Map of Planet Scenario

[Tholish]

I was thinking about making a Huge Map of Planet scenario for planetfall, but ran into two problems immediately.

One is the difficulty of getting data out of SMAC. Screenshots don't paste into gimp and the .MP file used for the map is unreadable by anything I have. Thus I will have to laboriously do it one tile at a time (128 by 64 is over 7000 tiles), though approximation might be forgivable and in fact inevitable due to the differences between smac and planetfall. Or perhaps the map transfer task could be divided up by a team of people willing to do parts of it.

Second is the problem of SMAC tiles being diamonds and CivIV tiles being squares. Direct transfer is impossible because one is diagonal to the other. Any thoughts on what is the best approach to this?

Or the value of the project at all?

 

[Maniac]

I'd recommend reading this thread, more specifically post #10. That program would save a lot of work at least for creating the landmasses.

Regarding the value of the project, I'm certain a lot of people would appreciate it. I wouldn't be one of them though - I only play on standard maps, because I think that leads to better gameplay, and because larger maps slow down the game.

 

[Pfeffersack]

(...) and because larger maps slow down the game.

A very important point - a bigger map would be nice together with the expansion factions we have now. But I'm not sure how many players will be really able to enjoy playing it in the end - my first 11-player-game on LT's beautiful standard size Map of Planet runs already very slow since turn 200 or so (I measured 1m53s from turn 297 to 298). Thats a lot more then I was used to get before adding the expansion factions at that stage of a game.

 

[Maniac]

So this guy is not alone, but the slowdown is a recent phenomenon? I doubt those extra factions would make such a large difference though. I would suspect other code. Do you have any idea how large the increase in turn time is compared to before. And does Planetfall now run slower for you than other mods like Fall from Heaven??

 

[GeoModder]

I experience about the same "slowness" as usual, compared with say version 10. But I never play on anything larger then standard size, and more often on small size.

 

[Pfeffersack]

So this guy is not alone, but the slowdown is a recent phenomenon? I doubt those extra factions would make such a large difference though. I would suspect other code. Do you have any idea how large the increase in turn time is compared to before. And does Planetfall now run slower for you than other mods like Fall from Heaven??

I cannot remember having waited 2-3 minutes (2406 to 2407 was nearly exactly 3m!) even in the late game. 30s, maybe a minute...

For possible reasons...the new factions seem to lead to a bigger save game, which indicated that there is more stuff on the map to calculate for the CPU:

1. My current game under patch k) has a size of 648 kb in the year 2350
2. The game before started under j) had 457kn in 2349
3. The game before started under d) had 475kn in 2354

Also more factions mean exponentially more possibles moves in reagrd to diplomacy, creating trade routes and the tightly packed map might create additional work for the pathfinding routines.

It has been a while that I played FFH, but I remember inter-turn-times of 2 min or so in the late middle/end game - but that on a huge map with 21 players or so and saves being bigger then 1MB...

Of course my results could be influenced by the Aquaformer bug under patch k). I will pay attention when starting a new game.

 

[Lord Tirian]

So this guy is not alone, but the slowdown is a recent phenomenon? I doubt those extra factions would make such a large difference though. I would suspect other code. Do you have any idea how large the increase in turn time is compared to before. And does Planetfall now run slower for you than other mods like Fall from Heaven??

I experienced some slowdown with Planetfall around v10/v11 (somewhere there). Before that, Planetfall was always running as zippy as plain BtS (sometimes even more, as 7 players make for a lean game) - afterwards, the turn times jumped a bit (roughly 1.5x what it was before). The new factions, however, made less impact, just a little bit (since even with 11 factions on standard map, it's way less than the 18 civs even vanilla Civ runs on huge maps fairly well).

@Tholish: When I did the standard map, I was retracing a screenshot of the Planet map from SMAC (the huge version) as bitmap and converted it into a worldbuilder save, that was a pretty good way to get around the square change. And you *can* take screenshots in SMAC. Make a screenshot, Alt-Tab out to your graphics program (ignore the fact that your colour depth is all messed up, just do it), paste, save the image, Alt-Tab back to SMAC and exit it. Then, your computer should go back to the normal resolution etc., and the image file should still look fine.

Cheers, LT

 

[Maniac]

I experienced some slowdown with Planetfall around v10/v11 (somewhere there). Before that, Planetfall was always running as zippy as plain BtS (sometimes even more, as 7 players make for a lean game) - afterwards, the turn times jumped a bit (roughly 1.5x what it was before).

Better AI was added in v11. Shortly afterwards jdog spent some time on improving his code efficiency though, so the impact of Better AI should have gone down again to only +10% turn time or so.