Game Lag Tests Part 2

[DarkMoge]

This is my next set of tests for how things impact the game. For this set of experiments, pipes will be the suspect... I dearly hope that there is no difference between water and gas pipes, because conducting same experiments for both types would be time consuming. Same as before, I will place "takeaway" section in the end.

I was not sure when ever to post it within same topic and make it hard for people to find as they dig through comments or to create a new topic. Previous part

Spoiler

Already during the building, I have experienced several issues. In fact, I managed to kill my game on the first attempt to build it. Which is surprising because there was no such issue with setting up ladders map. First of all, building large segments would become harder the larger the segment became, I would give up at segments with length of 1000. Secondly, building next segment starting at the end of previous one would become painfully slower and slower, this is how I killed the game on first attempt... Game handles placing segments of pipes and than connecting them much better than trying to continue building same pipe network.

Also, I got a few glitched out areas during my building process:
 

Spoiler

Also, the game experiences no issues in normal mode. Switching to pipes overview mode causes several major problems. First of all, moving camera becomes painfully slow and it depends on how close you are zoomed in which suggests that there is a major problem in game with the rendering of the pipe network. Also, I tried moving my camera in pipe mode in an area without pipes and it was smooth, but when I moved back to the pipes area, game crashed:

 

Spoiler

Luckily, I made sure to save my game. The game took quite a while to load, but loaded without issues. Before attempting to run any tests with that piping network, I let the game run for a few cycles... It seems like having those pipes does not impact game performance. Though, for some weird reason, it did increase loading freeze during the new cycle start more than having 400 pufts did.

Experiment 2: Run water through the entire pipe one way.
Expected result: with how many setbacks I experienced during the construction of that machine, I can only expect game crashing.
Result: Game Crashed within a few seconds of running after connecting the pipe network to the pump.

So, to continue the experiment, I first attempted to load the same game (in hope that I do not need to build a smaller map with same setup) and disconnected about half of the pipes from the network, but did not delete them.

Experiment 2. Attempt 2:
Result:Game still crashed.

For next attempt, still using same map, disconnected 3/4 of the pipes from the network.
Experiment 2 Attempt 3:
Result: Game crashed before I even started things running lol.

I am led to believe that I have to setup a smaller experiment map D:
 

Spoiler

While Setting up way smaller map, I got it to crash again >_> F6 overlay kills your games. I am going to attempt making the pipes on the smaller map for second time. Getting crashes one after another is discouraging me from doing any experiments (I crashed it again). My experiments might lose their validity after something that causes game to crash gets fixed.

I am going to attempt with 2 times less pipes than I planned on smaller map.
 

Spoiler

Well, at the very least, moving in F6 mode does not crash the game, but its painfully slow. I am surprised about how lucky I got with the bigger map when moving camera in pipe overlay. Before starting the experiment, I will let it run for a few cycles. There is a minor cycle start loading freeze.

Experiment 2 Revised version:
Expected result: hopefully it will work this time.
Result:it did not crash... As long as I avoid F6 overview mode, the game seems to run smooth, but as soon as I enter it, the game lags really hard, hovering map over the pipe makes game lag even harder.
It might be too small of a pipe to properly stress test for the lag, so I will still advice to build shorter pipes, but thinking logically about it, single input, single output should not be demanding to calculate. Also, I did not realize how many cycles would it take for the water to reach its destination  
 

Spoiler

Experiment 2.1: Now, lets make a "questionable" piping system and see how it runs... Questionable is the best way to describe it.
Expected result: this is where the game will start to lag.
Result:Well, first of all, even trying to build questionable network makes the game freeze, the more connection I added, the more it would take to load. In screenshot, it handle fine the first big segment than it took a bit to load after second segment... Third segment was small, but it took like 2 minutes to load... I gave up trying to wait for last segment as the game stayed frozen even after 20 minutes... So... I settled for less connection as shown in second screenshot.
Still there were no lags. So, the game calculates the route for pipes at the moment of the construction and actually calculating the piping of liquids does not take much. To test this, I tried another setup on screenshot 3... I stopped adding more connections when it started giving small delay. Surprisingly, it caused no lag, but the game failed to make proper routes for the water as it ended up getting stack at random places  
 

Spoiler

Experiment 3: setup a system with multiple inlets and outputs separately.
Expected result: perhaps the game will lag now?
Result: the game did not lag, maybe, the map size is too small to stress test how much lag it caused... On the other hand, going to the pipe overview crashed the game
 

Spoiler

---------------------------------------
-----------Takeaway---------------
---------------------------------------
1. Do not go into pipe overview mode when you do not have to and if you have to, make sure to zoom in first and do not zoom out in pipe overview.
2. Build your pipes systems as short as possible.
3. Try to not build systems that use pipes close to one another.
4. When building a network of pipes, build segments of pipes first and than connect them together. Do not try to just extend pipe system that you already have, instead, build the extension first and than connect it.

