Performance issues with large Mods

[thekossack]

Has anyone encountered game performance issues for large user created campaigns? Specifically, do larger maps, a certain number of on map units, or other game criteria slow down game speed?

[n0kn0k]

Units take time to move, so it will take longer with more units.

Same goes for the AI, weather patterns etc.

[pzgndr]

Another thing with larger scale mods is that some units have large movement ranges, such as air and naval units. The AI has to cycle through pathfinding algorithms, which exponentially increase with larger ranges. So more units and longer ranges means longer AI processing times.

There are also some subtleties to the AI scripts that Hubert explained to me and that I intend to document one of these days soon and make available to other modders. Things like transport and offensive scripts that refer to a friendly position means that units connected by land to the first friendly psoition get considered for the plan.

This gets complicated with more and more units. I found in my A3R mod if Allies opened up land connections between Europe and North Africa then my Med transport scripts for reinforcements started considering all units in Europe as possibilities and this bogged down the system. Weird stuff like transports from Lorient to Italy kicked in and AI turns were taking 10-15 minutes.

AI scripting is essentially computer programming. You are telling the machine what to do and what not to do under certain conditions. If you are not careful, it will proceed to do exactly what it is told to do and consume computer resources to do it. It takes quite a bit of time to figure out effective and optimum scripting.

[ChrisND]

In the process of making the now defunct Med Campaign, I did encounter slow-downs with a large (almosy max size) map and hundreds of units. It was playable, but slow.