Performance issues and lag mitigation in DLC

[Tiru]

I'm really enjoying the DLC Beta and have logged several hundred hours across two playthroughs. I wanted to offer some feedback regarding performance as I have concerns about the playability of the game once it reaches final release and given the changes from a monolithic asteroid to numerous smaller ones, think there is a real opportunity to significantly improve gameplay.

I've played on the public testing branch and I'm aware that debugging tools that are enabled causes significant performance impacts. That said, I've played two games until I reach single-digit FPS at which point I call it quits. Both were around 1600 cycles, and I wasn't able to build everything I had wanted to by then. Going back years there are requests by players to make the game multithreaded, as it is almost always CPU bottlenecked. As a result, my 8-core CPU usually hovers around 15-20% utilization. While this was dismissed in the past, I mention this anew because the DLC offers a unique opportunity the base game did not. With separate asteroids there are discrete units where gases, fluids, heat mechanics, dupe pathing, etc - everything that complicates thread synchronization, are entirely isolated. Yes, all the asteroids do exist on one big map, but they are functionally isolated. This seems obvious but I know sometimes a decision is made that a problem can't be addressed and when the situation changes it in not re-evaluated, so I wanted to offer the feedback that it would make the game much, much more enjoyable - and allow for true end-game megabases spanning asteroids, if performance could be improved - and there is now, possibly, a way to do it.

If not, I believe this will be a larger problem in the DLC than the base game as mitigation is more complicated.

- The total area of all combined maps is simply larger than a single asteroid in the base game, so there is just plain more to process, so comparable bases will run slower.

- In the base game I typically run around 30-40 duplicants, not counting those I lock in spaceships, which is a large enough construction force to tackle large projects. They are idle plenty of the time, but I like that - I build them nice rec rooms. What is important is they're ready when I want them. On a single asteroid, they can supply and build quickly so doing things like bricking up most of the map, despite it being annoying, is a feasible approach to reducing lag. This is harder to do in the DLC. It isn't safe to leave a single dupe on a planet to brick up the map in their downtime as they inevitably trap themselves and require rescue, so each asteroid has a 2-dupe minimum and even then there is some micromanagement. Additionally some locations don't have sufficient raw minerals, so this can involve shipping in supplies as well as building larger than needed infrastructure if, instead of a small support staff, you bring in a large team. Whatever the approach, this is a lot more work just to reduce lag and isn't actually a fun part of the game but just something you had to do. In the base game it at least was essentially a background project.

- Another approach, vaccuuming out portions of the map, is also less practical. You can always get water easily enough by bringing in mud/p-mud but it could be too cold or hot, and bringing in oil/petrol just for liquid locks is another hassle that isn't actually part of the gameplay. (airlocks are, but big projects just to reduce lag aren't, or at least shouldn't be)

- Limiting dupes to save CPU cycles is harder, as the DLC will require more, not fewer, dupes to have the same fun gameplay experience, at least the way I like to play. I enjoy having a dozen dupes rush to work on a big project. In my first DLC playthrough I had 20 and big projects were slower than I liked, but I kept most on the main planet so it was possible. On the second, I limited it even further to 15 but I had to spread them out more. Everybody was overworked all the time and I didn't even try to build anything complex. In the first playthrough I only had 6 worlds and left many empty once I grabbed what I needed while in the second I had 8, was trying to run an interplanetary base, and do big projects like converting the entire water moonlet to food for the resin rooster. I also got tired of shuttling around food so I wanted each planet to be self sufficient. I had far more farmers, ranchers, and suppliers which, with only 15 dupes, severely cut down on builders. The point is that with so much fun new content it isn't really going to be an option to play with so few dupes simply for performance. I want 20 dupes on my main base, a half dozen converting the water world to food, another half dozen clearing each new world, a couple stewards on each completed world, etc. 

- Even if you want to just grab a few resources from a world and leave you essentially can't as you need to at least stick around long enough to sweep up all the debris, simply for performance reasons. Sweeping is normally a task you can just give low priority and it will eventually get done but you have to actually keep a crew in place or leave a permanent steward simply because there is so much more, and the lag is so bad.

- Temperature management, plumbing, and ventilation are more complicated with multiple asteroids and requires more processing. Even if an asteroid only has a small outpost there is still some required plumbing and ventilation compared to only ever having a single base. Three of my eight moonlets generated enough heat to require active cooling - always a significant FPS impact due to all the extra piping running through a base. This was primarily due to having so much extra food production for resin production.

There are probably some other things I haven't thought of. Simply put the DLC, in my opinion, has much greater system requirements while simultaneously increasing the difficulty for the player to mitigate the performance penalty. Given the breakup of the world into small discrete sections, it might be possible to actually end up making everything faster by finally implementing additional CPU threads.

Alternatively, I think there will need to be some other options such as permanently abandoning a planet once you've taken off what you want to free up those resources for other projects. 

 

 

[babba]

@Tiru If your cpu can turbo clock then try to ensure that it runs in turbo mode the whole time at the fastest GHz possible.

For informative reasons you can compare where you cpu stands in single threading performance, compared to others with this list:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

According to past user posts the game runs in one entire big map ( which is IMHO an good attempt to always work on optimizations, to avoid players colony switch times and to help identifying game crash reasons ), this map work/rework in my opinion delays/delayed dlc content output and delivery by 1 year. However, Klei is surely always trying to improve performance on its game calculations and handling. Touch wood

If you like upload you save game here, then somebody may check it out