With how much the game actually crashes, it feels impossible to setup a proper stress test pipes for lag.
But, common sense tells me that you should not build mazes with your pipes and try to use bridges to simplify the flow of gasses and liquids.

Also, having a lot of pipes might be even worse than having a lot of critters.

[Nitroturtle]

Out of curiousity, are you loading from within the game, or returning to the main menu and loading?  Doing either of these has shown large memory leaks, and could possibly contribute to your crashing issue.  If you were doing either of these in your testing, I'd suggest trying again and making sure you completely exit the game any time you load a saved game.

If you were already exiting completely to reload, then you can obviously disregard my advice.  I love the testing and hope that Klei is taking note and eventually improves game performance.

[ONIfreak]

Info for windows 10 users:

If your game crash do restart ( do not choose shut down option and turn pc back on bit "restart")

 Reason behind is that w10 shut down behaviour changed and right now it is more like "hibernate" rather than "refresh". When you choose restart it will close all opened loops and speed up game ( easiest way to see thia is to go to start manager - performance and check uptime)

[suxkar]

It is well known that long pipes are bad for your pc health, that's why you could try again the experiment interrupting pipes with a reasonable number of bridges. Also, I wouldn't go as far as trying exotic configurations such as the grid. I understand they are tempting and intriguing to investigate, but those "extreme" experiments end up not giving meaningful data.

Other than that, what you are doing is great, interesting end extremely useful, to the point that I hope the Devs are keeping an eye on your threads.

 

Thank you!

[cblack]

I find the worst pipe-related lag usually comes when actually building/destroying pipes, as it's (presumably) recalculating the topology.  That said, I'd love to know the long term effects of lots of pipe with liquid flowing as I seems to always get more and more of that, and there's almost no way to remove it without catastrophic consequences.

[DarkMoge]

22 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

Out of curiousity, are you loading from within the game, or returning to the main menu and loading?  Doing either of these has shown large memory leaks, and could possibly contribute to your crashing issue.  If you were doing either of these in your testing, I'd suggest trying again and making sure you completely exit the game any time you load a saved game.

If you were already exiting completely to reload, then you can obviously disregard my advice.  I love the testing and hope that Klei is taking note and eventually improves game performance.

I do not even have an option not to restart the game when it crashes.

[Lutzkhie]

On 8/28/2019 at 7:15 AM, DarkMoge said:

Do not go into pipe overview

Ive been thinking about this, maybe someone should make a mod that will prevent the game from switch to other overlays when selecting specific items in the build menu, sometimes selecting pipe automatically switches to pipe overlays and it just freeze for a few seconds

[ONIfreak]

15 minutes ago, Lutzkhie said:

Ive been thinking about this, maybe someone should make a mod that will prevent the game from switch to other overlays when selecting specific items in the build menu, sometimes selecting pipe automatically switches to pipe overlays and it just freeze for a few seconds

Space - pipe - space

[Nitroturtle]

1 hour ago, DarkMoge said:

I do not even have an option not to restart the game when it crashes.

Right, obviously it's a fresh load after a crash.  I just meant any loading done during testing, when the game hasn't crashed.

[nakomaru]

37 minutes ago, Lutzkhie said:

Ive been thinking about this, maybe someone should make a mod that will prevent the game from switch to other overlays when selecting specific items in the build menu, sometimes selecting pipe automatically switches to pipe overlays and it just freeze for a few seconds

I would love this. I access overlays by F-keys.

Great study, thanks so much for sharing.

[Glassyfo]

On 8/27/2019 at 7:15 PM, DarkMoge said:

 

Could you add a link to your first test in the post? It would be helpful to those like me who come across this one first.

[DarkMoge]

2 minutes ago, bleeter6 said:

Could you add a link to your first test in the post? It would be helpful to those like me who come across this one first.

 

[Lutzkhie]

the best anti lag solution I found is play the game with no sound, seriously I cant feel the lag tonight

I wanna share my save file with you just to see how much is your fps on my gameplay but I also dont want to because I know If any one of you says "I got 45+ fps triple speed" I am going to sit in the corner and cry 

I am currently playing at normal speed and its so slow, too slow that Im playing fallout shelter on my phone while I play ONI on the computer

This is how much we need optimization/performance update

[gently]

On 29/08/2019 at 10:46 AM, Lutzkhie said:

the best anti lag solution I found is play the game with no sound, seriously I cant feel the lag tonight

also found that it helped, had too many critters and the noise was driving me nuts so I turned it off and it improved somewhat

[Lutzkhie]

16 minutes ago, gently said:

also found that it helped, had too many critters and the noise was driving me nuts so I turned it off and it improved somewhat

see told yah

[Oozinator]

5 hours ago, Lutzkhie said:

see told yah

That's weird, because so far i now, unity could only handle 32 sounds at once on PC, why should that slow down system?

[MorsDux]

I removed all debris and my hatches and the lag vanished. I will have to make a locked auto storage system to deny acces of materials from dupes. 

Maybe i will lock a dupe inside and make him replace auto sweepers.