The Alpha 10 Preview-Thread

[Sef]

what actually is it thats making the game lag anyway? the graphics or the AI scripts. I only notice lag on big maps with trees or when Qbot has like 500 villagers. Is there a way i can set a population limit for Qbot?

[OrganicHallucinosis]

what actually is it thats making the game lag anyway? the graphics or the AI scripts. I only notice lag on big maps with trees or when Qbot has like 500 villagers. Is there a way i can set a population limit for Qbot?

AI Pathfinding Methinks. The game is completely fine up until the point where the enemy army marches out of thier base. It gets really bad when 2 armies engage(usually more then 100 units).

Edited May 15, 2012 by OrganicHallucinosis

[gudo]

Pathfinding and AI are indeed the slowest parts of the game, though the AI has improved in speed quite a bit over the past few releases. Pathfinding is slower than AI at the moment. The other thing that slows the game down is the fact that it can't take advantage of multiple processors. Everything (render, simulation, pathfinding, AI, etc) all has to pass through a single processor. If the code were re-factored to be able to use multi-core processors, the speed should improve. Pathfinding, iirc has a larger impact on speed than anything else though, so splitting the game into multiple threads wouldn't speed the game up more than pathfinding allows. At some point in the future however, there should be both pathfinding optimizations and multi-core support.

[Dread_Boy]

I also get some lag when I zoom out. Nothing fatal but enough to annoy me so I just don't zoom out to much.

[Sef]

Ye it's definitely path finding then because just then my metal miners (about 20 of them) all got stuck at the same time and they was moving left and right to try and get past the other guy but they all ended up getting stuck and the game went to about 5fps but then i moved them all, the fps shot back up. This is why i don't play with Q bot and i play on my own from now on.