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[Karlito]

I see what he's getting at, even if I enjoy the game despite it's many flaws. It is stupidly frustrating some times.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, I get it. But like I said, I don't totally agree. Aurora can be frustrating, and parts of it are really rough, but that's not exactly unique, either among games in general or among free games that will likely never be released for sale (respectively). It also more than makes up for its own flaws, in the same way that DF does.

[ndkid]

You shouldn't be getting never-ending streams of errors if you installed properly. The only error I can think of that doesn't stem from that, and that come up without fail when it does occur, is a /0 error or an overflow error, which tends to be very simple to troubleshoot and fix. The only way to get permanent, campaign-killing interrupts is to play with Invaders on (due to the way they interact with other special enemies). I've never had a non-Invader series of interrupts that couldn't be taken care of by autoturning for a few months. That aside, unless you're starting with a dozen NPRs, you shouldn't be seeing massive amounts of interrupts for a long while. I've had campaigns run for 120+ years and still be perfectly playable when I got bored and gave them up.

I do not agree. I can think of several errors that I consistently get that aren't related to a bad install. I think you moved the goalpost to "permanent, campaign-killing interrupts", which wasn't the original point. Even upping the difficulty from 100% and adding a few NPRs can easily lead to both errors (due to the div-0/overflow errors you mentioned as trivialities) and interrupts (as the NPRs start to run into each other). And, often, with those sorts of errors, or the errors that get thrown when NPRs try to build ships incorrectly, or errors when you assign commanders to teams, you *can*, if you have the DB password and know what to look for where, go in, hack away, and fix them. I do not think most people would place that in the "very easy to troubleshoot and fix" camp.

I hate it because you can lose whole fleet by choosing one 5 minute increment instead of ten 30 second ones, because the increment system is so inconsistent.

I'm not sure what you mean by "inconsistent". As for the first part: I hate to be rude, but... duh? Of course you can lose a fleet if you aren't careful. If I'm playing EUIII and I lose a stack because I was running time at the maximum setting and didn't order a retreat in time, I don't say, "Oh, this fucking variable time system is so shitty, look what it made me do!".

Of course, in EUIII, you have a lot of control over what events toss up interrupts and which ones don't. A feature that Aurora doesn't have.

I enjoy Aurora a great deal, and I absolutely agree that Steve is primarily developing a game that he wants to play himself, with almost all other considerations being secondary, so a steep learning curve is par for the course, and we, as freeloaders on his effort, can either enjoy it, or not, but should not expect to have a say in his priorities. But I think we can still be honest about how much more effort and careful handling Aurora as an application takes than most. It's a fairly fragile application (and the more often you do things that aren't part of the way Steve plays the game, the more fragile it is), and exists in a state that fluctuates somewhere between an alpha and beta release.

And I hate this game because, as a programmer, I know for sure it would run at least 20 to 100 times faster if it did not use a database and an ancient programming language from hell.

Steve and I have discussed some of the details before, and I don't think Access or VB are the real root of the performance issues. I suspect, even if migrated to a better DB and rewritten in %FAVORITE_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE%, you'd get maybe a 2x speed bump, tops. The real issue is how Steve handles time increments. There are a *lot* of loops and Order(N^2) issues that are all about fundamental algorithm design, and not about technology. Steve has only sometimes been a professional developer, and Aurora stemmed from a codebase that was attempting to do something smaller scale. And, here again, the fact that he has personal goals that he's attempting to accomplish, and performance isn't really one of them, this isn't something that's likely to change much.

[j.h]

You shouldn't be getting never-ending streams of errors if you installed properly. The only error I can think of that doesn't stem from that, and that come up without fail when it does occur, is a /0 error or an overflow error, which tends to be very simple to troubleshoot and fix. The only way to get permanent, campaign-killing interrupts is to play with Invaders on (due to the way they interact with other special enemies).

In few of my games, I encountered errors regarding NPR officers or designs. At first it meant twenty errors at the beginning of each year or so, then it got progressively worse.
And for the interrupts, it is enough when one NPR fights the swarm somewhere. They will never win and just end up leaving wrecks there, which will make things worse and this repeats indefinitely. Or precursor transports standing near a jump point, producing an interrupt whenever anything travels through it. And when one NPR can find another, it can snowball quickly. I know all of this is solvable by the designer mode, but that would show me all NPRs and their ships, which kill some enjoyment for me.

I'm not sure what you mean by "inconsistent".

That the results depend on increments. If your ship needs 12 hours to finish a survey and has no other orders and you run 5 day increment, it will just sit there 4.5 days doing nothing before a default order is queued. The same is true for the civilian ship, so you can make so much more money over the same time-period by using shorter increments. Also, two ships on a collision course can miss their chance to shoot at each other if you choose long increment.

