In testing: RFC Fast Edition

I've been looking for ways to make RFC run faster, especially in between turns (which also is what makes autoplay take so long), and today I finally managed to make a break-through! We're looking at at least 10% less lag, but it would of course depend on the actual game at hand.

The files can be found in this post and the technical aspects are also discussed in this thread.

What is needed now is comprehensive play testing - instructions can be found inside the link provided above.

Once this setup can be confirmed to work it can be worked into a proper release, perhaps with other enhancements. So helping out with testing is appreciated.

ps I believe something like this is also going to be featured in the next release of the RFC Marathon mod-mod, which already features various speed enhancements.

edit: I originally thought I'd call this mod-mod "Faster, Rhye! Kill! Kill!" Can anyone catch the reference?

Here are the results I got with my setup and mod, but with all differences the principles are the same:

12 -> 10
13 -> 11
45 -> 33
20 -> 19
20 -> 18
30 -> 27
30 -> 25
50 -> 43

(original autoplay minutes vs. new)

Not a scientific test really, and the original values are were rounded up, but I think it's clear that there's about 10% speed increase in mid- to late- game. That one result with 45% increase was due to a bug unfortunately, some civs didn't spawn, after I fixed that there was no more problems.

10% is a lot tbh, especially when combined with other speed enhancements. RFC isn't that slow but this opens the possibility of adding more civs and features without making the game too slow.

well done! I've added a post in rhye.civfanatics.net

Cool!

I think there's still life in the RFC community, even with your retirement and the impending doomsday (Civ5 release, that is). Hopefully there will be new stuff available once people realize they really miss the rise and fall aspect of it.

I was talking with embryodead elsewhere about doing some additional enhancement work on RFC, and perhaps even release a new version eventually. That could also include fixes. It would probably be built around the RFC Marathon mod-mod and not include many changes or additions as such.

But whoever would organize something like that would of course have to run everything by you first...

Any effort to keep the community alive, whatever it is, is welcome.

I have already suggested in the minor sugg. thread, that one could turn off the autosave while the autoplay. But I don't know if this is possible.

It's possible. I just turn them off myself, but 1 line in CvGame will automatically make sure autosaves are disabled during autoplay, and re-enabled once you spawn. Does anyone actually need those autoplay autosaves ? In any case this "feature" could be disabled in the XML.

embryodead said:

It's possible. I just turn them off myself, but 1 line in CvGame will automatically make sure autosaves are disabled during autoplay, and re-enabled once you spawn. Does anyone actually need those autoplay autosaves ? In any case this "feature" could be disabled in the XML.

Click to expand...

Well personally I sometimes use the Initial autosave, in order to do a quick reroll - just loading that means you don't have to exit to the main menu and configure the game all over again, so.. but yeah, the ones during the autoplay probably aren't used by many