Latest update on the rewrite. The program is pretty much back in one piece and I have processed increments up to one day in length plus a couple of 5-day increments. The performance is staying on track with the larger increments. For example, a 3 hour increment with five minute sub-pulses takes about seven seconds. A good example of this is the detection of an NPR scout in my latest fiction update. It was detected pretty much on the edge of sensor range without any prior checks (I had forgotten it was in the system).

There is now an 'Automatic' option for sub-pulses instead of a 'None' option, although you can still select your own if required. The default sub-pulse lengths are shown below. If you use the player-specified increment length, it will use the closest default option for sub-pulse length.

Up to 60 seconds: 5 seconds
2 minutes: 10 seconds
5 minutes: 15 seconds
20 minutes: 60 seconds
1 hour: 2 minutes
3 hours: 5 minutes
8 hours: 15 minutes
1 Day: 30 minutes
5 days: 2 hours
30 days: 6 hours

There are some bugs but so far they are relatively straightforward and I am working through them as I play. I think it will probably be at least a month before v4.1 though as I am playing poker a lot at the moment and I am going to Vegas for 2 weeks for the WSOP.

Steve

[sloanjh]

Cool!!!  I suspect that the increased performance will help a lot in moving through the calendar once the game becomes complex (with multiple NPR).

John

PS - Have fun in Vegas!

[sloanjh]

I'm at year 18 of my conventional start, and in the midst of my 1st NPR encounter, so I thought I'd put out some observations on the rewrite.

1)  Overall, it's GREAT!!!  I've just gotten done running 3 1-day updates with a 2-minute sub-pulse size, i.e. 720 pulses per turn, and it only takes 20-30 seconds per turn.

2)  Ok, now the bad news - the reason that I'm doing 2-minute pulses is that Aurora is still letting contacts get deep into the sensor envelope when doing large-scale (e.g. 1-day) updates.  The first time I played the 1st contact scenario, Aurora chose a coarse (15-minute?) update, which put the gunboats that were intercepting me deep (about either 1/4 or 3/4 way - I don't remember which) into the range at which I should have detected them.  So I still had to fall back to a saved DB and replay it with a finer-grain update  The performance improvements mean I was able to do this, however.

3)  While I was waiting for jump technology, I did a lot of updates (10-15 years) where nothing was happening except civie shipping shuttling back and forth between Earth and Mars.  Once the civie orders issue was fixed, I still was doing 1.66 day or 2.5 day updates (depending on where Earth and Mars where in their relative orbits) rather than the 5 day updates I would have preferred.  The reason for this is that the civie ships seem to pile up together at the planets when the updates are too long.  I think this has to do with conditional orders not being checked during pulses; instead they're only checked at the end of the turn (at least it used to be this way).  So a ship would drop off its load of goods at Mars and wait before deciding it should head for Earth for a new load.  Note that I'm not 100% sure about the above - my prejudices were set while the civies were broken, and it might be that the order chaining is set up to not "pause" at the end of an update before going on to the next task.  On the other hand, I think I'm still seeing them pile up at the planets when Earth and Mars are close together.

4)  More good news - while I was doing e.g. the 2.5 day updates, Aurora was running faster than in previous versions.  In previous versions, I'd time-share by reading while Aurora was thinking.  In 4.2x, I don't quite have time to switch to the book before Aurora wants another click.

Overall - THANKS!!!!

John

[sloanjh]

Oooh Cool!!!  I just lost contact with some aliens, and Aurora left a location marker for where the contact was lost, along with a "tail" to show heading.  Thanks Steve - that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for with the lost contact stuff!!!

John

[sloanjh]

Oooh Cool!!!  I just lost contact with some aliens, and Aurora left a location marker for where the contact was lost, along with a "tail" to show heading.  Thanks Steve - that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for with the lost contact stuff!!!

John

Oops.  Looks like what was really going on what that I lost active contact (but still had thermal).  The next timestep I lost all contact and they disappeared (i.e. no marker where they went away).  OTOH, the message losing thermal contact remembered which ship the thermal corresponded to (a good thing).

John

[SteveAlt]

I'm at year 18 of my conventional start, and in the midst of my 1st NPR encounter, so I thought I'd put out some observations on the rewrite.

1)  Overall, it's GREAT!!!  I've just gotten done running 3 1-day updates with a 2-minute sub-pulse size, i.e. 720 pulses per turn, and it only takes 20-30 seconds per turn.

2)  Ok, now the bad news - the reason that I'm doing 2-minute pulses is that Aurora is still letting contacts get deep into the sensor envelope when doing large-scale (e.g. 1-day) updates.  The first time I played the 1st contact scenario, Aurora chose a coarse (15-minute?) update, which put the gunboats that were intercepting me deep (about either 1/4 or 3/4 way - I don't remember which) into the range at which I should have detected them.  So I still had to fall back to a saved DB and replay it with a finer-grain update  The performance improvements mean I was able to do this, however.

The default sub-pulses are 30 minutes for one day updates. If the general consensus is that the game is running well with 48 sub-pulses, I can up that to 15 or even 10 minutes per sub-pulse.

3)  While I was waiting for jump technology, I did a lot of updates (10-15 years) where nothing was happening except civie shipping shuttling back and forth between Earth and Mars.  Once the civie orders issue was fixed, I still was doing 1.66 day or 2.5 day updates (depending on where Earth and Mars where in their relative orbits) rather than the 5 day updates I would have preferred.  The reason for this is that the civie ships seem to pile up together at the planets when the updates are too long.  I think this has to do with conditional orders not being checked during pulses; instead they're only checked at the end of the turn (at least it used to be this way).  So a ship would drop off its load of goods at Mars and wait before deciding it should head for Earth for a new load.  Note that I'm not 100% sure about the above - my prejudices were set while the civies were broken, and it might be that the order chaining is set up to not "pause" at the end of an update before going on to the next task.  On the other hand, I think I'm still seeing them pile up at the planets when Earth and Mars are close together.

New trade runs are setup at the end of a turn after all movement is complete. I did this for performance reasons - mainly because the code carries out a search for all commodities between all planets for each fleet ready for a new trade run and I didn't want that happening every sub-pulse. Although I guess I could flag those fleets that had already been checked and failed to find a trade run and only check them again post-movement.

4)  More good news - while I was doing e.g. the 2.5 day updates, Aurora was running faster than in previous versions.  In previous versions, I'd time-share by reading while Aurora was thinking.  In 4.2x, I don't quite have time to switch to the book before Aurora wants another click.

That's good to hear. It sounds like the rewrite was worth it overall but I may need to revisit the default number of sub-pulses. I would be interested in feedback from other players as well on that point.

Steve