System requirements

[cue]

We tried to play 3 co-op vs 5 NullBot AIs v1.15 in Beta 7
But we had very bad slowdowns.

Can anyone estimate what the minimum CPU and graphics requirements are with Beta 7.

The server was an I7 that was at a constant 13% CPU, ferly even across all the cores.
player 2 was a Laptop, NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700. Dell Vostro 1320.
player 3 was a desktop. AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ @ 2600MHz. ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.

The slowest player was at 40-50ms ping throughout the game.
I will also ask in the NullBot thread.

[aubergine]

NullBot will eventually slow down as number of items in the game increases, for example when it checks to find clusters of enemy units. I imagine it will do that regardless of system performance (although the effect will be less on faster computers).

[cue]

How can that happen?
Is there a Windows LookBusy() or WaitRandom() function?

Don't faster computers just finish the calculations for the given cluster faster and not slow down the game?

[aubergine]

Faster computers do finish calculations faster, but as the amount of stuff on the map increases the calculations get longer so at some point you'll get in-game lag. Obviously, the more AIs there are in the game, all doing the same calculations, the more computation there will be.

In the current Warzone JS API, everything is event or timer driven. There is an outstanding task for the developers to improve the queue() function so that queued function calls are more intelligent in that if they see too much time has been used in the current "game tick" they will be postponed to a later tick. It's very much a work in progress, but great advances have been made over the past few months. The next set of updates and improvements will come with the 3.2 branch of Warzone (the developers work on this in their free time, which is limited).

Also, it should be noted that the JS environment isn't running in a thread as that would make certain scenarios nightmarishly complex from a JS developer perspective. So, when the JS is running for a specific AI, everything else stops.

Things will improve over time, it's just a case of the developers (both C++ and JS) having time to implement the many planned (and unplanned) changes.