Custom Map #236: Arrakis Prime. By: First

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This topic is for discussion of map #236: Arrakis Prime


Author: First
Size: 256x256

Desc:
Arrakis Prime. The Spice Planet. Protect the Spice harvesters from Sandworms until they're 100% full. Hint: pay attention to the physics at play. Disclaimer: This map is hard, but doable.

[First]

Forgot to mention that the harvesters are full in 30 game minutes.

[TLMike]

Sooo... the map objective is to Controls the Spice?

[MadMag]

Dune :)

[Helper]

Pretty amazing.
I started the game up on 4x to watch it develop and the hair on the back of my neck stood up when the 'movement' first started.
What I didn't think of was to drop a CN and build a Collector to see what other surprises were waiting for me. (Two minutes in and I'm restarting.)
This is going to be a fun one.
H

[speef]

I'm actually quitting at 16:00 because the game has got unplayably slow. I'm getting one second of game time every 1-2 seconds of real time (on 4x). It bottlenecks on the CPU (I have an 8-core machine, and CW hammers one core and doesn't touch the rest).

Word to the wise: Even though the huge surface area lets you quickly get 200+ power income without reactors- "MOAR UNITS EVERYWHAR" is not a workable strategy. :\

I love the idea, though, and it seems well-executed.

[First]

Good feedback and thanks all!

I'm going to make a Arrakis Prime Junior map next. All the fun without the calories.

- First

[Helper]

Once again you've put together a very impressive concept.
I personally don't like games with a minimum time to complete, but I understand what you were doing here.
If there was a way to anticipate where the next attack(s) were coming from, I couldn't figure it out - so just swamped the map with PC's, Beams, and Emitters.

EDIT - Final pic available. It is pretty crowded.

From about 20 minutes on, my system was lagging pretty badly and it is a fairly robust rig (http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=14629.0).

If you would take a few minutes to write up game/tactics notes for the players, I think that would help a lot of people. Some players like figuring out everything for themselves, but other (me!) appreciate an assist. Using sequential 'Spoilers' will let us read as much as we need/want and then get to playing.

Thanks again for demonstrating some of the amazing capabilities of the game.
H

[Lost in Nowhere]

I'm going to say that the lag is caused by the immense inefficiency of the SetTerrain command, as discussed here.
It started lagging decently after about 2 minutes of just watching it to see what happens.

[TLMike]

I didn't get any lag and I played for a good 20 minutes.

[First]

Get/Set Terrain only gets called when the terrain needs to change, which is less than you might think. Each worm is only changing the cells on its leading and trailing edges, and only when it needs to.

Hmmm, I can probably estimate. The average distance traveled by a worm is around 150 cells, and it's trail is 3 cells wide, so that's 150 x 3 x 2 x 2 calls per worm or 1800 calls. A worm lives for about 30 seconds at the start, so 900 frames, so about 2 calls per frame per worm. Not too bad.

Near the end, the worms speed up considerably (about 20x), and the spawn rate increases (2x). So 80 calls per frame per worm. A lot? Not sure, anyone know?

- First

[Lost in Nowhere]

About how many worms are alive at once?
I'm pretty sure that 80 calls to SetTerrain will cause a considerable amount of lag.

[First]

About how many worms are alive at once?
I'm pretty sure that 80 calls to SetTerrain will cause a considerable amount of lag.

Between 0 and 6 worms at once, probably. You're probably right, bummer. Such a spooky looking effect thou.

Maybe try the smaller Arrakis map, only 1/3 as many cores running around.

I'm tempted to make an extreme version of the map, where the worms can target any friendly unit, rather than just the harvester. That would be insane *evil cackle*

- First

[kwinse]

When testing the prototype terp in pyramis I learned that setTerrain'ing 49 cells (7x7 square) in one frame causes significant lag on my computer. 25 isn't bad.

[Helper]

I wonder if playing technique has any affect?
I built a huge number of units and that may have affected the amount of processor being used.