I enjoy the logistics management. I enjoy the feel of combat, where it's composed of long minutes of waiting before a few seconds of violence. I think a lot of other people do as well. If you're playing on the most recent version, civilians shouldn't have "hundreds" of ships unless you've been playing for centuries and have dozens of populated colonies. They also shouldn't be going to espionage colonies unless you put infrastructure or colonists on them yourself. Civilian ships do, you might want to note, trade with non-hostile NPRs.

I do too, but when fighting against missile cruisers faster than my ships, I end up waiting for them to empty their magazines and when every launch or intercept is an interrupt, it can be rather tedious. Civilians got better in the recent version, but with twenty and more populated worlds, they build ships rather quickly. An agreement with an NPR is needed for civilians to trade with them, but if you put a colony on a 0.0 planet, they go there regardless of an NPR or the colony being billions km away.

And it's no getting better - instead of features like "if I check this check this check-box any arriving ship will be refueled, resupplied and will have their magazines refilled automatically", we got crew morale.

I completely agree that that would be convenient. It doesn't, however, mean that there aren't refuel, resupply, and rearm orders. If I'm bringing a fleet back home after a battle, it takes about two seconds to tack those into the order sequence. I don't see what crew morale has to do with that, unless you're just complaining about the fact that you can't just ignore logistics and constantly blow things up. (Which, to be fair, you can. It's not terribly difficult to set up battle scenarios in SM mode.)

No, logistics is the best part, but baby-sitting every ship is not. For example, if you create long hauling route, ships can run out of fuel if it does not contain enough refuel orders even when both planets have plenty fuel. At that, point you have to redo the route, because you can't insert orders in the middle of it.
And the crew morale is just another thing to manage without adding anything interesting.

I think every game developer should ask "will this make this game more fun?" before adding anything. Did you have any fun (or Fun) moments because of the crew morale? I did not, and I mostly end up turning off the maintenance, because I enjoy playing much more when I don't have to constantly overhaul my ships.

I did. Also, insert standard disclaimer about Steve making Aurora for his own entertainment and just happening to share it with people who are interested. It's not a published game, it doesn't cost anything, and it's a personal project. It may just be me, but with that in mind I'm a little less inclined to bitch about things I don't like, especially considering that Aurora is already head-and-shoulders above every other 4X out there.

Care to share the story? I may change the opinion about the crew morale then.
Agreed with the second part - Aurora is an exceptional 4X. However, it can be made so much better if approached differently, which bugs me the most. And from playing it, I made pretty good picture of how the game works under the hood - I can almost see the code in my head, with all the missing range checks and performance issues, but that's just the curse of being a programmer.
Hell, if I had enough time, I would start programming a similar game, because I like the concept so much (and to prove my point  ).

Aurora II.

Seen it, but with all the respect to Steve, I would bet that DF 1.0 will come out earlier than Aurora II.

Yeah, I get it. But like I said, I don't totally agree. Aurora can be frustrating, and parts of it are really rough, but that's not exactly unique, either among games in general or among free games that will likely never be released for sale (respectively). It also more than makes up for its own flaws, in the same way that DF does.

Of course I appreciate Steve sharing the game with us for free, but the comparison with DF just does not work for me it his case. DF has complex interface and is hard to learn, but once you get around that, it has very little gameplay problems. The first part is also true for Aurora, but the second isn't. When I end DF game, it's either when I lose to it or because I conquered hell, built the tower of Sauron and flooded the rest of the map with lava. I end Aurora games because they become unplayable or frustrating.


But I should definitely stop ranting already.

[Flying Dice]

You shouldn't be getting never-ending streams of errors if you installed properly. The only error I can think of that doesn't stem from that, and that come up without fail when it does occur, is a /0 error or an overflow error, which tends to be very simple to troubleshoot and fix. The only way to get permanent, campaign-killing interrupts is to play with Invaders on (due to the way they interact with other special enemies). I've never had a non-Invader series of interrupts that couldn't be taken care of by autoturning for a few months. That aside, unless you're starting with a dozen NPRs, you shouldn't be seeing massive amounts of interrupts for a long while. I've had campaigns run for 120+ years and still be perfectly playable when I got bored and gave them up.

I do not agree. I can think of several errors that I consistently get that aren't related to a bad install. I think you moved the goalpost to "permanent, campaign-killing interrupts", which wasn't the original point. Even upping the difficulty from 100% and adding a few NPRs can easily lead to both errors (due to the div-0/overflow errors you mentioned as trivialities) and interrupts (as the NPRs start to run into each other). And, often, with those sorts of errors, or the errors that get thrown when NPRs try to build ships incorrectly, or errors when you assign commanders to teams, you *can*, if you have the DB password and know what to look for where, go in, hack away, and fix them. I do not think most people would place that in the "very easy to troubleshoot and fix" camp.

