[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Profiles from huge game

[Trent Piepho <xyzzy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Ben Webb wrote:
>       This isn't strictly speaking true. Everywhere where
> update_all_effects is currently being called, there needs to be some kind
> of update of effects. However, the call can certainly be optimised. For
> example, I suspect the main problem with the client is that all effects
> for all cities are updated every time a city packet is received. It is

Do this means at the end of the turn, when a city packet for all cities is
sent, that each city is recalculated each time.  So you have made an O(n)
algorithm into an O(n^2) algorithm?  That's just really nice.  I suppose that
when a city packet is received the client will update each city's graphic and
line in the city list too.  Do you have any idea how slow that will be?  You
are talking about making the client spend an hours updating GUI stuff at the
end of the turn instead of seconds.  I know, the client used to be really
inefficient in this regard.  If you had 300 cities, it would take the client
15 minutes to process the end of the turn city update, as it would refresh the
city list several thousand times.  I spent a great deal of time improving
this, and getting the number of refreshes down to 2.  Now it seems you have
undone all that work and made the game even slower than before.  

I can't believe a patch like this went in.  You might as well just go and
announce that freeciv is not a game, it is a place for people to try and get
their game ideas into someone elses code.  It's a research game, that's it.

In fact, why not just create a separate tree for research?

You could have the game tree that people play with.  Only patches that improve
the playablity would be for this branch.  Making the GUI faster, added a
feature to the dialogs, added some kind of gameplay like spies or diplomacy
from civ2 that wasn't present before.

Then their could be the research branch.  Patches that do nothing but rename
functions over and over again, add massive bandwidth to the protocol, make the
game super slow, create new ways to crash the server, obsessive
over-generalization.