![knights and merchants online knights and merchants online](https://static.kinguin.net/cdn-cgi/image/h=761,q=40,fit=scale-down,f=auto/media/catalog/category/KaMHD.png)
In other words, my current PC working at full load is capable of simulating ~5.5 minutes per second.īeing able to simulate whole minutes in a mere second is an amazing result, but it means that I can barely use the PC during that as CPU load is 100% and there’s little to no processing power left for other things. Given that KP is a single-threaded application, it multithreads very well and it also takes full advantage of Hyper-Threading – we can have a total of 8 threads, it gives us 16 hours simulated in 175 seconds. To make a reference point, let’s take a 4p Crossing map – a 2 hour game takes 175 seconds to complete in one thread. It is old, but still quite capable of running the game in Stadium in 8 threads and producing meaningful results in a sane amount of time (see previous blog post). My current PC is an i7 870 Lynnfield, with 4 cores dating back to 2010 or so. Larger target being – let the machine do the dirty work of discovering bugs instead of players. These things go hand in hand – better AI can use more of game mechanics and features, which lead to more bugs being discovered and more sub-systems being used that affect the game’s performance, making it more representative of what actual players will experience. Such automation is good not only for AI tweaks, but also for tracking down bugs and improving overall game performance and balance. As shown in a previous blog post, KP development suite has a great automation tool – Runner / Stadium which can crunch simulations of hundreds of games with AI players in a matter of hours.