Terrible performance in late game and how to prioritize projects and mitigate issues

[KnoBuddy]

I have about 2,000 hours in the game and have finally gotten to a point where I feel comfortable building even the most advanced projects with relative ease. Obviously making some mistakes but knowing how to correct them through trial and error. Liq H20, H2, Sour Gas, Radiation Reactor etc.

I have never completed the game however. I didn't really pick up a great stride until Spaced Out, and never really made it to the end game in the base game. Now that I am comfortable doing this I am currently having issues keeping performance stable and even then sluggish and pausing every 5-10 seconds which had gotten rather tedious. Right now I'm working on taming the niobium volcano but finding with 1 large base on the classic swamp, a mini outpost on the forest asteroid, and several rockets doing missions as well, that completing the game in this playthrough might not be worth my time.

So my question is, is there anything I can do to salvage this playthrough that will drastically increase my performance to allow me to manage to open the tear and travel through it? Or am I better off just starting over making a more prioritized effort to get to through the tear? Possibly using the spaced out map instead of classic? Any other tips, comments, or advice are welcome.

My PC Specs are:

Crosshair Hero x570, Ryzen 3900x, 32gb DDR4 3600, 2070 Super, and a 1TB Gen3 NVME boot/steam library drive. I'm also currently running windows 11 beta but it hasn't seemed to cause any performance issues in any other games but I have had the odd green screen which could be hardware (RAM timings/CPU settings), software, or just soft lock related. 

Tl;dr.

Games slows down too much late game. Trying to get through the tear. Start over? Tips, tricks, suggestions welcome.

[Jann5s]

your PC isn't the issue. The game is using about 1.5 threads, so 75% of your very nice CPU isn't doing anything. There are many posts about this, I can try and find them for you, but I think you may want to have a shot at it yourself.

None of the solutions are real solutions, they are more workarounds to make the game a bit faster. things like cleaning up debris and avoiding mixed gasses, or even vacuuming parts of the map out or making sure long pipes are empty and only used on demand.

[SharraShimada]

And keep in mind, the DLC is not released yet. Its packed with loads of telemetry code to find and identify bugs and problems. And this means, it wont run at peak performance at all yet. And it woll not for some time to come, until KLEI finds it ready to release, and deactivate this debug code.

[cpy]

Yeah add more god damn content when you will LAG out and rage quit before you even experience 50% of it due to horrible performance of this game. I will smack anyone saying WAA WAA ALPHA BETA GAMMA EARLY ACCESS WAA WAA! This crap performance was problem even before DLC.

 

I DO NOT CARE for new content since I can't even experience current content because I will rage quit before I can even explore it fully.

Do I build insane amount of stuff? No! I build minimum amount I can think of and still lag out before setting out to 3rd planet.

Wish this game ran better, this is one of the best colony sim out there and one of the worst when it comes to performance. Thing is I don't even know what the hell is causing those lags there is no diagnostics, I don't even know what to do to stop lags. GG Klei.

[sakura_sk]

24 minutes ago, cpy said:

No! I build minimum amount I can think of

If it resembles a previous save you posted... Sorry but.. It didn't seem like "minimum" at all 

Also, digging the minimum amount you can helps more.

[cpy]

Much less this time. Still lags.

[KnoBuddy]

Does sweeping to a few locations help all that much? And I went full a basically full excavation of the main asteroid this time. Would getting rid of all the gasses outside the main base be a worthwhile venture? Also, didn't realize shine bugs and pufts in open space could create such a pathfinding problem. Should probably kill them all unless confined I guess then correct?

 

Any other tips. I really am sad to see this save go at 1800 cycles. 

Also thanks for the suggestions so far. I'll experiment a bit and try to be patient without starting any major projects that are too frustrating to plan with the lag skips. The niobium volcano may need to get out on hold as that is requiring lots of finicky work and isn't coming together a easily as I my original idea was in my head. 

