GearCity 1.14 Progress

[Eric.B]

I've also added another 100 AI to the game and enabled the AI amount selection when you name your company. For slower computers you may want to choose less AI.

I dont know if youve mentioned it before, but when you say that slower computers will have problems with high numbers of AI, do you have a rough idea of what kind of computers might have a problem?

If you dont have a clear idea of that, what kind of computer are you testing with? that might give a rough idea.

Single core speeds are what make the difference with Gearcity, as GC is not threaded, and even if it was, it wouldn't help much since most of the AI interaction is via the database. My understanding is that SQLite can only be written to one thread at a time. Which would probably create a bottle neck.


As such, my AMD Phenom 9550 averages roughly 45 seconds a turn with 200 AI and no player data. With 300 AI the same CPU does averages about 2.5 minutes a turn. This is a medium end, 8 year old CPU.


With my AMD FX4300, 200AI averages about 25 seconds per turn and 300AI averages roughly 40 seconds per turn with no player data. This is a medium quality CPU that is about 3 years old...

With less than 200 AI, the turn times are barely noticeable, but the early game is realism is noticeable. With 300AI just about every city has at least 5 companies in it, and ALL vehicle types are filled. This is not the case with less AI, although I expect the companies to be stronger fundamentally with less competition.

As I get the rest of the game settled, I'll go back to optimizing turn speeds. Dumbing down the consumers and limiting the AI choices in car design will probably go a long way into bringing down the turn times.