Faster Loading/Turn Times in Scenarios/Mods

1: El Justo speeded up the loading/turn times of scenarios/mods by cutting down the air/sea trade.

2. When trying to additionally fasten up the loading/turn times of SOE I discovered the following:

When the mod/scenario is placed in the conquest folder (the biq and the scenario/mod-files) and the scenario/mod is started from the conquest folder
(and not the scenario folder), the loading time and the time of AI-turns is halfed, what in SOE is a lot of saved time.

May be this is helpful for other mods/scenarios too.

Cool, any idea as to how/why?

Civinator said:

1: El Justo speeded up the loading/turn times of scenarios/mods by cutting down the air/sea trade.

2. When trying to additionally fasten up the loading/turn times of SOE I discovered the following:

When the mod/scenario is placed in the conquest folder (the biq and the scenario/mod-files) and the scenario/mod is started from the conquest folder
(and not the scenario folder), the loading time and the time of AI-turns is halfed, what in SOE is a lot of saved time.

May be this is helpful for other mods/scenarios too.

Click to expand...

Ya this is great but why is that?. Were the 'conquests' scenarios given a more dir route or prority? (im not good enough at programming to know )

The last xpak was all about those conquests. THey had subcontracted miltary sim designers and the works. (sum are members here) I woundn't be surprised if they wired themselves the extra juice to make the companys hard spent$$ perform greater and more sneakily,have it look like there work runs smoother then amature content stored elseware(Scenarios).

I know thats going far but mybe they just forgot to stream line the other file. I mean, for what? They had no use in their contract for it to be completed. That was fireaxis's job
Better, they didn't know anything was wrong with the scenario file in the first place. That would explain why none of the guys at Breakaway mentioned the fact here.
Whatever the reason you are great and this is a big leap over that giant hurdle we had when running a mega map.

You could win a noble fot this. IM going to test it out tommorow

T.A JONES said:

IM going to test it out tommorow

Click to expand...

Some more confirmations about this would be handsome. At time we have only tested it with SOE ( a huge map with thousands of preplaced units).

I've always placed mods and scenarios in the Conquests folder, and they always seem to run pretty well. However, I don't really have anything to compare it to, since I haven't played one from the Scenarios folder.

If you limit the amount of cities on the map by for example, not letting them be built on tundra or deseart then on preset maps this can help.

Also if you increase the cost of units genorally but give them more hit points then the amount of units in the game decreases, helping turn times.

Basically if you find Rhyes mod and have a look at what he did to decrease them that could help

Wow, this is very interesting news. The only way I could explain it from a programming perspective is that the programmers coded an entirely new, more efficient loading process when adding the Conquests. Perhaps Civ-Content uses a modified algorithm from vanilla Civ3, but when they implemented the Conquests (scenarios) menu they wrote a new loading algorithm from scratch?
Regardless, if it does indeed work this could be great news for large scenarios. Nice work, Civinator

Thank you for the kind words, but I think it´s too early for them. Confirmations from other civers, or messages, that it doesn´t work for a scenario/mod are highly appreciated. Only if it works for other mods/scenarios too, it would be a great breakthrough for C3C. Otherwise we have to reflect, why it works so great for SOE.

Loading times and AI-turn-times were always a big pain with SOE and so we have documented these factors for a longer time. And that´s why I can say, that this move to the conquests-folder for SOE halfes the loading time and AI turn-time nearly exactly.

kairob, thanks for the hints. So I know this stuff (and may be sometimes in the near future I post some additional stuff here, that is not so well known yet), this can be very helpful for a lot of other moders. So if anyone here has some stuff to say for speeding up scenarios and mods, may be, this is a good place to gather these ideas here too.

you mean

civ3\c3c\conquests\soe.biq

instead of

civ3\c3c\scenarios\soe.biq

??

that would be nice!

perhaps you could try (rename soe.biq) -> conquests.biq

civ3\c3c\conquests.biq

that would be possible, would'nt it?