[sakura_sk]

There were some suggestions (not sure that was in the forums or discord) that excavating the less amount possible and leaving the most amount of natural tiles possible, will create less lag. But after everything is already dug out ....I'm not sure if vacuum or build tiles would help more.

[KnoBuddy]

Hmm, filling the whole map with tiles could be a goal into itself. Haha. A 1 tile vacuum barrier could be fun. 

[Timotheeee1]

Tips from the discord:

A few things have a major impact on game performance. The main one is pathfinding, which is 80% of the game's frame time. To ease up on your CPU usage and have a better framerate: - Consolidate Debris. This reduces debris pathfinding. Even better, make useless debris unaccessible. - Restrict Dupes movement by blocking off areas with locked door. When access is disabled rather than the door locked, pathfinding will still attempt to access all tiles behind. - Avoid excavating needlessly as this adds more debris and emptied areas are filled with gases, which have a bigger impact on performance than solid tiles. - Avoid Jet Suits as they give access to lots of additional tiles, which are recomputed every frame. - Move Pacus to 1x1 farms as they have a pathfinding bug which makes their performance impact bad. - Move Decor Critters to 1x1 farms because the Decor is expensive to recompute when they move, especially those with large Decor radius: Tropical Pacu, Shine Bugs, Longhair Slickster. - Keep Ranches closed as critters moving from room to room cause “room rebuild”, which re-calculates the type of all rooms, slowing down the game. Any time critter count change in a room causes room rebuild, which may impact some pez dispenser designs as well. - If you use a lot of Critters, consider using Decor Reimagined with "No Critter Decor" option turned on. If you do use Decor Reimagined only, place Mess Tables in any room with wild plants that are not already park/reserves to bypass park signs checking during room rebuild, which is slow (not relevant without the mod). - Restrict Critters movement by as little tiles as possible. This has a much lower impact than previous tips.

and then do this with the wild critters:

[gabberworld]

its not true that path finding causes huge fps drop. if you want stable fps you need spread items to the map.

but in end your fps drop anyway when you have allot stuff

[SharraShimada]

8 hours ago, gabberworld said:

its not true that path finding causes huge fps drop.

Everyone on this whole junk of rock floating in space will tell you, pathfinding ist the worst thing you can do to any performance, and you come around the corner and deny it...

[blueberry pi]

Maybe all of those gassy moos floating in the gassy moonlet are behind some of this. *puts on tin foil top hat*

[gabberworld]

10 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Everyone on this whole junk of rock floating in space will tell you, pathfinding ist the worst thing you can do to any performance, and you come around the corner and deny it...

its not what someone tells, but what i see myself . you know that im doing tests you know at sandbox?

[SharraShimada]

3 hours ago, gabberworld said:

its not what someone tells, but what i see myself . you know that im doing tests you know at sandbox?

maybe. dozens of others have run tests, and the result: pathfinding ist the main problem. You may deny it all you want. Thats fine, But it wont believe you.

[gabberworld]

27 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

dozens of others have run tests

maybe. but to they made test with latest releases as well? you know that they changing code all the time?

or that info is like 5 years ago and now everyone copy paste that?

[Padishar]

Well, intuitively it makes sense that pathfinding is very computing expansive. I mean is the classical complex problem in informatics.

[gabberworld]

12 hours ago, Padishar said:

Well, intuitively it makes sense that pathfinding is very computing expansive. I mean is the classical complex problem in informatics.

how it can be difficult and how it can take allot cpu? most off time they are afk, they not constant moving, that means they not search new path all the time either, if you add them to 1 tile, they still looking if there possible move somewhere.

this game have much higher performance drop somewhere else than those moving path finders

you know that empty unity project can go over 2000 fps in my pc?

clean up the map in sandbox and you should to able jump at-least  1000 fps , but no. as there is much higher issues in game

damn i cant even go 1000 fps in main screen in this game, where is mostly the buttons only

year 2000 3d f1 game what i played i can self have there the 1000 fps in play mode. in here even main menu not able todo that.