I'll give it back to you in your own words:

never-ending stream of errors or interrupts

You said it, not me. If it ends, it isn't a campaign killer. On another note, how, precisely, does "more NPRs" equate to /0 or overflow errors? Have you ever had either? Do you know what typically causes them? There's one potential source of /0 errors that would be affected by flooding the game with NPRs, but genning a system that causes a /0 error is rare enough that you can play for decades or centuries without encountering one. Incidentally, /0 and overflow error are by and large trivialities, because there are a limited number of potential causes, most/all of which can be easily removed. The only time I've ever seen an error that was neither of those and that didn't go away if I clicked through it was due to a faulty install. I can't recall ever seeing errors related to NPRs buggering up their ship designs, and I've never seen any related to commanders (unless it was so long ago and easily resolved that I've forgotten it). You don't need Designer Mode to fix most errors, by the by.

I hate it because you can lose whole fleet by choosing one 5 minute increment instead of ten 30 second ones, because the increment system is so inconsistent.

I'm not sure what you mean by "inconsistent". As for the first part: I hate to be rude, but... duh? Of course you can lose a fleet if you aren't careful. If I'm playing EUIII and I lose a stack because I was running time at the maximum setting and didn't order a retreat in time, I don't say, "Oh, this fucking variable time system is so shitty, look what it made me do!".

Of course, in EUIII, you have a lot of control over what events toss up interrupts and which ones don't. A feature that Aurora doesn't have.

I enjoy Aurora a great deal, and I absolutely agree that Steve is primarily developing a game that he wants to play himself, with almost all other considerations being secondary, so a steep learning curve is par for the course, and we, as freeloaders on his effort, can either enjoy it, or not, but should not expect to have a say in his priorities. But I think we can still be honest about how much more effort and careful handling Aurora as an application takes than most. It's a fairly fragile application (and the more often you do things that aren't part of the way Steve plays the game, the more fragile it is), and exists in a state that fluctuates somewhere between an alpha and beta release.

Have you ever played EUIII!? (Rhetorical question, for the sake of my sanity I'm assuming you have, please don't answer.) It only throws up interrupts for random events, declarations of war, etc. You also have little or no control over when it interrupts. Aurora will interrupt for damned near anything unless you've set an obscenely high minimum tick count so that it can only interrupt every five minutes or so. If you do that in combat, you bloody well deserve to be mauled.

I think every game developer should ask "will this make this game more fun?" before adding anything. Did you have any fun (or Fun) moments because of the crew morale? I did not, and I mostly end up turning off the maintenance, because I enjoy playing much more when I don't have to constantly overhaul my ships.

I did. Also, insert standard disclaimer about Steve making Aurora for his own entertainment and just happening to share it with people who are interested. It's not a published game, it doesn't cost anything, and it's a personal project. It may just be me, but with that in mind I'm a little less inclined to bitch about things I don't like, especially considering that Aurora is already head-and-shoulders above every other 4X out there.

Care to share the story? I may change the opinion about the crew morale then.
Agreed with the second part - Aurora is an exceptional 4X. However, it can be made so much better if approached differently, which bugs me the most. And from playing it, I made pretty good picture of how the game works under the hood - I can almost see the code in my head, with all the missing range checks and performance issues, but that's just the curse of being a programmer.
Hell, if I had enough time, I would start programming a similar game, because I like the concept so much (and to prove my point  )

It was at the tail end of an engagement with a system full of Precursors, and I had barely come out ahead. I had a handful of ships left, mostly damaged. It was early enough in the campaign that I was barely ahead of the Precursors in tech. I also had forgotten to add emergency cryopods to my main frigate design. So basically I had the survivors scoop up the life pods and limp for the JP out. I had two frigates still in-system, both at reduced speed from battle damage, but mostly intact otherwise. They'd been overcrowded for close to four days when my jump tender picked up another contact at the edge of its sensor range, moving quite a bit faster than my frigates.

I was worried, naturally, but the morale? The morale was going downhill from the overcrowding, and the ships had been fairly green already, so I was worried that they wouldn't be able to take it with them. Until it turned and ran, that is. Later turned out that it was a troop transport and I was getting antsy over nothing. 

More generally, I like that you have to consider all the different factors involved with keeping a fleet working. It just doesn't make sense that you can crank out a survey ship with plenty of fuel and supplies, send it off into the wild frontier for thirty years, and have the crew not give a damn. Nor does it make sense that crew would be content to sit in their cramped quarters, loitering around a jump point for 30 months waiting for something to come through.

[EuchreJack]

Fun times: I spend over two hours setting up a nice little campaign where I'll be playing aliens based upon ancient greece, and the very first event to occur: Time Incriment reduced - NPR conflict.  5 sec forever.  Epic Fail.

EDIT: It has been four hours real time, 12 hours in game.  Yeah, I think this game has died for me.

