Cool Pog Tricks

Yes, I think the pause is placing the sim into the world. I think they delay all real work (and simulation of ship systems etc) until the sim is placed. I can create 10,000 sims, and as long as I don't place them, they don't slow the frame rate. That is how I am handling fleets. They are waypoints that are not placed in the game. (they live in lists attached to each station, so they have a location but have no impact on game speed). It works quite well. When the player gets close to a station, the player task "wakes up" the hidden fleets, and they turn into ships. We get a real time sim worth of ships, but the speed of a FPS.

-Gtrout

That means there is one local true 3D world, like 100 km around the player and there's another simulated universe around that bubble which doesn't live in the actual game engine? Yeah, that sounds sensible. Just one question: Do the objects outside of that bubble 'life'? Do they get some kind of life tick each 5 sec or so to update their activities? If not, things like this could happen: You fly to a station, it's stuff (guards) gets alive and begins flying around. Then you move away for 5 mins and return and it everything begins to live form the _beginning_, would look pretty strange...

Thats a very elegant solution to that problem Gtrout.

Originally posted by GrandpaTrout

Yes, I think the pause is placing the sim into the world. I think they delay all real work (and simulation of ship systems etc) until the sim is placed.
-Gtrout

Just wondering: Could this be the reason for the 'Sound Delay Problems' that crop up ocasionally? a conflict between streaming and sim placement?
If so, it should it be possible to put something into the scripts to compensate? Perhaps delay sim placement while streams are running instead of what is presumably happening now?

Edit: perhaps not streaming but a conflict somewheres in the iComms/iConversation packages during sim placement. (iConversation offers timing while iComms doesn't).
maybe: When a distress call is displayed, the sims at that location are being created simultanously and iComms gets hung up and can't return a value??
i.e something like:
while (!iComms.IsBusy())
Sim.Create(bla, bla)


Have Gun, Will Travel

I get the sound pauses in almost every modern game. I am guessing it is DirectX, or some CoDec problem (because it happens in multiple games that use 8.0+, like EoC). I run Win98 (ancient home box).

-Gtrout

I wasn't concerned about the sound pauses, that is probably a codec or sound driver issue.
I was thinking about the reports we've had that the game actually locks up or freezes when a comms message is recieved. There are many such reports over in the technical section and no repeatable fix has been found.

Have Gun, Will Travel