@BulletMagnet: That is correct. GPG tell us this is for security reasons so nobody can cheat when there are AI in the games or use AIs to act as players.

@ouch: This does indeed kill CPU and/or simspeed, but as far as I know the AI does not issue the reclaim order on mass. Likewise the AI doesnt issue large amounts of patrol orders to engineers which would also have the same effect. This was all discussed earlier in this thread. Its likely however that this issue effects other commands that we may not have found.

@all: Having said that, as someone who regularly tests one AI vs another or plays 2 AI's at a time I rarely see the sim go below -2 (AMD X2 at 2.2Ghz). Most likely the issue with simspeed is when players try 4 or more AIs in one game. This will kill simspeed unless all players have 64 bit OS with 8 core CPUs running the 64 bit version of FA.

One final idea I had at improving sim speed was to limit the AI's command throughput. Currently the AI can issue as many commands as it likes at once. A human is probably limited to about 2 or 3 per second. I just havent thought of a way to implement the limit.

I played with Core Maximizer on my C2D - it improved the speed a bit. Dunno why i'm not using it with my i7(maybe because none of the cores ever reached full load) - will take a look at it.

Done

Nearly no, but some difference:
2 Cores approx. at 20%
1 at 90%
1 at 40%
On Fields Of Isis with 20 norush 3SAIx. slowed down to +3 - +5

2 Cores approx. 10%
1 at 80%
1 at 40%
On X with 20 norush 3 SAIx. slowed down to 0 - +2

2 Cores approx. 20%
1 at 80%-90% (variating alot)
1 at 60%
On X with 20 norush 7 SAIx. slowed down to -1 - +1

It's a little bit irritating that the speed slowed down faster on a bigger map (but restricted built area) than with more AIs.

There is another interesting thing i was a little bit confused about with my old C2D(don't know if it still happens with the new cpu). 2 AIXs vs 2 Human Players. We played for approx. 45 minutes and the speed went down to approx. -4. Then we paused the game for about 1h because on of us had to go for a while - then we returned to the game and boom - unpaused the game and it was at -8 or so - just like the game continously adjusted game speed without new units/wrackage popping up

that slowdown is unrelated to AIs, it's Windows/the Engine siphoning memory away from the game when it's paused.

it goes really slowly when it's choked for RAM, it fixes itself pretty quickly in skirmish on my XP machine (2.5GHz Phenom X4, 2GB RAM). i'm not sure how it reacts to multiplayer games, or Vista.

There is a 64-bit version of FA? Please, do tell. I am running on a 64-bit OS.

Oh, and it's not RAM related - one of my test machines is a Phenom 9950@2.8GHz and that has 8GB of RAM with 13GB/s of RAM I/O. The game never uses more than 1.5-2GB max.

no, unfortunately there's no x64 build of FA. i'm not sure what Duncane was getting at up there.

It was sarcasm

So, there's no randomness in decision making between AIs? It's all 100% deterministic? And all AIs do the same thing and cross-check that they are doing the same thing?! Wow! That's really retarded. I'd have expected at least a way to switch that off.

1) I trust my friends not to cheat.
2) Having the game not grind to a halt would be quite nice. It really isn't playable on anything but a small rushing skirmish game, which is not what the game was sold as. At least distributing some of the load might help with the current dire performance even on bleeding edge hardware.

it's better to have all players process all AIs than one person send out the data across the internet for the equivalent of 7 players.

each method has pros and cons, GPG chose the path that allows multiplayer on mediums other than gigabit LAN.

now, AIs aren't at all deterministic. they do have some random calculation in it; but said randomness is a psuedo-randomness. at the beginning of the game (this goes for every game, RTS, RPG, FPS alike) everyone synchronises their random number generators. so long as everyone calls the RNGs the same number of times, the results will be the same.

the AIs trust each other not to cheat, so they don't directly cross-check, but the game has it's own cross-checking to prevent people from cheating. a fortunate by product of this is it also makes sure the AIs are all in-line too.

I disagree - the b/w required for a game between 2 players is less than dial-up at about 30kbit/s (I have cacti bandwidth logs to prove it). So considering there is a maximum of 8 players/AIs, the maximum bandwidth required is 240kbit/s. This is little enough that any standard broadband connection can handle it.

Additionally, the AIs-everywhere solution still doesn't make any difference when there are a player-vs-player games with 8 players. The instructions players send still have to get synced, and that takes up just as much bandwidth as 8 AIs. So the argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny, it just shifts the problem around a bit. It certainly wouldn't require gigabit latencies.

And don't forget that we used to play much bigger games with many more units in Total Annihilation. Sure, SC/FA has much more advanced graphics, but if TA could handle 2x players + 2 AIs with 5,000 unit caps each without any sim-speed slow-down on a 300MHz Pentium II, then it is pretty unforgivable that we are now experiencing sim-speed slowdown to unplayable levels when the nature of the work it has to do is pretty much the same.

I have long suffered this problem and have pretty much had to limit my self to 1-2 AI's in any skirmish that I play. I saw that the people on this topic were testing this with AI only games. How do I exclude myself from a skirmish? I have looked through the options and the cheats and I haven't found it. Any help would be appreciated.

Use the multiplayer lobby, not the skirmish one, and make yourself an observer.

You can also be in the game at the ver start, and then just ctrl-K your commander at the very beginning...

I agree with you. I don't experience any slowdowns at all on 40x40 maps with my 4.0 quad however on 80x80 Debris.. it bogs down fast when it is just me and 1 bot. Neither of us expand much however the game just slows down for some odd reason even after there are no more units on the map at all. It was the same thing that was happening with the people at the beginning of this thread on Srypm'd Clutch.

