10-05-2004 13:22									#1
	Time scale ? Get a bigger avatar today!

is there a cvar for speeding up fps? most games have this and i'd really like it for this game, im so used to playing civilization 1 for snes on an emulator with 10x fps . im very impatient ... lol

	10-05-2004 15:52									#2
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Que?

	10-05-2004 17:09									#3
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de nada

	10-05-2004 21:57									#4
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I am not following the question here at all. FPS, if that stands for frames per second, what do you care about it for? This is a TBS game, if it is moving slowing it is not a function of the video rate.

Time scales to me means how many years each turn represents, is this what you are asking about? If so it is set in the editor and can be changed or discovered.

How fast a turn plays out is controlled by the CPU and the map settings and events. Large maps with more civs and lots of water will take longer as they need more cpu. Large wars also can slow things down as well as the animation settings.

	11-05-2004 02:04									#5
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cvar?

as for slowing, just bung in some extra ram. and a processor as well if your budgets bigger than mine

	11-05-2004 03:10									#6
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im talking about speeding up the game... not because my computer is a piece of ****. I just built a beast... i mean is there a way to speed up everything in the game. heres an example. in the game savage if you type in timescale 3 everything speeds up real fast. it makes the game go 3x faster all npcs run around super fast, and building things takes a second. was wondering if civilization had a command like that.

Last edited by Diocide on 11-05-2004 at 03:20

	11-05-2004 03:16									#7
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No, there are many games that have that feature, such as Stun and others. Those games are not true turn based games, but rather real time with a part of the game done in turn base.

	11-05-2004 03:19									#8
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You can turn off all/some animations in the preferences. You can also turn off viewing some/all moves. This will speed things up somewhat.

	11-05-2004 03:25									#9
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damn ok. but the npc's in civilization 3 when its there turn could go way way faster. ive noticed when you dont see any npcs at all and your just starting, it goes to your turn almost instantly because it doesnt play the animations for the other npcs. turning off animations in prefrences still doesnt seem to make it go faster. there still seems to be a time limiter for each turn of the npcs.

	11-05-2004 04:09									#10
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That time is the time it takes your CPU to process all of the AI calculations. It's less for smaller maps. It takes longer as the game progresses because the game is becoming more complex.

	11-05-2004 04:37									#11
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theres still a limit. like for snes i play civilization 1 with an emulator and it still takes a while, but i can speed it up with the emulator and its instant. if i had a 10ghz cpu it would still go the same speed. theres a limit and thats what im trying to get rid of with a timescale command.

	11-05-2004 04:40									#12
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I don't know the programming so I can't say for sure but I really think there isn't a limit. Civ 1 is much less complex than Civ3. I know that Civ3 runs much faster on my current computer than it did on the computer I had when I bought Civ3 in 2001.

	11-05-2004 04:45									#13
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An emulator for old software designed to run an old hardware is quite different from running Civ3. Your comp simply reaches its limit on how fast it can crunch AI decisions (however it makes them), how fast it can pathfind for AI units, and how fast it can calculate the production round.

If you want inter-turn calcs to take less time, try smaller maps and fewer civs.

	11-05-2004 07:27									#14
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Speeding up an emulator is more like what would happen if SNES had a better processor. The emulator by defaults will try to emulate the hardware as exact as possible for the original thing, puting in its own limits. The limits in Civ3 is your own based on all the math the AI has to do to know what to do next. This increases with the number of cities units the AI have as well as the number of contacts the AI have. There is also some calculations in the upkeep part of turns that depend on the total number of cities as corruption calculation.

	11-05-2004 07:33									#15
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Oh, and just FYI: the SNES processor runs at 3.58 MHz

	11-05-2004 11:25									#16
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quote: Originally posted by Gramphos Oh, and just FYI: the SNES processor runs at 3.58 MHz

That's not so bad. My old Atari only had 1 MHz!

	11-05-2004 11:31									#17
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SNES was actually slower than the Genesis (which was older).

most of the first generation SNES games had major slowdown problems with many enemies on screen and it received a lot of criticism for it until developers finally learned how to get around it.

... and I have no clue what that has to do with this thread...

	11-05-2004 11:55									#18
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quote: Originally posted by Master Zen SNES was actually slower than the Genesis (which was older). most of the first generation SNES games had major slowdown problems with many enemies on screen and it received a lot of criticism for it until developers finally learned how to get around it. ... and I have no clue what that has to do with this thread...

It's called a threadjack. I'd think YOU would be intimately familiar with the concept.

And so this post isn't COMPLETELY wasted, my commentary on the subject is that the only thing you can really do to speed up play is to turn off all of the animations. At least that's the only thing I've noticed to consistently speed up play.

Personally, I prefer to keep animations on and just cope with it being a bit slow.

	11-05-2004 20:42									#19
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

oh one more thing.

Civ3 is terribly coded. Even if you have a monster machine (like a P 3.0 with 1 GB of RAM for example) games on large maps with lots of civs will slow the game down tremendously, so much that turns in the industrial age can take between 10-15 minutes.

AFAIK there's no real way around it.

	11-05-2004 21:22									#20
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Hold down the SHIFT key while the computer is moving its' units around, that'll speed things up.

	11-05-2004 23:07									#21
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quote: Originally posted by Master Zen oh one more thing. Civ3 is terribly coded. Even if you have a monster machine (like a P 3.0 with 1 GB of RAM for example) games on large maps with lots of civs will slow the game down tremendously, so much that turns in the industrial age can take between 10-15 minutes. AFAIK there's no real way around it.

Games generally are now, programmers are spoiled with hugely powerful machines to work towards, so instead of optimising code they optimise profits. I remember an old Atari 2600 game (about 15 years back I played it, so the name escapes me) but it was a long play and its size was 100kb. Compare that to some of the 5 gig installs of today.

	12-05-2004 01:32									#22
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Try adding "NoAIPatrol=1" to the .ini file. Helps some.

(I'm not 100% positive that's the right line, but I'm sure someone's gonna correct me if I'm wrong!)

Oh, and the computer players in Civ are not normally refered to as NPCs - we call them AIs.

	12-05-2004 02:02									#23
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

.kriger is only 96Kb

I run a 2.8ghz P4 on only 512mb of ram. I really don't know what your talking about. I'd say it only takes the ais in my games maybe 4-5 minutes to finish up their turns. Yes, btw, I play with the full 16 civs on huge maps.

I have Civ3 Gold Edition.

I'd recommend makeing sure your fully patched up. Then, I'd recomend getting a stop watch. Sometiems what feels like 10 minutes really...isn't.

	12-05-2004 02:59									#24
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quote: Originally posted by Master Zen oh one more thing. Civ3 is terribly coded. Even if you have a monster machine (like a P 3.0 with 1 GB of RAM for example) games on large maps with lots of civs will slow the game down tremendously, so much that turns in the industrial age can take between 10-15 minutes. AFAIK there's no real way around it.

That is sort of true. I tried in the huge AU game to see how bad it would get. There was 24 civs on huge (250x250) map and I did not kill off any civs until very late in the game to see how bad it would get.

It did get from 1 min to 25 mins very late.

I played a huge (160x160) map with 9 civs archipelago and it never got more than 2 minutes, even though some civs had more than 1000 units.

This was on 3.066GH, 1GB raptor 10k hard drive on XP PRO.

	12-05-2004 19:40									#25
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It seems high civ counts matter more than high numbers of units and/or cities. The fact that wiping out a harbour causes the game to halt for an appreciable amount of time (on my Celeron 2.0GHz) when there are many civs in the game suggests that checking trade routes may partially account for that.

	12-05-2004 21:40									#26
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A Celeron is going to lag more anyway (admit it!!), but all the same the game can be excessively slow at times considering the amount of work its doing