Bad performance, worst coding

[muertix]

Sorry to say this , the game is result of bad coding and even worse design over GUI system.
Even having a High end system wont help to improve civ3 performance

- Its very boring to change city production or moving units one by one, will be easier if you have a group system like any new game does.
- Governor histocastic prediction is wrong, better destroy it.
- Game CPU utilization is too high cos of bad implementation of AI algorithm and polymorfic scales.
- CPU cycles are not adjusted to system performance, generally it cause mouse lagg and scrolling lag.
- Game AI its very well, but making it cheat at higher difficulty levels its not good, will be better to implement different strategies depending on difficulty so it cannot be predicible.

We all know that its hard to optimize our code but the guys that coded civ3 had NO idea about it, just take a look using an aplication performance monitor and even game API calls are way too lagged, seems they have bad loops.

Game facts are very good, except some logic and normal bugs that can be corrected, but how can they expect a player to wait more than 10 seconds per turn in a board / strategy game.

Civ3 needs to be recoded from scratch, too many bugs and civilization management system is like 10 year old, giving orders to every unit and cycling over all the cities its a waste of time, what about a good global management system ( remember Civilization Call to Power 2 have a Nation Manager , its very usefull )

Bad performance is related to zoom scale and map auto
moves, its also annoying trying to concentrate over a map area when it focus every unit that makes a move.

Also its important when releasing a new aplication to give the user customization tools related to application performance and visual settings, dont expect your customers to open .ini files to change screen resolution for example.

Civ3 its fun but if anyone plans to buy it , better try it first.
Maybe we expected too much , but anyway the game concept is very good and hopefully coders do lot of cycles optimization.

Releasing aplications that are not ready is just an economic issue but forgiving user needs its really stupid

Just my comment, thank you for reading.
Sorry about my engish , i am german =).

Chris F. Cybernetics and Systems Engineer.

 

[RouTaran]

"Its very boring to change city production or moving units one by one, will be easier if you have a group system like any new game does."
thats the way its always been. I've not seen anyone complaining about it before. im guessing you didnt like Civ1 or 2 cuz they both worked pritty much the same way.

"Governor histocastic prediction is wrong, better destroy it."
i looked up histocastic in the dictionary as my vocabulary is rather limited, i suck at english but i couldnt figure out what you ment. Unfortunately, that word was not in the dictionay. The closest thing i saw was histogram, which means bar graphs to represent data. The governer does nothing like that as far as i know so im still lost. Could you please elaborate on this point?

"Game CPU utilization is too high cos of bad implementation of AI algorithm and polymorfic scales."
I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what you are talking about but it sounds like you are saying the system has to be pritty powerful to run this game. I'm running a 933 so i cant be a fair judge of that. Maybe it does require a powerful comp, maybe it does not. In anycase, most games out right now require nothing less than a super computer to run on, alteast the ones that are "good." Min reqs for Civ3 by comparison are significantly lower.

"Game AI its very well, but making it cheat at higher difficulty levels its not good, will be better to implement different strategies depending on difficulty so it cannot be predicible.
Well, there was this discussion I had with some other people on the strategy forum about the AI. We compared chess to civ. Chess in general is a very simply game, atleast from a mathematical point of view. Each peice has a set value and this value changes according to what transpires in the game. For example, the starting value of a Bishop in a game is 3 but its value can rise to 6 or higher in late game as it can exert significantly more control over the board when there are fewer peices left. Each square on the board as a value with the center being the highest. The computer simply has to pick the lowest valued peices and take control of the highest value squares.
Deep Blue, the IMB super computer that beat Garry Kasprov was made up of 250+ processors and could evaluave millions of positions that are possible from each move per second and then keep them ALL in memory to refer to. It also had all the games played by the grand masters over the last 100 years to find similarities to the game it was playing so it could develop ideas on how to approach its current situation.
Thats what it takes for a machine to beat the human mind, the combined knowledge of the grand masters of the past 100 years and a computational speed millions of times faster than Kasprov's 3 moves/sec
To program an AI that can present us with a challenge on a game that is far more complex than chess using a processor that's nothing compared to Deep Blue with very little info to fall back on for help is a task of absolutely monumental proportions.
If by some minor miracle, Firaxis were to pull it off, the game wouldn't ship in 1 CD, prolly more like a couple 100 CD's and would cost a whole lot of money.
Cheaper and a more realsitc way to make it challenging for us, let the comp cheat cuz thats the only way it can match our intelligence and ingenuity.

