Recent content by Cromagnus

Well, yes and no. I meant more of a time consumption metric. Some people with slow machines might be ok with longer turn times to get smarter AI. And people with fast machines could crank up the slider without seeing their turn times increase.

Further confirmation that rendering is the bottleneck in the AI benchmark: 6C/12HT: 19.5 seconds/turn DX11 (17.6 seconds in strategic view) I'll have to try that mod when I have time. Otherwise it's not much of an AI benchmark. ;)

I'll worry about pathfinding perf when next turn time isn't limited more by animation speed and DirectX perf than pathfinding. For all we know pathfinding is already multithreaded. As far as I can tell, next turns times are literally spent just waiting for animations to finish while my CPU...

Seems like people with less than 6 cores are reporting DX12 is worse, whereas for me it performed better. Anyone out there with an 8-core Haswell-E or something that can run the benchmarks and give us more data?

You mean the leader animations? I wasn't aware you could disable combat and movement animations.

I'd love to see a developer give players an AI CPU scaler. There might be some PC games that scale the AI based on measuring CPU utilization, but I'm not aware of any. Nor can I recall any that let you drag a scaler or check a box to increase AI computation time. I did work on a single-threaded...

I see your point, but game engines are usually a vast conglomeration of parts glued together somewhat haphazardly. If you're picturing a clean, well-executed design that programmers were given time to make perfect, that's a fantasy world. Time constraints make it almost a certainty that what you...

Re: Making it fun vs making it fast - The more flexible your game engine, the less efficient it is, generally speaking. The more control a game designer has to change the way things work, the less ability programmers have to optimize the code. As a game gets close to ship it usually hardens...

Right now, Civ6 feels significantly easier than Civ5. You can make more mistakes and get away with it. I think the gameplay elements they added have made the game a difficult juggling act, and if it's hard for players to get it right, it's almost always harder for the AI to get it right. Also...

If I were to hazard a guess, based on experience, (I did AI programming for about 5 years) the issue isn't needing "better coders"... usually deadlines and priorities are the limiting factor. No game has ever shipped bug-free. Therefore, shipping on time is an exercise in triage. You prioritize...

Whether you see improvement in DX12 will depend on your specific GPU and CPU. Here are the benchmarks I ran. (with updated AMD and nvidia drivers) Specs are: CPU: X5670 @ 4.4Ghz 6-core w/ HT (hyperthreading) GPU: GTX 1070 1600x900 (GPU never exceeded 70% utilization) I ran the benchmarks in...

Yes this is with the patch. FYI to use DX12 I had to right-click on the game in the Steam Library. The DX12 .exe ends up launching DX11 for me. YMMV.

Here are the benchmarks I ran. Specs are: CPU: X5670 @ 4.4Ghz GPU: GTX 1070 1600x900 (GPU never exceeded 70% utilization) AI benchmark 4C/4HT: 18.3 seconds/turn 4C/8HT: 19.1 seconds/turn 6C/6HT: 18.2 seconds/turn 6C/12HT: 19.5 seconds/turn DX11 Graphics Benchmark: 4C/4HT: 15.1ms (66 fps)...

There's still hope. I don't need Civ6 to take advantage of 8-12 cores. What I want is two things: 1) I want the game to run 60fps on my 2.0GHz 12-core when it's not GPU-limited, just like Doom, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield, and a lot recent games that have been designed to remove the...

Here are some issues that would hurt perf like this... 1) The game could be mutex-bound. A lot of older engines that were remodeled for multi-threading suffer from this. Because the engine wasn't designed to be thread-safe, parts of it must be protected inefficiently. When one thread is...