A Turn is a unit of game time. It is used to describe how quickly, or when, things happen in the game.
Dungeon Keeper[]
"A game turn is a counter that counts how many times Dungeon Keeper has run through it’s [sic] main loop. The main loop is a series of commands which tells the game to update and then draw everything on the screen. Each time it runs through these instructions, the game turn counter increases by one and the loop is run again.
On slower PCs, the game turns will increase slowly, while on fast machines the game turns will increase faster. To stop the game becoming too fast, there is a limit of 12 game turns a second." |
— Dungeon Keeper Editor Manual |
A Turn is a small unit of time used internally for executing the game's ongoing tasks, cooldowns, and timers. The real-life duration of a turn is going to fluctuate with the game's frame rate, but the turn rate and frame rate are dependent on each other. The game can handle no more than one action per turn. A single line of level script is processed each turn.
The game has a limit of 20 turns/frames per second (not 12 like the manual claims), but this can be overridden by using the -fps parameter;[1] however, the game will be too fast when set higher than 20, as that's presumably the maximum turn rate the developers had in mind, and things just happen too quickly if you go too far above 20.
- Examples of turn usage
- The time limit for Secret 2, the first "Slap the Imp" level as it is called in the level script, is 6600 turns— about 6 minutes. The level opens with a visible countdown box starting at 3300, so it's using increments of 2 turns.
- A creature's "Training Skill" is the number of experience points the creature gains per turn while using the Training Room. A Horned Reaper (Skill=1) therefore gets 1 per turn or about 20 experience points per second, and about 40 after he learns Speed. The Dragon (Skill=3) gets about 60.
- The creature spell Meteor has an activation time ("ActionTime") of 6 turns, followed by a cooldown ("ResetTime") of 100 turns. For this and most other spells, the user has a waiting period ("Time") of 10 turns, overlapping the activation, to wait before it can use another skill.
- Fairly similar in nature to Training Skill, a creature's "Research Value" is the number of research points it contributes per turn while using the Library. The main difference is that creatures grow more skilled in this job when they gain levels. There is a 16% bonus (multiplicative, sort of like compound interest) per level; a Warlock will start out at 4 research points per turn, but by level 10 he contributes over 15 per turn.
After you win a level, the game tells you how many turns it took as the Hopes Dashed statistic.
KeeperFX 0.5 introduced delta timing, which makes the turn rate and frame rate independent of each other; previously, the two were tied to each other and treated as one and the same.
References[]
- ↑ Dungeon Keeper Script Commands Reference v1.3. Keeper Klan. Retrieved on 27 August 2019.
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