Brad's unofficial, private builds of FE

I'd be glad to beta test for you with the AI changes... is there recommendations on how you would like us to evaluate things for you?

I would like to test some.

Are you insured against your private builds causing players to transform into frogs?

What I'd do is tell you what I did and you tell me whatcha think.  Tonight I'm playing with general performance. So I'd be looking for someone who finds the game to be slow.

I'd be glad to tell you if general performance has improved. I usually get around 25 fps on my nVidia 555m card. But with the map unveiled I can see it drop to less than 10 easily, by finding the appropriate spots. It's not uplayable for me, but I can tell you about general increased performance if there is any. Load times can be length as well, I can time them too.

I'm ready and willing.  I'm sick right now and I need something to get me going.  I've been with stardock from the first betas of war of magic.  I do have one concern.  Its kinda hard to work with the tile creator.  I dont know how to copy an item, so its tedious to put multiple thing on my house or whatever.  Also a copy and mirrror who be nice.  That way I'd only have to build one side and that commands does the rest.  Also theres some issue of selecting something to build.  I place it, move it and get x y z in order.  But then when I try to create another pillar it wont spawn, wont do anything.  I have to select some other menu like people or effect.  Them i reopen the build slide and it works again.  It just really slows down the process.  I do plan to make unique buildings for my Emperor MeowMeow .  

I would love to get the to test the newer builds. We got to turn this into a household name.

I am interested, I often have time to test things late at night over the weekend, if that would help.

Only if you start getting better at fractions.

Did you just increase the AI Value for strategic damage spells? Or did you do some code magics?

With the map revealed I didn't notice any improvement in performance (in fact maybe slightly less performance). The game has roughly the same FPS performance. I'll play the game to check the possible AI improvements.

Did you read that post about him reading up on french and russian forums looking for how people tried to defeat his AI.

You think the log-in at Ctrl-Tab is just pretty?

He's got your game being recorded.  I was 100% convinced after 1.0 started out at easy.  Easy?  What game starts out at easy?

On my base system, FPS went from 19 to 33 in a late game.  nVidia 560i.

I am currently testing turning up AI Values to get certain spells to be cast more often. For some things it works. Have not been able to confirm it for offensive strategic. I think it may have something to do with targeting. 

Always willing to test stuff. It's awesome finding faults in others and ignoring my own.

I'll tweak some settings and do some comparisons for you... turn off outlines and other things to see if the performance is better with this update or worse. I was checking a completely uncovered Large map, which pushes my system anyway. By any chance is there any tweaks you did with the nVidia config for the game to make it run at a higher frame rate?

bug: I also noticed that poison is not being applied... the animation is there but no poison. I left a mite live for 3-4 actions with venom from a black widow at 1 hitpoint. He didn't die from the poison.

Just updated it with a new build that does eve more perf.

I think poison does 0-2 for 2 poison damage. I have some assassins with 9 poison damage and they often roll a 0.

This update 1.02612 'Toad' provides a significant performance increase (Average when I look around the revealed map before 6 - 7 frames on a large map, with this update we are looking around 12 - 15 frames per second). The initial start point before reveal was around 42 fps before and now with these chances 60 fps.

There is some horizontal tearing when getting max fps 60.

Note: The horizontal tearing can be fixed by forcing vertical sync on through the nVidia config (although this does cause a slight decrease in performance (more choppy when scrolling), but is still overal better).

This issue is in the normal 1.00. And forcing V-sync didn't fix it for me. Triple buffering reduced tearing but again, it didn't eliminate it.

GT 630M here, latest official non-beta drivers.

EDIT actually, not 100% sure, i need to test it again since other than the very beginning, i don't get 60 FPS.

I rarely drink, but Brad: some day I'm gonna buy you a beer.

A really good beer.

I hope this is not going to be the only fix to the issue of AIs being able to perform hard quests too early. They need to be able to do the quests at realistic power levels.

To me it would be better if the AI didn't make a roll at all with the quests; rather, the AI would automatically succeed in a quest when it has a strong enough army and attempts to compelte it.

The casualties the AI takes when doing the quests could be made with a roll, but the success would be guaranteed.

There is no need of randomness in this sense; it won't affect the player too much whether the AI makes a roll or not. What is important is that the AI completes the quests at same power levels as a human.

As a questmaker, I will just increase the power ratings of all my epic quests to avoid the AI.

The problem before was that it was a dice roll. The problem there is that there isn't a "% chance" that an early game sovereign is going to beat a dragon. The odds are ZERO. The update addresses that so it's not a dice roll but one of thresholds.

With the new exe i cant start a game on the map "Bay of capacea". The game crashes on loading.

Updated again.  Mostly Performance improvements again.

On my test box I got a late game from 22fps to 45fps

Cloth map perf improved too.

I am running an old 512MB videocard, but I have a nice little quad core processor. Are your optimizations going to help at all for me? Seems like my frame rate is low just from this one hardware weakness.