There’s a new dev diary up today that goes into some detail about language translations in a game.
New dev journal from Brad is up today and he talks about some work that he’s about to start on GalCiv.
Nice to see Brad going back to GalCiv to optimize or just dabble.
Always like reading dev journals that focus on this kind of stuff.
Edit: Been a while since I played it but it felt like turn times were really quick.
Definitely interesting to read about what Brad is up to. I’m a bit surprised though, that there is still so much “low hanging fruit” around after the game has been out so long. No one during the development thought to split independent tasks like pathfinding among multiple threads?
Brad mentions that GC3 turn times are already better than their peers, so while it may be low-hanging fruit my guess is there were probably higher priority items to work on.
I know that my very first impression of GC3 was that it took a long time to load. Now in a day or two Brad has doubled the loading speed and quadrupled the turn processing speed. There have been a lot of days since GC3 was released, so I think in an ideal world this would have higher priority than whatever they did on day 165. Of course, there could be any number of reasons why this wasn’t noticed before, I’m not saying the developers were dumb or whatever. However, I think that something is off in the development process if a very quick optimization win of this magnitude is still possible at this date.
[quote=The article]
And so that’s what I did yesterday and today: I made it a lot faster. A lot faster. Loading up the game is about half the time it was. Turn times are about a quarter the time they were. But there’s a caveat to my performance tuning: If you’re running 2 cores, you won’t notice any difference. If you have 4 cores, you’ll probably notice. If you have 8 cores, it’s massively better. That’s because I solved many of these problems through improving the task system.
Instead of an AI player going through all its ships one at a time to do its pathfinding, I just split it off into the N-1 cores at a time to do it. That is, if you have an 8 core PC, it’ll do 7 ships simultaneously. [/quote]
Well, I suppose you could ask yourself; how many optimization phases do you do on a game before you release it.
Maybe after some time, with lessons learned from other stuff and perhaps new tools, you decide to take a new look at something because you wondered “can it become even better?”
Okay guys, the mega patch is now available as an opt-in.
I was a very very bad man this Thanksgiving break. :)
Civ still doesn’t. ;)
That looks terrific, Brad, I’ll give that a go this evening!
The more time I spend in software development, the more I’m convinced that good stuff doesn’t happen until someone with the right skills and enough independence makes it their personal mission.
I haven’t played since release. Is the game done after this patch?
No. The game will never be done. Not while I’m alive anyway. :)
I thought there was some new version coming out though?
I like the cut of your jib.
There [quote=“LeeAbe, post:1455, topic:73564, full:true”]
I thought there was some new version coming out though?
[/quote]
We have an expansion coming out (DLC) next year. But that doesn’t mean this is done. We still update GalCiv II for instance.
Really hopeful about that expansion next year if it can make some of the tedious things more fun- though I suspect constructor spam will still be all too common.
I did mess around with the game a bit tonight- the optimization is immediately noticable, and well ahead of the other games in the genre. If the economic side of things can become fun this game would be a classic. Right now it’s seriously unfun.
If you do more AI improvements- I’m hoping you guys can get rid of the maintenance AI cheat.
Updated to the beta and it just hangs on the loading screen…
The big v1.9 update for Galactic Civilizations III is now available! :)
Highlights of this update:
- Capstone Techs: Research new techs in the Age of Ascension! These techs provide large (though temporary) empire-wide bonuses that stack as you get them
- Performance Optimization: A newly enhanced multithreaded system dramatically improves load times and reduces memory usage.
- A.I. and Balance: The AI has received a bit of a boost! You’ll notice that they are smarter about expanding, building fleets, and spreading influence, and more. Ready for the challenge?
- Rich, Unique Galaxies: Performance optimizations have allowed the addition of more stars and planets, making galaxies feel even more vast than before.
Full changelog can be found here: http://forums.galciv3.com/480906/
