I've been playing strategy games from Paradox Interactive for a long time, and I've been curious about how the event system works. With so many countries and thousands of events that trigger under certain conditions, it seems like a lot of calculations would be necessary. I wonder how they efficiently check all those conditions every month for every country. It feels like running 10,000 'if this, then that' commands each tick would be really inefficient. Can anyone explain how this system works and what methods they might use to manage all of this?
5 Answers
Actually, there's a lot of computational power needed for this, especially in the late game when more NPCs and events are involved. Performance tends to drop, and it's often why games speed up after major events, like a massive plague reducing the population.
It’s a mix of efficiency strategies. For instance, they might load only active events into memory at specific intervals instead of every tick. This would make the checks more manageable, keeping the load light and fast for the game’s performance.
They likely use some form of hierarchical structure for events. For instance, if a character's location changes, the game can easily skip irrelevant events. Sorting events based on their conditions is a smart way to reduce the number of checks needed each tick.
The event system probably doesn't just check everything blindly. Algorithms like Rete and other decision-tree frameworks are likely in play, which means they streamline their checks to only what's necessary, making the process much less intensive than if they checked every event every tick.
One possibility is that they don't check every event every single tick. Instead, they could set up a system that sorts events chronologically. This way, during each tick, only the upcoming event is checked. If something happens that triggers it, they can then look back to check for any other events that might be triggered at the same time.
But that doesn't really explain the optimization needed for the eliminated events. They still need to manage those effectively.