Game facts are very good, except some logic and normal bugs that can be corrected, but how can they expect a player to wait more than 10 seconds per turn in a board / strategy game.
It could be the fact that the comp has to deal with the graphics of the game as well as the "thinking" (if you can call it that) it has to do while playing.

Civ3 needs to be recoded from scratch, too many bugs and civilization management system is like 10 year old, giving orders to every unit and cycling over all the cities its a waste of time, what about a good global management system ( remember Civilization Call to Power 2 have a Nation Manager , its very usefull )
Did you try using the city manager? You can tell him exactly what kind of stuff to build in your cities ranging from limiting production to Settlers/workers or ground defence/offence, navy, air force or buildings of specific interests either production, culture, science or happiness or just give him a general order to build a combination of these with some higher up on the priority that others. Personally, i like the way its setup right now, i dont have to baby my cities to the extent i had to in Civ 2. I do not know about the Nation Manager as i never played any of the CTP series.

Bad performance is related to zoom scale and map auto
moves, its also annoying trying to concentrate over a map area when it focus every unit that makes a move.
Well, if i see something of interest, i dont move my units till i take a closer look. If you have the units on auto like workers, then just wait for them to do what they are doing and when a unit that's not on auto becomes active you can go back to whatever peeked your interest. If you have an idea that can deal with this better than the current system, please propose it. A lot of the stuff thats in Civ3 is a direct result of feedback from Civ2/SMAC players.

Also its important when releasing a new aplication to give the user customization tools related to application performance and visual settings, dont expect your customers to open .ini files to change screen resolution for example.
Unfortunately, I have neither the time or the patience to make mods, prolly more because of the latter. Would some1 else care to comment on this as i have yet to take a look at the "map maker" utility that ships with Civ3.

Civ3 its fun but if anyone plans to buy it , better try it first.
Maybe we expected too much , but anyway the game concept is very good and hopefully coders do lot of cycles optimization.
That is ALWAYS good advice. If you have some poor sucker friend who bought the game before you, call em up and find out if you can try the game out over at their place or something. If you live in edmonton, then i guess im your "sucker friend."

 

[Nick]

Judging from some other threads I do wonder whether there aren't some home truths in muertix's comments about the coding. Is the game really having to do so many many more calculations than Test of Time, which had pretty reasonable graphics (anyone care to comment how these compare to those on Civ3?), even allowing for the fact there are twice as many civs? (Potentially at least) My computer has a 750 processor and 64Mb of RAM, which was quite respectable about 18 months ago, but is now dwarfed by a lot of the machines now available. From what I can tell Civ3, along with a lot of other games, is less efficiently coded than games used to be when codeshops had more limited constraints on what they could expect their customers' computers to do.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

Your computer blows...as a poor student I use a 1.6 Ghz, 512 mb ram monster...

Have to love the thieves that stole my old computer so I got the insurance money that allowed my transition to a nice new computer

 

[RouTaran]

its not the processor that matters these days, a new one's popping up every other month or so
the real "big fish" these days is the ram and the video card. these 2 better be big and powerful if you expect to run any of the new games comming out

 

[HomeAir]

He is right. Each piece should not be individually moved. The computer should group pieces. I was playing a game with 16 players and it got to the point where it was taking 3-5 minutes in between my turn for the computer opponets. That is way to long. This is just bad coding and should have been thought through before they implemented the old code from the previous versions of Civ. I have a 1ghz with 384 mb ram and that is more than enough to run a game. If it isn't then the game maker needs to think about how many people are going to get super computer running 2ghz with 2gb of ram. That goes for all game makers.

 

[CeasarSalad]

Have you tried turning animations off?

 

[Craterus22]

I will take a shot at the Histocastic definition

HIstocastic- a combination of history and forcast

Based on the players historical selections the game govenor will select production based on some percentage of previous choices.

If that is the case why would it keep trying to build the forbidden palace after I have deselected it 50 times?

BTW please don't flame me - I use the forbidden palace only occasionally as a shield storage bunker for wonders...

 

[toolie]

Originally posted by Nick
My computer has a 750 processor and 64Mb of RAM, which was quite respectable about 18 months ago, but is now dwarfed by a lot of the machines now available.

The CPU is fine. You will probably need more RAM though. Which is OK, since that is a ton cheaper than a new MB & CPU .

 

[treadwin]

I think making a "bad coding" assessment even based on a profile is probably a bid harsh.

I have produced software commercially for many years and the first release always has "features" which are. . . shall we say undesireable.

