I remember hearing Neutrino speak about wanting 1 million units in the game. I have recently started playing Forged Alliance again. I have always been interested in LARGE scale games. 4v4 Setons and 5th Dimension Survival games are AMAZING to play. Those are a very good demonstration of the grand strategy that SupCom helped to bring to the RTS genre. However, even now, years after FA was released, the game doesn't really scale too well. Our internet speeds have doubled, my ram has tripled and the newest i7 processors are beasts compared to the e6750 I was using when Forged Alliance came out. However, both Setons and 5th Dimension games slow noticeably to a crawl as each player approaches to 400-500 unit mark. Uber, I'm not asking you to speak directly about Forged Alliance. But I am curious how the engine is shaping up? What is the largest (most # of units) game that can be simulated so far? Does the Server/Client model help to increase this performance?
I think it's important to note that SC:FA really doesn't make good use of multi-cores. Given single-core performance hasn't improved anywhere near as much in the intervening time its any wonder it hasn't scaled particularly well.
Really? Multi-cores arn't so good for Supcom? That explains a lot. I've alway had the felling that the game had run much better on my old pc with a single core than on my newer one with a dual core.
Stepping up from one core to two will give you a massive boost in SupCom. Going up from there gives you rapidly diminishing returns. There was one simulation thread, one rendering thread, and about a dozen little helper threads. The first two worked best if they were given one whole core each, and left alone to do their thing.
In fact it gives NO returns. Supcom has 2 major threads, and a bunch of junk on the side. It can effectively use 2.5 cores (actually less, since the junk barely counts for much).
Don't forget that supcom relies on the slowest player exclusively. i7's are pretty high single thread performers and thats one of the major reasons intel is better for gaming. An i7 could probably handle several thousand unit caps but if the guy on the other end is still running and e8500 it doesn't matter.
Not answerable yet. You are asking questions that won't be able to be answered until we move more into optimization mode from building stuff mode. However, keep in mind that the fundamental game architecture has been defined to more efficient in terms of CPU than SupCom. I was shooting for 10x the number of units per clock cycle by using a different design. We'll see where we end up.
The issue with the 500+ unit counts is the Engie spam. If you haven't try playing with that new eng redesign. I've played setons with some subpar PCs (not mine) and had no sim speed slowdowns even after 45 minutes or so. When you don't have 300 useless engineers struggling around you would be surprised what that does to your sim speed.
FAF is making a good effort to mitigate engineer spam, a pratfall that PA can avoid with proper design, e.g. factories being more cost efficient than engineers.
