Starmap Performance

meekay · December 28, 2022

I'm now in the late game, cycle 823. I've got three sustainable colonies, two new colonies being bootstrapped, resource-gathering base camps on three others. A dozen or so geysers tamed, piping and conduit networks that are glorious to behold. I have six rockets, four in flight. On the main screen, on a last-gen Intel MacBook, I get 15-19 fps. Not great, but definitely usable, and with the recent performance upgrades from this past autumn I can scroll around and use the interface and only drop about 10% of my clicks or so. Everything is fine.

On the Starmap screen, fully revealed, I get 8 fps.

What the heck?

There's nothing on the Starmap screen. Why is it so poor? Why is scrolling abysmally slow?

I realize the bulk of the performance in this game isn't the rendering, but the simulation. But that's true of every view. Why is the Starmap, of all places, showing the strain more than anything else?

And why are my planetoids suddenly bouncing up and down like it's the halftime show at an NBA game?

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yoakenashi · December 28, 2022

My first planetoid also bounces, even on pause. And no, it is not the expected slow float up and down that planetoids have. I still see that float motion combined with the fast bouncing. Thanks to meekay for capturing it so well.

babba · January 1, 2023

Happy new year everyone !

Hopefully Klei can improve the star map speed for us players... :confused: I`m praying.

@meekayGame lags always suck my dear friend :concern: Always hoping for the better...

All planets run in one big giant simulation map, and the star map is also carrying the simulation at any moment in time. The simulation is not divided in to several parts AFAIK, it is all accessible for the player instantly as it is all computed in ( more or less ) "real time".

Jumping from planetoid to planetoid, it is just the camera repositioning in the big simulated map. Planetoids are divided by borders within the big game map. The star map, with its traveling rockets + rocket interiors mapping, may also be in the games persistent ram memory...But maybe there is some kind of ram swap when the star map is visible to the player, I do not know. :confused:

The star map and rocket interior(s) mapping was kind of banged in to the game "at the end" during the ongoing games development.

The handling of all things takes a toll on the overall game speed, but has the advantage that its all accessible in "no time" to the player ( on a beefy modern fast single core threading cpu with lots of l1/l2/l3 cache access and fast ram ). :bee: :roll:

In general the game runs best on 1 modern 2022/2023 cpu core clocked at permanent 5-6 GHz with 50 to 100 MB L3 cpu cache :ghost: + fast ram. Great air or water cpu cooling and playing without a pc case is an advantage for ONI and other played sim games. :lol:

Having a 2nd core running at high clock rate also often benefits other simulation games like Cities: Skylines etc.

The higher the ranking in the passmark list, the better for ONI and other sim games in general.

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

I`m waiting since 8 years to get bitcoins back from the mtgox bancruptcy, so im still playing on an old, modified intel 7700k with a 2 kilo aircooler on top....I built the system for ONI and other sim games ( Factorio and whatnot ).

In this year I want to build a new :love_heart: ONI "open air" single core system ( more permanent fast cores are welcome ), with an rtx 4070ti for Cities Skylines, WOWS and MS Flight Sim in 4K + running several editing instances of Filmora at once. I waited long time, this year is ripe for me as there is some really good cpu competition going on. Soon there will be cpus which rank with double the speed in single threading, compared to my vintage 7700k.