A funny thing happened during my game against the Cyans. I lined up for a punt, and kicked the ball. The ball sailed up as normal, but then all of a sudden it darted back to the ground as if it got yanked by an invisible chain!
???
As I started digging into it, I noticed that it only happened when I was playing my game at the same time as I was running multiple games in the background. I thought it was weird because there’s nothing special about running 1 game in the background, or 10 games in the background. It’s all the same as the game I’m currently playing. In fact, they even use the exact same calculations engine and physic-…….oh crap.
Every game is changing gravity each time the ball is in the air.
Remember way back when I was having a hard time with getting the ball flight to look right? I fixed it by specifying the height and speed of the ball, but I allowed the gravity to be changed to get the ball to land at the right spot. The end result is a really nice looking ball path. The downside is that gravity is changed every time there’s a ball in the air, and that means every other game with a ball in the air is affected.
Ugh!!!
I can solve that 2 ways:
I can fix gravity, and not let it change. It’s not hard to do, but the ball flight looks like crap. Believe me, it gets really annoying.
I can make sure only 1 play is being run at a time. This is really going to extend sim time.
So I started doing the quick math to see how long we’re talking for option #2. I’m planning on shipping with 20 teams in the league. During my Ex2.5 sims I’m averaging just under 4 seconds per play. So if you do the math, I should expect a 20 team league to play a week in just under an hour.
Yikes! That’s way too long!
So that won’t work. However, if I met my goal and was somehow able to sim 4 games at a time, we’re still talking about a 15 minute sim time. That’s still not going to cut it. There’s no way I’m sitting at my computer for 15 minutes every sim.
So now what? What’s that mean for the regen3 universe?
It means I need to develop a fast-sim option.
I’ll probably leave the slow-sim as an option, if you want it. (I know I’d use it for my high-profile leagues) Adding the ability to fast-sim the league is now a necessity. You have to be able to run a week’s worth of CPU-vs-CPU games in under 5 minutes for this to be a viable game. The problem with that (besides development time) is you have to somehow make the fast-sim relatively consistent with the slow-sim and the played games. That’s the thing I hate about most games’ fast-sim, they almost never jive with what you see on the field. I remember back when I was a big EA Sports: NCAA Football fan. I got so tired of the fast-sim being wildly different than the played games that I started stocking my roster with “sim only” players and “play only” players. I’d put the sim-only players in when I simmed games, and take them out when I played.
I really don’t want to have a situation like that.
Well, that’s solved…. 🙂 That’s pretty far down the list of things to do, though. There’s a good chance we don’t see the fast-sim option until right before release.
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