Testing AI Turn Pan/Zooming

[sven]

As of r38628, it should be possible to pan around the strategic map during AI turns.

I'm hoping the feature is relatively stable, and I believe it should have a pretty minimal impact on performance, but, please let me know if:

• You notice any graphics glitches while panning during AI turns.
• The pan controls don't seem to be working properly during AI turns.
• The game feels slower since this update. If you notice slowdowns, please let me know how large a map you're playing on, and what video card you're using.

Note that the "Simplified Graphics" option will disable the feature.

There's also an experimental option for 'AI Turn Zooming' that you can try out as well. Enabling zooming does add some latency to the end-turn button clicks though, and there are also currently some outstanding issues with range circle drawing during ai-turn zooming that would need to be fixed before I could take a version of this feature live.

[zolobolo]

Good results so far on:
- Turn: 150
- Card: GeForce GTX 970
- 99 Stars
- All factions
- All normal settings

Panning and zooming is seamless during AI Turns with two exceptions:
1. During the start of AI Turns processing there are 4-5 seconds wait time when screen is blocked untill the AI Turns text appears
2. When AI Turn finsihes, there is another 1-1.5 seconds of wait time beginning from when the "AI Turns" text bubble freezes

The above wait times were already present before the change and have not noticed considerable changes in them

Zooming is clearly even more seamless during AI Turns
Panning also seems somewhat smoother during AI Turns then during player turn

Have not seen any glitches or crash so far

[sven]

1. During the start of AI Turns processing there are 4-5 seconds wait time when screen is blocked untill the AI Turns text appears

So this wait time I would very much like to get rid of. Arioch and I observed similar behaviors when we were testing version 38623, but, my own experience, so far, has been that on version 38629 (the current "in_development" build), the initial freeze time drops to closer to 1 second. And with "AI Turn Zooming" disabled, it goes down to almost nothing (maybe 0.1 seconds).

Are you seeing this 4-5 second lag on the 38629 build? And if you disable "AI Turn Zooming", does that change anything?

2. When AI Turn finsihes, there is another 1-1.5 seconds of wait time beginning from when the "AI Turns" text bubble freezes

I've seen versions of this lag as well -- though, again, on my somewhat smaller maps and somewhat newer video cards, the waits aren't quite as long. I'm not sure there's a good way of fixing this one. I think it may just be a suboptimality we need to live with, but, I would like to keep an eye on how bad it gets for different players on different setups.

Thanks for your feedback.

[zolobolo]

Are you seeing this 4-5 second lag on the 38629 build? And if you disable "AI Turn Zooming", does that change anything?

No, started a new game and is reduced to around 1s at Turn 150 with the same settings. End of AI turn wait time seems to have remained around the same but difficutl to tell as it was already at around 1s

The previous game was started with the previous version

Disabling or enabling zoom option does not seem to be affecting wait times for now.

[sven]

No, started a new game and is reduced to around 1s at Turn 150 with the same settings.

Are you playing with autosave on? I found a glitch that was causing autosaving to add delays. This should be fixed in r38631.

Disabling or enabling zoom option does not seem to be affecting wait times for now.

It might start to be noticeable when you update to the next version. The times I'm measuring on my own system (on an 88 star map), are currently about 0.45 seconds with zooming enabled vs. 0.08 seconds with zooming disabled. That's pretty slight, but, it is noticeable, and I'm sure it will be more so for people on older systems.

[zolobolo]

Are you playing with autosave on? I found a glitch that was causing autosaving to add delays. This should be fixed in r38631.

Yes: turned it off and the transition to the AI turns is now almost instantaneous

It makes sense now that you have mentioned it and should not be a bug (saving naturally ties down the process) unless you have coded it in a way that it runs parallel somehow and can work from the undo log or something

[sven]

there are also currently some outstanding issues with range circle drawing during ai-turn zooming that would need to be fixed before I could take a version of this feature live.

As of r38633, these range circles issues should be fixed, so as far as I know the zoom feature is working as intended now. (Though it still does add around 0.5s of latency to next turn clicks on my own test setup.)

[nathanebht]

No problems with zooming or panning during the AI Turn. The AI turn takes only a second or two on my computer but I guess this is a nice feature to have.

[bjg]

Is this technical change leading to something useful (like actually showing AI moves)? Right now it does nothing during short waits (no time to do anything), and makes long waits a bit longer (no need to do anything, because everything was done/looked at during your turn).