Very interesting indeed! I'm still a little skeptical but I'll be looking forward to more cofirmations.

@ jatibi: I don't think renaming it to conquests.biq would really help (all the fireaxis conquests have different names) but I could be wrong.

jatibi said:

you mean

civ3\c3c\conquests\soe.biq instead of civ3\c3c\scenarios\soe.biq?

Click to expand...

Yes, and to put the files of that scenario/mod in the conquest folder too.

jatibi, may be I don´t get the full sense of the second part of your question.
In the moment I see no need to rename that biq to start a mod/scenario (here SOE) from the conquest folder.

If you can start random C3C games on very big map-settings with these benefits out from the Conquest folder, I never have tested.

i agree, it was very confusing.

what i mean:

would replacing the original game files with the given scenario (SOE in this case) additionaly decrease the loading time?

so SOE would be the whole game, no subfolders.

Civinator said:

Some more confirmations about this would be handsome. At time we have only tested it with SOE ( a huge map with thousands of preplaced units).

Click to expand...

As I've said on another forum, this works for sure. Except, I only tried it with SOE.

It could work. I remember before a certain patch, city view for the conquests was still enabled...

Just a quick question, too impatient to read the whole thing, can I just move the i.e. WH folder and .biq from the Scenarios folder to the Conquest folder and have faster games, or will it crash on me, cos I didn`t change a file path somewhere or something?

Thanks

Stormrage said:

Just a quick question, too impatient to read the whole thing, can I just move the i.e. WH folder and .biq from the Scenarios folder to the Conquest folder and have faster games, or will it crash on me, cos I didn`t change a file path somewhere or something?

Thanks

Click to expand...

If you have .biq and the folder in the Conquests folder, you'll be set.

AlCosta! BTW, I miss your old avatar(s). You were quite unique with it

jatibi said:

would replacing the original game files with the given scenario (SOE in this case) additionaly decrease the loading time? so SOE would be the whole game, no subfolders.

Click to expand...

jatibi, I haven´t tried that yet.



and Stormi,

please tell us, if the movement of the WH folder and .biq from the Scenarios folder to the Conquest folder speeds up the loading time and the AI turn times.

p.e.: The loading time for SOE on my pc with this methode was speeded up from 10 minutes to five minutes, for AlCosta on his pc from 12 minutes to 6 minutes.

I'll try it with LotM... though I'll have to actually play to a point when turns take a significant amount of time!


(nah, I'll just throw a bunch of units and cities on a map...)

Weasel Op said:

Wow, this is very interesting news. The only way I could explain it from a programming perspective is that the programmers coded an entirely new, more efficient loading process when adding the Conquests.

Click to expand...

Glad to see we share the same theory since I have jack for expiernce in programming mind was essentially a hunch. It seems more real when you consider the guys who did the Conquests route where not the same as the ones who programmed the scenarios route

Its in all likelyhood considerin Breakaway is a heavly accliamed Gov contracted company working for military applications where performance is kinda important )They might have a few tricks they forgot to share the other guys in the office. Mybe the other guys were all off on vacation when they did it -Anyone be surprised?

BUt to the testing I had a setback Im always playin extra huge maps. At the moment its a Balancer Reloaded(surprise) 204x204 on turn 460. Right now its about 2 minutes plus AI fighn with capslock on(4 minuites on average) Of course When I tried to move the file from scenario folder over to conquests the save woudn't load from that new lacation. I have to start from scratch.

What I am doing is playing out the scenario folder game first and timing the turns at differant intervals. After Im done I will play the same varaibles from the Conquest folder and chart the comparisons on a graph.

ONly prob as anyone would know is these games take a long time. For me a few hours every day for over a month span. Thats crappy cuz that means I won't have anything concreate to prove this breakthrough for quite some time

I hope others can get the tested much sooner.