resource management and recent improvements

Post by **zuzuf** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 3:40 pm

I've fixed several minor bugs in r1284 to 1286 and improved resource management.

So what about resource management here ? Well it was working great as long as you have the required resources to build things since it only checked for each unit if you had enough resources to build/fire/etc... now each unit tells how much resource is needed and for next tick it modulates the resource consumption by some factor that ensures no unit will take all the remaining resources for itself.

What does it change ? Remember when you were building lots of things and your commander suddenly stops building because he wants more resources than available ... now he doesn't stop and resource priority is given according to what builders need

Among recently fixed bugs you'll find some AI fixes: it doesn't feel the need to fill the map with metal extractors or to build metal extractors over wreckages. And a minor fixe in FBI loaded concerning unit's Yardmap footprint that wasn't read correctly in some cases.

Post by **zuzuf** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:31 am

I've improved some AI functions complexity and made a few optimizations to AI code. The game is now much faster when playing with thousands of units

milipili · Post by **milipili** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:25 pm

Yeah

Maximum · Post by **Maximum** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 11:32 pm

Sounds great, keep up the good work.

Its hard to be active lately with all the games that are coming out in such a short timeframe.

Post by **zuzuf** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 11:53 pm

I noticed the memory requirements had increased with the loading speed up because of textures being stored in RAM instead of video memory as compressed textures ... so I fixed it

now 3DO textures are stored in texture cache as TGA files, of course they are written only once so that it doesn't slow down loading

. This saves a bit more than 100MB RAM for me on my laptop and much more on another PC with a full install (TA, TA:CC, TA:BT and several third party units).

This should reduce memory requirements compared to revisions before the loading speed improvements (unless you manage to see every single 3D model during a game ... which is very unlikely), so this isn't only a fix for something we introduced earlier

Balthazar · Post by **Balthazar** » Tue Nov 11, 2008 7:59 am

Glad to hear about new fixes. What`s next in the to-do list?

P.S. How was your vacation, Zuzuf? Was St.Petersburg a nice place?

Post by **zuzuf** » Tue Nov 11, 2008 11:26 am

well the todo list is in the trac and I keep fixing annoying bugs when I find them

.

P.S. St Petersburg is really a nice place, there is so much to see, it's frustrating I didn't have the time to see more and the sun was a bit shy

Post by **zuzuf** » Sat Nov 15, 2008 12:45 am

I got horrible linking errors on my system after an update

so I've fixed compilation with CMake 2.6.2 ...

I improved a bit loading speed and memory footprint (~30MB less, I get 110MB instead of 140MB on my 64bits OS).

SO assuming your OS is light you can definitely play with 256MB RAM on a 64bits OS and maybe be with even less RAM on a 32bits OS!!

Without any optimization (not even for my CPU) I can load the map "darkside" in 10 seconds (after cache has been built of course) and with build optimizations I can reach 8 seconds !

test machine:
AMD Athlon64 3800+
1GB RAM
GeForce 7600 GT
Linux64 (Intrepid using KDE 4.1)

Balthazar · Post by **Balthazar** » Sat Nov 15, 2008 11:59 am

Qite impressive

Post by **zuzuf** » Sat Nov 15, 2008 10:19 pm

Saving/loading multiplayer games is now fully supported

!

Balthazar · Post by **Balthazar** » Sun Nov 16, 2008 6:50 pm

Thanks! Very usefull fix!

Post by **zuzuf** » Sun Nov 16, 2008 7:53 pm

I also forgot to say the ESC menu behavior is fixed too

PS: and we can now play with the unit limit we want in both single and multi player games

TA3D

resource management and recent improvements

resource management and recent improvements

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