fredsanford

Thanks Quantumstate. Looks like the little bit of code I've messed with is redundant and/or made obsolete by Philip's changes. Since there have been no publically visible changes from Philip since Feb 2012 or so, I thought I'd start picking at the edges. If he's completely rewriting things my changes/bug fixes are kinda useless. One big speedup for generic STL code I've had success with in the past is to use a fixed-size allocator for vector<whatever> that only goes to the system for memory once. This is something I was experimenting with in the pathfinding code, especially where I estimated vector.size was less than 100 or so. You can see an example of this in use here. Look at fsa.h and stlastar.h.

Thanks Zoot. Hi fcxSanya. Is Philip still around and working on stuff? If so, I'll leave the pathfinding and formations alone as he has spent huge amounts of time on pathfinding at least. I assumed he stopped working on it as I see nothing from him since 02/2012 or so. Proving yet again that assumptions are bad. Thanks for this as well. Getting the pathfinding to the point where it slows down is quite time consuming. Hmmm, this forum software appears to hate Google Chrome... Copy/Paste fails and quoting just spins in place... Time to break out firefox...

Thanks Feneur, you've given me some nice stuff to chew on. The pathfinding document answers a lot of my detailed questions. I suspect you're right about the fixed point math as well. The sync problem did not occur to me even though it's been a problem in the past.

I figure it's time to stop in and say hello... I like your game a lot and would like to help with what polish I can provide. I'm a C++ (and C) programmer with about 22 years of experience in a lot of different industries, except the gaming industry. A lot of my work time in in the past was spent incrementally optimizing things and removing code while leaving the same or improved functionality. I both enjoy this type of work and do it well for the most part. I've taken an interest in the path-finding and formations, formation movement area and over the last few weeks I've come up with some (small) patches. PM me if you'd like me to post them. Note that the patches are small and may actually be wrong but each change did make at least a small improvement to either run-time or for mitigating pathological behavior. Note that I have some issues which prevent me from working on anything for long uninterrupted periods of time. It seems my body is forcing me to make up for all the sleep I missed in my 20s and 30s. This generally means it takes me anywhere from 1.25 to 2.0 times as long to do something. Anyway... I have some questions if anyone is willing to take the time to answer. 1) The way formations reform as they turn drives me crazy. Is there anyone who can give a brief overview of how it should work and how to find the related C++ and JS code? JS is not my forte, but I can probably figure it out. 2) Why is the vast majority of the code using fixed point? Is it a historical artifact? By using floating point and one of the better Template Math libs (that uses SSE type instructions), the math could likely be sped up by a big margin. If you point me to an isolated smallish area of the code to change to floats, I will do the changes, testing and profile etc... IOW, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. 3) In the file CCmp_Pathfinder_Tile.cpp there is a fair amount of redundant info spread across several data structures. An example is state.terrain (which looks like it could be combined with state.tiles) that contains only 2 bits of data related to impassable tiles. I'd be willing to clean this up, but not to waste time on it for no effect. 4) Was any of the code written by Ykkrosh/Patrick?/Phillip? saved anywhere? He seemed to write in the forums about some nice improvements, especially related to path-finding, but I do not see code attributed to his svn/git IDs in the repository. 5) Is there any way to setup a game that will play itself? I've seen references a few times to a command line option (-replay) to replay from a text file, but I have not figured out how that text file is created. Thanks for listening to the geezer ramble.