Pirate Bill Posted July 12, 1999 Share Posted July 12, 1999 Does CM have a speed adjuster, so that in 5 years when everyone has a 3GHz machine with 4GB of RAM the 60 second battle sequence won't play out in 3 seconds? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Big Time Software Posted July 12, 1999 Share Posted July 12, 1999 It already has such a mechanism in it because it is already necessary. A small map, with few units and fairly flat terrain, would be totally crazy on a fast system. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Davie Posted July 12, 1999 Share Posted July 12, 1999 Steve; you mean the playback in this situation don't you, because of course there shouldn't be a single person who would mind decreased AI processing time? Just curious, and since this is totally off topic, don't bother replying if you don't want to, but have you done a comparison between graphics processing time and 'planning' processing time in this game? (the time required to step through the code I mean). Thanks Tom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Big Time Software Posted July 12, 1999 Share Posted July 12, 1999 Why the heck would we ever want to slow down number crunching? What Pirate Bill was asking about was graphics animation speeds. If you have ever played a game that did not time its animations to some sort of empirical clock, instead just going full speed ahead, you would know why he asked this question. I remember learning why this is important quite vividly when Falcon 1 was played on a fast 286 instead of a pokey x86. You hit the throttle up and had about 2 seconds before the runway ran out. It was like flying a rocket ship Oh, except you can control a rocketship in flight! The amount of AI CPU cycles has no effect what-so-ever on frame rate (graphics), and vice versa. Don't forget that every action in the Playback Phase is precalculated before a single polygon goes to move. This includes the AI, path finding, LOS checking, casualties, spotting, etc. etc. Therefore it is totally irrelevant what each takes up as far as cycles as they are never going concurrently. And a lack/plethra of CPU cycles for AI is *NEVER* the reason why AI's are good/terrible. It is the underlying logic and programming that decide this, so measuring how many CPU cycles the AI uses doesn't tell anybody anything. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Lokesa Posted July 12, 1999 Share Posted July 12, 1999 "Shadow of the horned rat" was kind of screwy in that it's "winds of magic" cycle ran on a clock but the rest didn't so on my 486 I had excess magic comparatively and the game was too easy but on my pentium the hordes came on so fast there was never enough magic making the game terribly difficult. Too bad they didn't have a multiplayer version or a map generator that game was really good for it's time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marko Posted July 13, 1999 Share Posted July 13, 1999 Another example: the scrolling in Steel Panthers 1 is unbearably fast on my PII-400. There is a DOS application which will slow it down: it's call Mo'Slo. Marko Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts