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aznblader
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quote:
Originally posted by Darkknight
duh!
It's nothing like a 3D game. This is running to millions of operations a turn for the AI. Even a simple where do I want to move would take about 100 ops. Then there's the production and diplomacy. Don't forget it needs to read and write all these ops to RAM so it can look back at what it's just done. That calls for high-speed RAM and a lot of it. Even then it's still going to take a long time going through every unit and city and then starting over again for the next civ.
A 3D game is just a graphics engine with at most 50 units. It's all in a set path as well until an action ( like you walking within sight of an enemy) occurs. All you need for that is a decent gfx card.
[QUOTE] Originally posted by Kaesar
Gosh, you really don't understand programming and computer systems do you?
The reason you can run Unreal smoothly is because of your video card. I don't even think you can run Unreal in software mode(cpu calculates the polygons).
The mechanisms causing the slowdowns in the two games are completely different. In unreal, it is the graphics. In civ3, it is the calculation of the AI moves. The computer has to figure out where to move its units, calculate culture, recalculate borders, figure assimulation, happiness, etc, etc. On a huge map, there is likely more than 300 cites and 2000 units. That in itself is quite a lot for the cpu to process.
In Unreal, the bottleneck is the calculation of the 3d graphics, which is all handled by a specialized graphics processor unit on your graphics card, that's why you can run your 60 fps.
If it's possible to show civ3 fps, you will see that there is no slow down at all. It is the game mechanics that takes a long time to calculate. |
give me a break. i think i would know at least a little about computer science, given that i'm a 4th year computer science major. granted, the video card is doing all the work, but still you CAN run unreal in software mode using software d3d. on my system, it slows down to about 5 seconds/frame. in those five seconds, the CPU (alone!) does tens of thousands of matrix transformations, lighting calculations, 3d sound effects, on top of running the AI code for 8 players at a time, in addition to the uncountable other processes it takes to run a 3d game (deaths, weapons damage, physics trajectories etc etc).
"A 3D game is just a graphics engine with at most 50 units. It's all in a set path as well until an action ( like you walking within sight of an enemy) occurs. All you need for that is a decent gfx card."
Uhm. No. Every single frame requires the recalculation of up to half a million polygons, each of which needs a matrix transformation calculation to update for a new viewpoint. And that's just for the wireframes! On top of that, you have colored lighting, texture mapping, etc etc. And that's just for the display of the graphics. For the actual game, you have something like 8 AI players, each shooting and receiving damages, and you have to keep track of all of their health AND positions in 3d space, and calculate next moves, as well as PATHS IN 3D space.
"Even a simple where do I want to move would take about 100 ops."
Nuh uh. That's still no excuse. Especially considering that Civ3 movements consists of just a series of cells on a 2D map. Compare that to calculating a path with obstacles in abstracted (rather than cell based) 3d space, and doing all of that 8 times within less than 1/60th of a second.
Compared to this, Civ3 is beans. Again, I say sloppy coding.
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04-12-2001 06:15
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