Speeding up battles

[PhilD]

Originally posted by Arryn:

quote:

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Originally posted by RadiantFleet:
I just had pretty much the perfect battle with Ermor. Archangel+defending angel unit+90 temple guards+ark killed 2249 units + 34 leaders with no casualties.

Cool!

I'd be happy with a slider bar that would let me jump around in the battle (like an mpeg).

Me too. It's annoying to replay a battle over and over to see everything that happened. Many people gripe about the replays (due to arrows) taking too long. I'd like an option to be able to slow them down. But, as you suggest, the ideal solution would be to treat the whole thing as a movie, which lets you move forward and back as needed. But I don't think the movie idea would work with the ability to zoom in and out and change the camera angle up and down.

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Well, how much more space would the turn files take (they're already rather large) if, instead of just the battle's initial placement, they included the situation at the start of each turn of each battle? that should let the battle replay "jump" to any single turn of the battle with no additional calculations, which would help a lot with the battle replays (right now, if you want to watch something in a battle and miss it, you have to restart the replay from the beginning!)...

Battles, especially large battles, tend to Last what, 10-20 turns? If the result is to make the turn files 10 times larger, I guess that's not feasible (but I don't know how much of the file is battle placement... I just had a look at my "UlmWorld" game files - World map, about turn 90), and the .trn files are about 360KB, while the .2h files are about 160KB.

Still, there might be another solution, like doing the "battle effect" computations at the start of the replay, and storing the exact state of the battle at the start of each round. Obviously, the complete movement of arrows is just graphical display, and does not need to be stored - it can be recomputed on the fly. It might add a few seconds of precomputation for each battle, but then the battle could be replayed at leisure.

And, adding an option to turn off missile/spell volley would be nice. I like the Spirit Helmet, but since each and every one of them fires in its own time slot, it just makes battles unbearably sllooooooow...


I'm not a (real) programmer, but I really believe an at least partial fix to the battle replay thing should be doable with reasonable effort. I mean, the battle results have already been computed, with no display, and they're being re-computed, with display. There shouldn't be that much of a difference...