May 12th
For today's update, Paul on the campaign team has kindly shared the following information on one of the issues we've just got fixed:
Kind regards,
Kieran
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As many of you will be aware there is currently an issue causing consistent CTDs when selecting certain navies on the campaign map. This is due to a problem with the calculation of the movement extents. Many people are also experiencing substantial pauses when selecing armies and navies on the campaign map. For patch 1.3 substantial parts of the movement extents algorithm have been redesigned and rewritten. This should eliminate the majority of pauses and crashes when selecting armies and navies on the campaign map.
We have started running automated testing on these changes - overnight a script teleported a british brig (joint-highest movement points in the game) to over 270 000 random positions on the campaign map, calculating the movement extents for each point. This was done with all tech researched so the movement extents were as large and as complicated as possible and no crashes were found. Such testing will continue for a while yet - forum reports have focused on first rate ships of the line. Our understanding is that the issue should be slightly worse with brigs than first rates, but we'll be repeating the automated tests with first rates just to be certain.
Just to give a bit of technical information and explain why this issue has taken so long to resolve, Empire as you know uses a completely different movement system to earlier Total War games. Rome and Medieval II used a grid-based campaign system, meaning that every piece occupied exactly one grid square and in one turn could move to one of upto a few hundred other grid squares. Empire is completely free-form. A piece in Empire has on average a couple of hundred trillion (ten to the power of twelve) unique possible destinations it can reach in a turn. As you can imagine, this requires a completely different approach and required us to design and implement a brand new system from scratch with no prior knowledge of where it may be suceptible to failure. We thought we'd addressed all the issues by launch but there's nothing quite like having a few hundred thousand people hammering your systems to highlight the weak spots. So sorry it's taken so long to address but hopefully by patch 1.3 all your fleet selection problems will be solved.
For today's update, Paul on the campaign team has kindly shared the following information on one of the issues we've just got fixed:
Kind regards,
Kieran
---
As many of you will be aware there is currently an issue causing consistent CTDs when selecting certain navies on the campaign map. This is due to a problem with the calculation of the movement extents. Many people are also experiencing substantial pauses when selecing armies and navies on the campaign map. For patch 1.3 substantial parts of the movement extents algorithm have been redesigned and rewritten. This should eliminate the majority of pauses and crashes when selecting armies and navies on the campaign map.
We have started running automated testing on these changes - overnight a script teleported a british brig (joint-highest movement points in the game) to over 270 000 random positions on the campaign map, calculating the movement extents for each point. This was done with all tech researched so the movement extents were as large and as complicated as possible and no crashes were found. Such testing will continue for a while yet - forum reports have focused on first rate ships of the line. Our understanding is that the issue should be slightly worse with brigs than first rates, but we'll be repeating the automated tests with first rates just to be certain.
Just to give a bit of technical information and explain why this issue has taken so long to resolve, Empire as you know uses a completely different movement system to earlier Total War games. Rome and Medieval II used a grid-based campaign system, meaning that every piece occupied exactly one grid square and in one turn could move to one of upto a few hundred other grid squares. Empire is completely free-form. A piece in Empire has on average a couple of hundred trillion (ten to the power of twelve) unique possible destinations it can reach in a turn. As you can imagine, this requires a completely different approach and required us to design and implement a brand new system from scratch with no prior knowledge of where it may be suceptible to failure. We thought we'd addressed all the issues by launch but there's nothing quite like having a few hundred thousand people hammering your systems to highlight the weak spots. So sorry it's taken so long to address but hopefully by patch 1.3 all your fleet selection problems will be solved.