 

there can be also issue that they switch to new unity. i tested c++ DirectX 9 vs  DirectX 11 and i to see 400-500 fps difference

 

[SharraShimada]

1 minute ago, gabberworld said:

how it can be difficult and how it can take allot cpu? most off time they are afk, they not constant moving, that means they not search new path all the time either  

Head > Desk...

[Timotheeee1]

I feel like this game could be a lot more optimized if the devs added settings to reduce the frequency of stuff getting updated. do the navigations of every single dupe and critter really need to be recalculated every frame ? does every single tile of polluted water really need to call the rng function 4 times per second ? does the decor really have to be updated as soon as anything moves ?

it would off course help a lot if the asteroids each had their own AI threads.

[yoakenashi]

On 8/26/2021 at 1:16 PM, Jann5s said:

The game is using about 1.5 threads

I use Windows 10, and when I open up resource monitor, under CPU, I see OxygenNotIncluded.exe and it says approximately 70 threads.

Also, all 4 of my cores are running pretty balanced.

I have seen applications peg one processor before, but ONI doesn't do that.

The only issues I see on my potato of a computer is when I open up research menu or consumables menu; the game seems to hang her a little. That definitely has more to do with accessing and rendering assets not in the core code, so that makes sense.

[misotoma]

On 8/26/2021 at 3:24 PM, SharraShimada said:

And keep in mind, the DLC is not released yet. Its packed with loads of telemetry code to find and identify bugs and problems. And this means, it wont run at peak performance at all yet. And it woll not for some time to come, until KLEI finds it ready to release, and deactivate this debug code.

But how can klei find bugs like this? If people cannot reach late game full capacity of let’s say tapping on geysers that exists on ALL planets just full load work in all small planets with digging rockets and some planets colonized. If people cannot reach this stage klei cannot see how it would react right? 

On 8/29/2021 at 11:12 AM, gabberworld said:

damn i cant even go 1000 fps in main screen in this game, where is mostly the buttons only

If this is true then klei has let us down… how is it possible that even on menu we can’t get max frames per second a PC can handle? I’m not in a position to make tests since my pc is non existent… but people out there should try testing things out in debug mode. Have 80 dupes in one tile with no pathing or 80 dupes enclosed by a mass of tiles and see how “pathing” tanks FPS if at all. Also adding one dupe in a line of debris with sweep command to see how FPS tanks. Also do this at intervals as in 250, 500 or 1,500 cycles since I feel save file gets more cramped with information creating performance issues. 

[gabberworld]

49 minutes ago, misotoma said:

If this is true then klei has let us down… how is it possible that even on menu we can’t get max frames per second a PC can handle? I’m not in a position to make tests since my pc is non existent… but people out there should try testing things out in debug mode. Have 80 dupes in one tile with no pathing or 80 dupes enclosed by a mass of tiles and see how “pathing” tanks FPS if at all. Also adding one dupe in a line of debris with sweep command to see how FPS tanks. Also do this at intervals as in 250, 500 or 1,500 cycles since I feel save file gets more cramped with information creating performance issues. 

problem with this is that every frame is important  when you reach to some point to game. now if there is something what let be two eyes like poorly coded menus and soo on , they all affect late game

im not say that this game is unplayable . but for some users it affect more than others

[tnankie]

Why on earth do you care about 1000 fps? Bloody sure your monitor can't display it.
FPS is completely irrelevant, the important metric is how long it takes to do a simulation tick. for instance when running on  extra fast my dupes pause a long time after digging before the next dig, that is because the path finding and task assignment routines are lagging, but if I slow down to fast they dig relatively faster, (more digs per cycle) yes it takes more wall time but the simulation is less stressed so the dupes are more efficient within it. Likewise dropping back to normal.

What I don't have are frame rate issues, the display of graphics is not the problem, the problem is the overloading of the simulation engine.

[Yobbo]

21 minutes ago, tnankie said:

Why on earth do you care about 1000 fps? Bloody sure your monitor can't display it.

A simulation tick can also be considered a frame.

Of course the FPS metric is still the wrong one, but it can be easily converted to milliseconds per tick.