Standby

[NeonPeon]

I've run into this problem too. I play on a netbook, often during my train commute. Which poses two problems for me:

1) The netbook isn't exactly high-powered, so once in a while the game will lag for a second or two. The game zooms at a fast pace to catch up. This has screwed up my game more than once.

2) The HUGE problem is when the netbook is put into standby. I often begin a game during my morning commute, close the netbook, and try to finish in the evening. When I take the computer out of standby, the game will play catch-up for a long time. I don't put it into standby until I'm on the turn summary screen, so I can press the button when I'm ready. Once I take the computer out of standby, the blinking light under my name flashes very rapidly, presumably because the game is playing "catch up". If I hit the button, the whole turn will zoom by at a super fast speed and next thing I know I've missed my entire turn. So, I can't hit the button until I notice the light is once again blinking at a normal pace, meaning the game has finally caught up.

Lately the first thing I do when I come into work is open the netbook and let it catch up. It takes about 20 minutes, typically. However during last night's commute, I started a really good game that I wasn't willing to abandon. This morning I tried to finish but spent the entire train ride (1 hour+) waiting for it to catch up. It finally caught up a few hours later.

Having delved a little bit into game development, I'm guessing the game is subtracting the current time from the time of the game loop's previous iteration. The wait time per iteration is adjusted accordingly. If the time difference is huge (because of standby, for example) the game will run at an accelerated pace for a ridiculously long time (wait time is 0 or close to it), until the "correct" number of iterations has been reached (a very large number if I've left the game on overnight!).

If this is indeed what's going on, there should be a well-known solution to the problem. I believe I once read one in a game development books, though I can't recall it off the top of my head. It should be out there though.

I can attach a log later, if necessary.

[Peter]

We will fix this in the next version. The reason why the game runs fast is simply that it should reflect the real time that has passed by. Of course, if you put your game on standy you wouldn't want this to happen. Also if you're playing solo it's really not necessary to stay synchronized with real time.