RS revived

[zaimoni]

Test game technically unblocked (all required AI fixes have been prototyped). There has been a significant regression on CPU in trunk.

[zaimoni]

Finally got time to schedule testing (the public repository is suddenly updating again). Turn times on the new development machine are running 15-25 seconds at Day 2 Hour 10.

Known stability issues on trunk are:

• Multi-threading enumerator crashes involving Map::m_ActorList. This is a research-and-development issue; C# does not have the language support to fix this directly. I hit this twice in the current test game.
• Pathfinding chokepoints. Pathfinding tends to get stuck when two AIs are navigating 1-wide corridors in opposite directions; fix strategy known but unsure whether it involves a savefile break.
• Trading hairballs. Aggravated by cheating police AI (those police radios are incredibly advanced technology)

Also: I'm considering a new game mode: Classic (instant zombification, no infection) with corpses. Main problem is, of course, what happens when a zombify-on-kill z bites a corpse that is already dead by some other means. This doesn't come up in true Classic because of that 1960's Hayes code (for murder mystery movies) keeping actual corpses off-screen.

I haven't done a detailed genre check yet. The technically obvious options are:

• XCOM 3: it's hard to brainsuck someone who has no vital signs. Replacing the just-eaten brain with a z-brain may not be enough without other vital signs on-line. I.e., works like Infection mode.
• Ahem...the z clearly have bioweapon capabilities just from instant zombification on the killing blow. Since they're "already dead", the instant zombification should work fine (just reduce the hp to account for the condition of the corpse...may want the scaling factor to be square or cube rather than linear, however. That is, 50% corpse condition might rate only 25% or 12.5% of the starting hitpoints).

[MP]

Whenever I'm agonizing over a decision like that I ask myself which is more fun. Sounds like this would be a more hardcore mode, so that might swing it

[zaimoni]

Test games take weeks to grind properly, so I have to make a choice with 20/200 vision. This change is radical enough that an unstable release should be cut before it is attempted.

I'm leaning towards the XCOM3 option, because RS Revived is already ammo-starved.

[zaimoni]

The May 31 2019 June 1 2019 unstable release has been cut. The test game backing this release was pushed to Day 6 Hour 10 Day 7 Hour 4.

The newer development machine's CPU loading per turn is in the 5-15 second range, but usually below ten seconds. (It is only 14 months old, and noticeably slower
than it's near-dead 9-year-old predecessor.)

Commands of note:

• The self-order command (CTRL-SHIFT-O). If we can agree how a task that isn't here should work, it can land in the next release.
• R)un and W)alk, accessible from the Waypoint command (ALT-SHIFT-I). These use the same pathfinding as the AI (and thus cooperates better with AI). If you are controlling a civilian, you even get the close door behind me behavior during these commands.
  
  R)un is not quite as good as manual control at long ranges.
  
  Both commands have the notable defect that they do not yet allow for a maximum turn/step count (e.g., if you want to run for ten turns towards the subway entrance 40 steps away, that is not yet supported).
  
  If R)un or W)alk stop early, look around -- either the game thinks you're "in combat" (you may disagree) or there is someone who would do an ai-ai trade with you in sight. In the latter case, hover over the would-be trader to get what they want and what they offer. (They likely would take "more important things" if offered.)
• Item memory (SHIFT-I). Tells you where you last saw something. R)un and W)alk commands work here as well, with the same limitations. Currently available only to players and police (and if you become a cop you get their item memory).

Unstable releases before August 18 2018 have been removed.

[zaimoni]

Just cut the June 7 2019 unstable release. Burning cars now incinerate air drops (and thus do not elicit truly ugly pathing issues).

I'm not sure how "stable" pathing is, but the crash-on-period-2-move-loop only happens in debug builds anyway.

[zaimoni]

Just cut the July 4 2019 unstable release.

• new text label SIMULATING when it is not your turn. Not 100% reliable; if things look weird try the R)un command to force a screen redraw.
• same screen space also has the SAVING label when saving a game. This replaces wiping the displayed messages.
• Counted walk command now available; 1) through 9) steps.
• Considerably fewer cases of living ais inexplicably stepping between the same two locations.

[zaimoni]

For those checking trunk: the recent gymnastics have been trying to line up changing the Point type the main game uses "cleanly" (with a minimum of manual casting to short i.e. 16-bit integers). The problem is save game load time:

Saving 4 bytes per location should save a substantial amount of hard drive space per savefile, thus bringing down the load time (120MB times as ~6 minutes 30 seconds to load; 138MB times as ~8 minutes 45 seconds to load, and also drives up the RAM allocation during game loading to 2GB ... of which 90% is garbage-collected away after game load.

120MB was Day 16 hour 14; 138MB was Day 14 hour 3. I don't expect this to be a major issue for Staying Alive or Rogue Survivor Alpha 10.1; the police ai support is expected to be the cause of the huge save files for RS Revived.

Right now I don't have a hard block on introducing the highway encircling the city (the city is large enough to make this a reasonable expectation, and I want this in before attempting helicopters), and there has been a map-generation break landed already.

[taberone]

Is RS-revived supposed to run really slow, or is only latest Unstable supposed to run really slow?

[zaimoni]

All versions past 0.9.9.5 are known to run slow. It's a side effect of the police actually doing their job.

[taberone]

Aug 26, 2019 13:39:15 GMT zaimoni said:

All versions past 0.9.9.5 are known to run slow. It's a side effect of the police actually doing their job.

If all the police NPCs die, will that speed up the game?

[zaimoni]

Yes. That's why turns are at least three times faster Day 14+ than Day 0 Hour 2. (I need to work out a testing procedure that monitors turn times at various stages in the game).

[zaimoni]

There doesn't seem to be any non-ideological hosting for Mercurial repositories, now that BitBucket is going away for that purpose. (That said, I'll still be using Mercurial for what it does cleanly.) There was no way to rationally decide between GitLab and GitHub.

[xan]

Made an account just to thank you, good job enchacing the game.

Have a nice day.

[zaimoni]

For those of you tracking the GitHub (and thus seeing the glacial commit rate): the next user-visible planned feature is I-435 (the highway encircling the city). This is soft-blocked by CPU/turn (larger map will cause more extensive pathing costs), and the game is in a position where all known profile-guided optimization targets are either numerically negligible a priori, or cause measurable slowdown.

If I have to commit a save-breaking change, there are other things I could land.