Continuous Play - [RBP Help Contents]

RBP's continuous play feature is a handy way to test the ability of the various computer players against each other, or to test a custom map.

To enable continuous play, from the Game menu choose Start Game. From the Game Setup window that appears, click the Game Options button. In the Game Options window, enable both the "Non-stop play" and "Continuous game repeat" check boxes.

STATISTICS

You can view cumulative statistics about the continuous games via the Game Status window: from the Display pull-down menu choose AI Stats.

INCREASING PLAY SPEED

For maximum play speed, minimize the map window: RBP will skip updating the map graphics until you restore the window to its normal size, and will execute in the processing background so that you can run other Windows programs concurrently.

In the Game Options window, enable the "Skip brute force search" check box; this will reduce AI trip finding skill a bit, but yield much faster performance. If you will not be running other programs simultaneously, you can gain an additional 10% to 20% speed boost by enabling the "Maximum processor use" check box on the Game Options window.

Leaving the Game Status window open at its normal size will not slow the game much, especially if left viewing the AI Stats.

SUM DATA

If your device has a multi-core processor, you can run multiple instances of RBP, and each (up to the number of cores) will automatically execute on its own processor. Enabling the Sum Data checkbox on the Game Options window tells RBP to gather and combine the data from all instances into the AI Stats displayed for the first instance. Tech note: the data communication is handled via DDE.

To use this feature, when setting up for continuous play, enable the Sum Data checkbox for each RBP instance. Be sure to employ the same map and settings (number of players, etc.) for each instance, otherwise the statistics gathered may be unreliable.

"Error 286 in ddesend" means the RBP instance gathering the statistics was busy at the time another instance tried to send it statistics. If the error occurs sporadically it can be ignored because the stats are not lost, but instead will be retransmitted after the next match is completed.

CONTINUOUS SAVES

To save every game the AI plays, enable the "Save continuous game at end" checkbox in the Game Options window. Upon completion, each match will be saved into the directory that contains RBP, and automatically assigned a name, such as 10311DXL.RBZ, that represents the date and time. The name of the file is included in the WINRR.LOG file. To review an interesting match, you may find the replay game feature handy.

WINRR.LOG

Upon completion of a continuous play game, RBP appends results into a text file named WINRR.LOG stored in the location of your RBP.EXE file. Beginning with RBP version 3.8, to have game results logged, you must include the /winrrlog switch. i.e. start the program via

rbp/winrrlog

You can use the WINRR.LOG text file to study which RR combinations are most often owned. Beginning with RBP version 2.8, the networks of the losers, in order of net worth, are also listed (semicolons separate the players' networks). Each CR/LF separated line of the file shows the results from one game; the format is as follows:

<WinnerScore>,<SavedGameFile>,<Winner RR #1>,<Winner RR #2> ... ;<2nd place RR #1>, ...

SCENARIOS

RBP can repeatedly play specific game situations, either ones you create by hand or load from a saved game, so you can learn the varied ways in which they can finish. This is described in the Ownership/Scenario topic.