EDIT2: I also just realized that with the 5 sec combat interval, the game takes 25 seconds to process every minute.  Dunno how long combat usually takes, but since I'm not involved, this might take a while.  Time to figure out whether or not a dual core laptop can run Aurora and another game at the same time...

P.S. Anyone have the designer password, and can tell me how to use it?  Provided my Earth NPR isn't involved, I'm very much inclined to just delete the disputed system, and I don't think SM mode can tell me where the conflict is occuring.

[j.h]

Steve and I have discussed some of the details before, and I don't think Access or VB are the real root of the performance issues. I suspect, even if migrated to a better DB and rewritten in %FAVORITE_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE%, you'd get maybe a 2x speed bump, tops. The real issue is how Steve handles time increments. There are a *lot* of loops and Order(N^2) issues that are all about fundamental algorithm design, and not about technology. Steve has only sometimes been a professional developer, and Aurora stemmed from a codebase that was attempting to do something smaller scale. And, here again, the fact that he has personal goals that he's attempting to accomplish, and performance isn't really one of them, this isn't something that's likely to change much.

I can imagine that, contact detection is definitely O(n^2), probably with a flag that turns it off when no enemies are in a system. Volume hierarchies would speed that up considerably, but they are difficult to store in a database.

I agree that rewrite to another language would bring 2x speed-up, but dropping database entirely and using an object hierarchy instead would speed things up so much it won't even be funny. Of course only a profiler can confirm that, but querying a database is just so slow in comparison to everything else. The constant cost of each query (query parsing, execution planning, index searches, format conversions, ...) is so big that after replacing the whole thing by few reads using pointers/references, 100x speed-up might not even be an exaggeration.

I know Aurora started as something different and Steve has his own goals, but in my experience, when project becomes difficult to maintain or suddenly has to adhere to completely different requirements, rewrite is an only option and delaying it just adds more code to rewrite.

Other than that, SQLite may perform better than Access, I will probably test it and send result to Steve if I find the old visual basic somewhere.

[Gruntdonttoot]

I dove into this and then after about an hour I realized my screen was too small...  After all the planning and naming of things, oh well!

[Tarran]

I dove into this and then after about an hour I realized my screen was too small...  After all the planning and naming of things, oh well!

See Flying Dice's signature.

[Karlito]

Here's the SOP for getting around that problem. If none of that works, then you might be out of luck.

How to run Aurora in a playable state on small monitors:
1. Game Parameters -> Reduced Height Windows.
2. Lock taskbar to the right side of your desktop.
3. Download and run ResizeEnable

So, my two active NPRs, high difficulty modifier, 100% spawn rate, conventional start campaign has proved to be too much. I peeked around in designer mode after a series of overflow errors, and seven years in, there were already 6 NPR races active with hundreds of ships each. I decided that even if I did locate the source of the errors, I didn't want to stop every 3 months so those guys could fight out an extended missile engagement. I think I'll try a new campaign with basically the same settings but no NPRs active at start, so I can at least get out of the Sol system before things slow down.

[Flying Dice]

I think I've mentioned this before, but it should be noted that ResizeEnable doesn't work on Win8, at least in my experience.

[Gruntdonttoot]

Hey it worked, thanks! I just realized I can also use my TV as a monitor and that's got the appropriate resolution. 

[Azated]

What kind of roleplay do you people include in your games?

 For my next game, I'm planning to create a Stargate-esque galaxy. Goa-uld ruling the galaxy with ancient ships, the Asgard fleet sitting in some highly defended system with the best technology present, Tau-ri sitting in their quiet corner of the galaxy with missile weapons, gathering more technology as they defeat enemies instead of researching it. For example, if they go to war with the asgard and win, I'll give them beam technology. If they destroy the Goa-uld, they automagically receive dozens of small colonies scattered about the universe.

[Flying Dice]

When I do anything beyond the bog-standard "Humans develop tech. Humans explore galaxy. Humans kill lots of things and take their stuff.", I tend to go in for last resort/lost colony type deals, where I start in some random system with TL1-2 tech or TL5-6 tech (depending on the specific flavor), ~500,000 population, minimal (as in 5-10) automines and factories and a single research lab. Typically I do it in a system with lots of habitable/easily terraformable worlds and plenty of minerals (for conventional starts, mainly), in order to make the development curve not quite so brutal.

A real challenge would be a 50,000 pop conventional start in system with no minerals or other habitable planets, and preset mineral/fuel stockpiles just barely sufficient to build two shipyards and get survey ships and freighters into another system. Toss in a few 1000% difficulty NPRs alongside the usual Swarm and Precursors and you've got a recipe for lots of tension. Start with a single freighter for slightly less risk of running out of minerals scaling up a commercial yard.

[ollobrains]

certainly adds to the difficulty factor with a lower population 6.3 is coming soon hopefully