I don't want to re-awake old subjects, but I think this needs to be said. Even with the slim campaign pack, it takes approximately 5 minutes to load GFFA. And when it's loaded, the lag is horrendous enough to sap all my enthusiasm to play. This is turned into a further annoyance when it takes nearly as much time to quit GFFA as it does to load it; it's literally faster to bring up the task manager and end the process.
Barring a major breakthrough in the future, GFFA will no longer contain more than 100 planets. Period. If you want more, it'll have to be at your own peril by modding an optional campaign back in. That should at least give us enough deniability to keep people from fixating on lag concerns while still allowing others to load every planet in the mod in a single campaign.
I've felt that the extremely powerful defense forces of many planets detracts from the Rebellion versus Empire gameplay, but that's just me.
Independent forces are central to the 4x feeling of the mod. In EaW, they were a joke, since you usually also had to conquer the entire galaxy to win. That's specifically not the case here: our campaign objectives will almost always involve either wiping out the Empire/Rebellion or completing some specific task. The rest of the galaxy is just along for the ride. They are the Outer Rim from
Rebellion, if you will - except instead of being mostly barren, they are
alive. It's up to the player to decide which are necessary for victory, but at the same time, don't lose sight of the objectives.
And perhaps if PR is eventually compiled into Mega Files or whatever, that might help with the loading.
True. I'll make a note to do that this time. There's really no good reason why I haven't before.
That's where we have a conundrum, though. A lot of players, me included, like having those epic campaigns available, as that's the air that PR is attempting to provide. Yet, there are others who want to have better playability. The question is: which direction will PR take? Demanding one or the other will upset certain parties, and demanding both will create more work for PR.
I'd like to think that if we are anything in a word, it would be "epic". But it still has to be playable. I've come to the conclusion that we'll probably upset everyone a bit in the next release, but I guess that's the art of compromise.
My CPU is fairly good, the way I see if most people playing this game aren't experiencing the Galactic Map Lag and slow startup like I am then they must have CPUs a huge amount more powerful than what I have, and since my CPU is fairly good, I just wonder what the mod is really geared towards...alienware super gaming computers?
For the record, we didn't add the lag just for fun; all we did was trailblaze. That Ghost's GFFA would perform the way it did was something we never anticipated. It's inexplicable, really, why FoC would run so poorly based on those changes... some aspect of it (that we haven't yet been able to isolate) must be terribly inefficient.
I just hate being criticized for innovating. Failure is part of the process. It's still better than the alternative, which is not even trying.
I would like to decrease the wait between releases though, so at least the failures aren't lingering all year...
I don't know how a quad core can cause the issue. I mean I'm not the best computer expert, and I know most games aren't made to take advantage of multi-cores, EaW being one of them, but I wonder how it's utilizing them. Is it only able to use one of my four cores? Or does it just use them all for the same task, unlike games like Supreme Commander which are made for multi-cores and specifically assign different game tasks for different cores.
From what I understand of all the multi-core stuff (And I'm no expert, so my thoughts are definitely not law) is that:
I think FoC will only run on one core, since it's apparently not designed to take advantage of multi-threading or whatever. Some other functions and programs running in the background, not related to FoC, may be shunted to other cores in order to heighten performance. Unfortunately, in order to really get that "2.4 GHz", all core power has to be combined. So really, you're technically running FoC on a processor that clocks in at some fraction of 2.4 GHz. The other core activity will come from those background programs and services.
Like I said, that's from my understanding, which is limited, so please don't take my word as law on this. Anyone else who knows more is completely welcome to correct me and prove me wrong.
I'll let you guys own physics, but I majored in computer science
.
What Tropical Bob said is basically true: if you're running a game that's not multi-threaded on a quad core processor, that game can only take advantage of one core. To make use of all the cores, you need to be running at least four threads, game or otherwise (pretty much guaranteed on an OS). However, even if the game is multi-threaded, it's difficult to perfectly partition the workload into multiple threads, so you'll never utilize all the cycles available on every core. As Kacen mentioned, clock speed isn't
everything with CPUs, but there are circumstances where something like a 4.0 GHz single-core or 3.0 GHz dual-core will outperform a 2.4 GHz quad-core -
especially when running one CPU-intensive program that doesn't make good use of multi-threading, which is definitely the case here.
That said, I don't remember the official word - if there ever was one - on whether or not EaW actually supports multi-core processing. Assuming your findings haven't been tainted by a slew of background programs, it would seem to at least make some basic use of it (I'm not necessarily prepared to draw that conclusion just yet though). Either way, the bulk of the game is still going to be limited to a single core, so I wouldn't expect much difference in performance going from dual to quad or higher - the other stats are going to be more important for gaming. It's definitely the processor that's slowing you down in galactic... but I wouldn't expect it not to be playable. I don't know what to say
.
I notice that, for instance, when I play PR in Skirmish no maps appear in the "official maps" section. They're all in custom maps. And there's doubles of every map, yet the doubles are the same as far as I know.
No, that's just EaW being quirky. It puts them in Custom because I had to add fighter factories to all of the vanilla maps. The doubling is just a glitch, but everyone should have it
.
Edited by Phoenix Rising, 15 September 2009 - 05:27 AM.