Is there a mod or something that addresses it because I was reading how someone on Page 1 was saying something about "Duncane fixes"

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work and wanted to throw in a few things I noticed that was real buggy last night when I was playing.

I was playing as UEF for once and I noticed they seemed to be real buggy compared to the Cybran race. UEF has major pathing problems, assist problems and my engineers seem to forget what they was doing. I tell one unit to assist another engineer in his build que and all he does is follow him around and sit there. I also noticed the commander is really slow at moving compared to the Cybran and that engineers are constantly bumping into each other or idle units trying to get to there path. As soon as I get some extra money I plan to donate to sorian for working on the mod. I did have a couple of questions, when you do showstats in the console I seen what was called heap size? I assume its the memory. Is there a way to increase that? I just kinda want to play with it and I noticed when I saved my game then reloaded that the heap size dropped about 512 meg and the other memory thing (I'll look the name up in a min wasn't at 64meg constant anymore it had also dropped). And just a suggestion lol, is there a way you can turn the ui taunts off? or make it so we can toggle it? Me and my friends could do without it =P lol but then again maybe everyone else likes it .

Taunts can be turned off in the game menu. Under sound, I think.

Still working on sim speed improvements, but not sure what else can be done.

I think that has to do with the fact that FA is a 32 bit application. AFAIK a normal 32 bit application can only use 2 GB of memory independent of how many memory exists on the system. There is some large adress switch that determins if an application can use more (up to 4 GB). I know there was such a fix available for the original Supreme Commander but I do not know if it also exists for FA.

Mad Boris made a patch for the exe to use the Enlarged size on 32bit systems (in conjunction with PAE) and enabled use of larger than 2GB files on 64bit systems that natively support it.

I don't know if the patch works with the latest exe's though. Is Mad Boris still around?

Kaerar, let the thread rest; if a question wasn't answered after two months, then you shouldn't go answering it.

and no, MadBoris has left us to mod and improve Crysis; that happened ages ago.

i had an app crash at 2gb virtual addressing in Forged Alliance. That was on a 10x10 map also

You need to use either the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file in XP, or in Vista use 'bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa 3072'

Having read most of the posts about the slowdown and having tried alot of games myself i still feel the problem must be the pathing.

I read somewhere that each unit the way it works now is giving a new order to move every time something gets in its way to its original target, and while this may not be a problem at first, after about 15-20 min most of the ai´s got several hundreds of units trying to get to your base, sometimes up to 50 at this point standing around their base not having been told to move out yet, so they clog up the path for other units.

The way i understand it is that the pathing calculation that has to be made everytime a unit is told where to go is made the instant the order is giving, so say you have a ai that continues to increase the amount of units it sends at you, they would eventually start to get in each others way a bit, slow things down, this gets increasing like more apperant when map features makes the units clog at certain points...
e.g Setons clutch that has some of the worst slowdown of all, yet if you look at it, it makes perfect sense since it has the narrowest choke compared to the size of map / mex and so the amount of units players will try to squeeze through there is higher that anywhere else, since the choke is so small the units path with often cross each other making the new calculation of path i.e the slowdown accur.

I have no proof whatsover of this, but i have played alot of ai games (i have no friends) and one thing that never fails is the huge amount of units the ai eventually has that just stands there, waiting to move.

The fact that the sim speed is improved when ducanes and sorians mod are added is probably because they optimized the pathing? or they make the ai send units away sooner so they dont clog up as much?

Have any of you looked really hard in to this aproach to it, as i said, i have read most of this thread although most of it was a long time ago so maybe i have forgotten if someone already mentioned this... anyways.. my 2 cents on the issue, great work on the ais

I have done quite a bit to try and improve pathing. I have set up a pathing cache so when there are multiple unit heading for the same destination the AI only calculates a path for the first one and the rest use the cached value.

I also changed the pathing function a bit to be more streamlined.

Oh okay, well, i guess it would be silly to expect you not to have tried this avenue already, still, i think thats whats causing the slowdown, i have tried with alot of different ais to make sure that its not just one of them and the one where its the worst of all... the swarm, after 40 irl min the game was at -6 and the clusterfuck had long since started

[

But still when all thats said, even with the slowdown theres nothing quite like it when you get a Sorian Rush, set the build multiplier to 6x, and watch the ai get out a experimental at the 5 min mark

Tried doing it on frostmill ruins and you could actually see the ai arranging the experimentals in groups ranging from 2 all the way up to 7, to bad the game was so slow they never got to my base before i got bored

Intel Core2Quad 9450 @ 2.66Ghz
4GB Ram
Nvid Gforce 9800GTX+

Well i was fascinated:

Me and a made of mine often played matches against Sorian AIX in FA. We played nearly every Version since 1.8.3 i think. We indeed played 1.9.9c and the slow down was as usual with the Old FA Version 3599. Then we moved to 3603 and the slow down stayed the same. I don't know if we changed SAI or Game Version first but SAI 2.0 never felt like a challenge to us and the slow down was still the same. And so we reverted to 1.9.9c with 3603 - and here it was: Nearly no slow down, even after 40 minuts of play time every thing runs smooth:

Nearly every match ended after 45 minutes of IG Time:
45 minutes IG Time with 2.0: 4 Hours Realtime
45 minutes IG Time after reverting to 1.9.9c: 2 Hours Realtime

Well i have to say that we use pauses alot but from a personal pov it looks like no slow down at all anymore and i don't know what way we moved to geht these results exactly but now SCFA is fun again

Computers:

Mine: Core i7 920, 3GB Ram, 260 GTX
Made: Higher Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram, GF 9800 SLI

Can you give us some more details like How many Sorian AIx you played against, Is there any unit mods you use, and did you try playing & testing on Setons Clutch ? I can also test what you say when i come home after my 3 days trip..