General off-screen behavior

[SharraShimada]

So, the game obviously treats visible and off screen actions in different ways. 

This results in strange, and often critical behavior. 

For example, heat exchange wont work right, water flow (world, not pipe) is wierd, and bunker doors or automation wont run smooth and for that, not in the estimated timing.

Currently i have a wide row of bunker doors, segmented in ~10 blocks. While the ones on screen open/close as intended, and automation with filter gates run smooth, the ones off screen have a brief delay, causing the attached automation to not jump in at the right point, causing problems. 

Okay, why i am writing this? Because i want to open a discussion with people on different hardware, to see if its just PC-related, or if its a general, maybe engine related, problem. I´m running ONI on a i5 4460 with up to 3.4GHz turbo boost, and i frequently run into this problems at later gameplay, when the performance goes south generally. Whats the experiences of people with high-end CPUs?

[blash365]

Maybe it would be a good idea to attach a screenshot or even a savegame of your example as some kind of benchmark.

[Sasza22]

I`ve seen this happening. Bunkjer doors open slower off screen. Especially apparent when you build a full walloff with bunker doors. I`ve seen this often on streams. I`m sure it was reported as a bug before.

[HeadPot]

Can confirm bunker doors desync opening and closing but never had problems with them not closing on time. I add adittional 30 seconds on automation to be on the safe side (when running a 100% scan setup) Running with i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz and haven't noticed anything else weird but my worlds haven't gone massively complex yet.
 

[Lilalaunekuh]

Ok for me the only "off-screen" delay was considering automation (most noticeable my bunker doors).

7 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

For example, heat exchange wont work right, water flow (world, not pipe) is wierd

At least I couldn´t find any weird behaviour considering the heat exchange

[mathchamp93]

I've noticed some bunker door issues myself. Such as if I am not watching the doors, then I have a look at them when they happen to be opening/closing, they'll be just starting to open/close even though they should have been running 20 seconds prior.

Or if I watch the door opening for a while, then go somewhere else, then come back before it finishes opening, it will be back to where it was when I last saw it, even if it should be one second away from finishing.

I'm guessing that when on screen it computes the door opening/closing progress in real time, since it has to show the door animating. But off screen it does not matter as far as the physics goes, so it can just save the door's progress along with when it will finish, then it does not have to do anything until it reaches that simulation tick where it finishes.

The problem is if you decide to look at the door again before then, or if the power state changes. The correct action would be to update the door progress based on what the progress was before and how much time has passed since then. But what the game seems to actually be doing is to just keep the "saved" progress without accounting for the time passed.

[fishoutofwater]

I only noticed "off-screen" delay for bunker doors.

Running on i3 6100 @3.7GHz

[Lifegrow]

It's been reported and regularly highlighted to the devs - I assume (based purely on speculation) that the reason it's not been fixed yet is due to some form of performance impact.

This has been a reoccurring issue since forever - but in different forms. Previously we've had similar issues where plants stifled off screen, or critters froze off screen and slowly died of hunger, etc etc. Seems to be a bug/change that rears it's head every few updates.

You can do nothing to fix your bunker doors in terms of making them all run at the same time - aside from always playing in fully zoomed out screen shot mode (Alt + S), which isn't exactly practical. Only sort of solution seems to be to allow them way more time than they need to close when factoring in your scanner based automation.