Space and Pace

[Vandermeer (OP)]

Ok, I seriously have to lose a word about how the pacing in Aurora performs.  I have no problem with the general idea of those self chosen units with their subunits within.  Also the overall game progression speed -though maybe too slow for the casual gamer- is fully satisfying for a veteran 4x gamer I think.  So far no trouble with the basic setup.
The difficulties however arise with that also other races and their 'whatever' battles with swarms or remnant are also allowed to slow the increments down.  I know there is reason to do so, as you would have to decrease the subintervals to around 10 seconds anyway in ship battles, but that doesn't take the issue away.  Right now it all too often happens that you face a period of non progression, where you sit in front of the computer doing nothing for half an hour, because some NPRs you wont see in another 1000 game hours are duking it out somewhere in the galaxy. ("Wait! I feel a disturbance in the force!" or whatever) So far I could shrug it off, because it would eventually subside, but today, and until now, I faced a geanourmours delay of over 6 and a half hours already. . .  .  Is this serious? I watched the first Alien movie, then Alien:Resurrection, then a 20 minute Review about Alien:Resurrection, then went taking a shower, and when I came back, it still is calculating the time progression in 10 seconds intervals! (with a day interval coming around every 30 minutes or so) This is no overstating or drama, no, this actually happened and is happening to this very minute.  The ventilation of my laptop always switches to full and noisy power whenever I do multiple turns after another due to the intense computing, and for nearly 7 hours it did not stop that anymore.  I would show you a printout of the event log that cannot capture more than around 2200 messages, but I can assure you that almost none of them is white, and instead nearly all grey 10 seconds intervall messages.  . . And it would be more if the memory was larger.  (did I mention that very long slowdowns forshadowed this event.  slowdowns of that kind that I easily watched a 1:30 hours Ultima 9 retrospective before that with the most time spent on calculation?)
This is serious "it's not a bug, but a feature!"-buisness right here.  How can one expect of anyone, even hardcore genre fans, to deal with such time draining foibles? I know it could be a coincidence and my bad luck, since I see other people getting further than me, and still enjoying progress, but that doesn't take away that you can easily get death-trapped at any moment by a never ending crawl.  What is that? - Not only can bugs crash your game beyond repair, because there is no rollback functionality intended (and unwisely for a construct like this: no debug either), but now the very game mechanics itself, the "how it should be" can destroy your game too? The bugs I could now navigate around through the useful remote saving tool (not in the game, even though it should be top priority urgent imho), and, well, bugs may be fixed sometime, but how can you ever deny the game itself if it posses inherent tendencies to just be non functional in this setup?
I plead for measures here.  Something needs to be done about these 'invisible wars'.  If there would be a function that just rushes their battle calculations, draws like a few minutes together through average estimation or whatever, it shall be so.  I honestly don't care if the invisible battles are done super-exactly or not.  And I would chose functionality, . . no: usability  over exact mechanic any time night and day.

I am sure others must have made some similar experiences at some point.  Or is there even a way around this that I don't know of, and all this was for nothing?


P. S. : I forgot to mention that I didn't go crazy about the starting races or whatever.  Actually they should be pretty flat, since even so I enabled two rivaling empires instead of the standard 1, I set gaming difficulty to 20%, so they shouldn't really be able to produce this much hazzle so early.  Also the invaders are turned off, and the NPR spawn is on standard 30%.  Nothing suspicious here, nu uh.

[Hawkeye]

Well, regarding bugs killing your game and no roll-back ability, you either regularly make manual backups of your database or you could use Erik´s launcher/backup utility

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,6121.0.html

and simply overwrite your actual database with an older one.

Re. endless slowdowns, you could ask Steve for the Designer password, look at what causes the slowdown and delete the offending colonies/ships/whatever.

[MarcAFK]

I unfortunately have to agree, It would be nice if there was an option to allow faster abstract NPR battle resolution, in fact that option alone would probably significantly end the most frustrating aspect of Aurora and thereby create a more enjoyable experience allround.
However, I'm quite aware that anything advanced enough to abstract NPR  battles sufficiently would probably require significant work from steve and therefore I wouldn't be happy to make any kind of demands of that nature towards him, keeping in mind that this game is his and we're all just basically volunteer beta testers who happen to enjoy this genre.
But back to your question, there is essentially only 2 ways around this, one being judicious use of the designer mode password ( which i've never personally had access to, never needed it really) but the simpler solution is basically to never EVER, allow more than 1 NPR, that way the only NPR lag you'll get is when your single NPR encounters various spoilers, and steve has coded in something that delete's combatants stuck in long stalemate battles.But having more than 1 NPR's vastly increases your chance of getting the combat lag.

Honestly if the slowdowns really are ruining the game for you perhaps you would be better off doing away with NPR's altogether, basically just play sandbox style untill you have a fleet you like, then generate a nice enemy fleet for it to curbstomp, find some interesting way of handicapping yourself or perhaps pass your stevefire.mdb over to another player with instructions to create a fleet of a certain number of buildpoints randomly at one of your recently discovered but not thoroughly explored systems for you to find.

Really Aurora excels in it's detailed battle scenarios, but sadly lacks the ability to set these up frequently enough to retain interest, and getting past the exploration and NPR slowdowns can be frustrating, so I've been thinking lately of how one could make Aurora more accessable, exciting, and faster to play, perhaps some kind of multiplayer concept involving each player basically sandboxing in their own copy of the game, while using a forum to coordinate their empires, each person starting in a different end of the galaxy, and claiming systems using the forum, disputes over systems perhaps handled through a third party who would spacemaster in the invading fleet into the defender's system to run the battle, before informing each side of the results, or perhaps the gamemaster would spacemaster respective opposing fleets into both databeses, each player then runs the battle from their own perspective, then the results are posted and compared, a system would need to be developed to determine the victory, maybe a points based system that would determine which of the results would be taken at face value, then in each player's game the system would be transferred over to the winner. etc.
I need to think more about this.

[vonduus]

Yes, someone should give Steve a lot of money so he can pay someone else to fix this.

But you are talking about a re-write of the whole program, in another language. It seems Steve doesn't have the time for this. And I have a suspicion that he doesn't really care, he is somehow in it for the fiction, not the game-play, that is just an extra bonus. That you and I are allowed to use the software for our purposes and for free just shows that Steve is a generous person. But we cannot expect him to rewrite everything if he is happy with what he has already got.

Also be careful with what you ask for. The game is so old, and the existing code must be so convoluted, that any major re-write will tend to be a re-design. And we don't want another game, do we? We want Aurora as it is, warts and all, just without those interrupts.

What about organizing a donation? Seriously! But first ask Steve, if he would be willing to let someone work on the game as it is now, and make a port to a newer engine.

[sloanjh]

Moving this to Chat.  We try to keep the number of threads in Mechanics down because that is where Steve posts new rules, and we don't want them lost in the noise.  Please read the "Where should I post?" FAQ for details.

John

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Generally speaking, you can avoid this problem just by limiting the number of NPRs that get generated. There's a few ways to do this, but generally the best is just to limit or eliminate the generation of new NPRs and/or to turn off generation of NPRs at game start.