The only bug I have seen to date which I think really should have been caught is the air supremacy / ZOC / Coastal Fortress mess which I think is possibly all the same thing.

As for performance, Civ2 was slow when it first came out - and Civ 1, but technology improved and they became faster. I think in 5 years time when we are still playing this game (and I will be I think) the performance issue will have faded somewhat.

The trade off between performance, delivery time and features has always been tough. I for one hope that a patch to correct the immediate bugs will be along soon and if I was that particular about my games I would have waited for the next release, which I am sure will be faster, better, stronger.

(If you hold down the shift key when the enemy moves, it speeds up their move. Also playing on a smaller map with less civs is obviously faster)

 

[Jezner]

So how is Civ3 bad coding different from all other bad coding in other software applications. I mean, if you want to be a stickler about coding, point your guns at Windows. As far as Civ 3 is concerned, its a game and my business, life, unverse does not depend on the Civ programmers being sloppy. They are providing entertainment and ninety nine percent of its users could care less about bad API calls. Jeez.

 

[HomeAir]

Of course I turned off the animations. It helps some but doesn't alleviate the whole problem. As for the hold the shift key down, where did you see that at? Does it really work? I am at work, so I can't really try that. A Ghz machine with 384 mb ram should be more than enough to play a game. There is something that is just taking time and that is the moving of the AI pieces. They could have grouped them so they move as a group if they are going to the same spot. Too many instances that 10-20 pieces were following each other to some spot far away. Computer wants to move them individually so it takes the extra time to do so making the player sit through it. There are definitely better solutions. I do program for a living too and you can't detect everything, but a lot of this stuff should have shown up in playtesting.

 

[slothman]

What they need to do is improve the "don't show enemy moves" option. When it is checked all the computser stuff is done in memory and then set up at the beggining aof your turn. That way you only have to wait for the physical churning of the CPU. This would be good even if the enemies units are near yours. The computer turns should be nearly instant.

 

[muertix]

Its good you guys got the point i was trying to communicate.

about hisocastic methods translated it wrong, sorry , i meant " prediction models" dont know exactly the translated phrase but its " Estocastic" i think, the fact is that trying to predict what the user will want ( in this case to build ) is not the best election, the reason is ofcourse simple , human is not predicible.

another point is that currently AI implemented over games or applications is very primitive compared to human capacity , so cheating seems like a easy solution with not bad results.
But having a computer enemy that always do the same strategy is kinda boring , someday you will track down its movements and finally beat it completly.
Civ3 seems to have an average AI compared to currently games, some are really amazing without compromising system performance, actually neuronal networks can do a very good job following patterns and taking inteligent strategies depending on the input.

In this case i have being trying to find why civ3 performance is so bad, and looks its not because complexity of AI, the best way to probe this is quite easy, measure the time between a heavy loaded situation and a supposed simply non related AI.
setup a game with 1 civilization ( you ) and put NONE enemies , at the beggining it will say there is no scoring but it will ask you if you want to keep playing , just pick yes and it will run normally.
There you will note that the turn time its still large , and game performance its still bad, at least i feel that , but maybe ya can encounter different results .
Over a normal desktop athlon 1ghz 256 pc133 plus geforce2 GTS.
and my laptop toshiba with a very good video card geforce2 go 16mb and p3 900.
All the time measurements are not less than 3 seconds per turn when it should be almost at instant because there is not anything complex to measure isnt it?

About civilization management its primitive , if you need to increase your scientific output building universities for example you will need to change each city queue by hand when will be simple to add a damn change all button or something like that.

Thats what i am not fully loving the game, its so hard to manage that its far to be " user friendly " , i dont understand why the developers didnt added so important items.

Civ3 is good but is far away of the game i expected

My personal experiences are that no code is ready at the first pass, you need to re-do and optimize it when everything is running properly.
At first look , as a programmer it seem that developers coded it once without worries of quality or code recheck, i know its a pain in the ass to study the code and harder when there is so many people coding over it but if you dont like what you coding better you stop it.

well thats my thoughts, i know most of you can disagree but there is something important to take in , with all the experience the civ developers got from the past , its incredible that civ3 still got so bad limitations.

What can we expect with the first patch? i hope its fixed or will be the disapointment of the century lol

 

[Libertarian]

Has anyone yet seen a bad professional review of Civ3?

 

[starfox]

Muertix, I discovered last night that you can hit "g" to call the governor menu. There you can personalize the production. It's not perfect, but quite good. Now I can oder my cities never to build air or naval units and focus more on happiness.