Lag, a growing concern

[CuteC]

I've been finding the world I play on with friends getting increasingly laggy as time goes on and I am afraid it will go into unplayability after enough time, everyone knows this game has terrible lag issues and I REALLY think this should be addresed ASAP.

There's not a workaround either because this problem has two structures that are vital to everyone's base, chests and above average trees.

Our world seems to lag a LOT whenever someone walks by our storage, we have already tested this and the problem seems to be what's in the chests rather than the chests themselves, perhaps the game thinks the items still exist in the world as if they were on the ground or something, since we despawned all our chests and spawned 100 empty ones, which caused no lag.

Somehow our storage causes more lag than a couple hundred merm guards, which was still playable even on my not very good laptop.

The other problem are the above average trees, they don't even go into double digits and they make one part of our base EXTREMELY laggy, the host's laptop can run other games at hundreds of fps and this one struggles to even get to 60.

As more content is added, there will be more stuff to do, more items to store, and thus more lag.

Any late game world is at danger because of this and something has to be done about it, heck, even NEW worlds can experience massive lag if anyone dares stumble upon the rocky spider biome, not even 50 spiders cause infinitely more lag than hundreds of merms.

[Spino43]

1 hour ago, CuteC said:

I've been finding the world I play on with friends getting increasingly laggy as time goes on and I am afraid it will go into unplayability after enough time, everyone knows this game has terrible lag issues and I REALLY think this should be addresed ASAP.

There's not a workaround either because this problem has two structures that are vital to everyone's base, chests and above average trees.

Our world seems to lag a LOT whenever someone walks by our storage, we have already tested this and the problem seems to be what's in the chests rather than the chests themselves, perhaps the game thinks the items still exist in the world as if they were on the ground or something, since we despawned all our chests and spawned 100 empty ones, which caused no lag.

Somehow our storage causes more lag than a couple hundred merm guards, which was still playable even on my not very good laptop.

The other problem are the above average trees, they don't even go into double digits and they make one part of our base EXTREMELY laggy, the host's laptop can run other games at hundreds of fps and this one struggles to even get to 60.

As more content is added, there will be more stuff to do, more items to store, and thus more lag.

Any late game world is at danger because of this and something has to be done about it, heck, even NEW worlds can experience massive lag if anyone dares stumble upon the rocky spider biome, not even 50 spiders cause infinitely more lag than hundreds of merms.

Agreed. The amount of lags appearing when there are a large amount of spiders on screen is ridiculous. Can't even run the spider catapult farm due to how insanely laggy it is.

[chirsg]

I've gotten issues lately with my hub where all the chests are. 

I'll typically get so much lag sometimes that I stand still for 3-4 segments while trying to walk.

 

 

[Dragonboooorn]

Since Klei introduced ocean － I had more and more troubles running a solo world.

Now, I cant play in default world + caves at all. After first winter, my game lags asf, and its not fps! It feels like high ping, in my own world

[Evelo]

I cannot play the game and have fun with the amount of lag there is. I have to play solo with the mod that fixes the lag issue. No clue how others have fun in multiplayer with the amount of delay. It drives me insane. Considering how long it is been I doubt it will ever be fixed, just something we have to deal with.

[chirsg]

11 minutes ago, Evelo said:

I cannot play the game and have fun with the amount of lag there is. I have to play solo with the mod that fixes the lag issue. No clue how others have fun in multiplayer with the amount of delay. It drives me insane. Considering how long it is been I doubt it will ever be fixed, just something we have to deal with.

I think that having the world owner shut off the caves shard would be a start. There exists a mod that does this, but with EXTREME flaws. 

I can't emphasize EXTREME enough, so I had to reiterate it.

 

But from what I understand, it does help as flawed as it is. 

 

Just running one instance of a shard could probably help, even as a world setting. And if there are other players in other shards when the owner has logged off, I think it would be as simple as a guest being ejected from the caves. 

[Dragonboooorn]

2 minutes ago, chirsg said:

I think that having the world owner shut off the caves shard would be a start. There exists a mod that does this, but with EXTREME flaws. 

I can't emphasize EXTREME enough, so I had to reiterate it.

 

But from what I understand, it does help as flawed as it is. 

 

Just running one instance of a shard could probably help, even as a world setting. And if there are other players in other shards when the owner has logged off, I think it would be as simple as a guest being ejected from the caves. 

QoL feature that allows solo players to run only world they currently in (forest/caves) will be the hugest and prolly the best there ever was. 

Paired with official geometric placement, of course

[grm9]

10 hours ago, CuteC said:

the game thinks the items still exist in the world as if they were on the ground

It does, every stack of an item still counts as a prefab, so every full chest is 10 prefabs. If you fill a chest with cut grass in a world with no cut grass in any other container or on the ground and use c_countprefabs("cutgrass"), you'll see that there's 9 cut grass prefabs in the world, with the chest being the 10th prefab contributing to lag.

[Spino43]

14 minutes ago, grm9 said:

It does, every stack of an item still counts as a prefab, so every full chest is 10 prefabs. If you fill a chest with cut grass in a world with no cut grass in any other container or on the ground and use c_countprefabs("cutgrass"), you'll see that there's 9 cut grass prefabs in the world, with the chest being the 10th prefab contributing to lag.

Damn, chests just sound a less useful for me lol

[Well-met]

klei please make a proper singleplayer setting

[Masked Koopa]

I really have to wonder why items inside chests can't be abstracted to some capacity. Unless we're talking mechanics like spoilage they really shouldn't have to be treated as full and complete prefabs when inside a chest. Chests shouldn't be anywhere near as laggy as they are.

As for the trees, I have no clue what the issue could even be. I've tried turning off the tree shadows and the difference it makes to fps has been negigible.

The trees seem to mostly cause fps lag, but the chests straight-up cause connection lag.

[Uedo]

Is it just a case of too many calls for components in the code? I worry a lot of this is the chest issue and keeping track of variables. 

Could the issue be with the Canopies that there are a number of locations figs can be spawned from the tree and the lag is the keeping up with how many variable locations they can spawn from? 

Would the hat slot on spiders be contributing to more unneeded lag? 

I literally haven't looked at any of it but the rubber banding I can get sometimes (It's not my rig, usually host a whole lot of people with minimal lag - full caves etc) feels like a latency issue when lua makes a lot of call-to requests.

[lunararoma]

There can be many causes of lag, but often it's due to mods. Avoid using "Global Position" mod; it's a lag-heavy mod. Also, refrain from using mods with a lot of widgets, like "Simple Health Bar" mod.

[CuteC]

6 hours ago, lunararoma said:

There can be many causes of lag, but often it's due to mods. Avoid using "Global Position" mod; it's a lag-heavy mod. Also, refrain from using mods with a lot of widgets, like "Simple Health Bar" mod.

They're not really mods you can just let go once you use them, for example I can't possibly imagine how playing without combined status is like, I know that one was not part of the recommendation, but it's nice qol to have, just like those two mods.

That aside, I really don't think the mods are the issue here, as I said before it's those few situations but unfortunately they are things that should be present in anyone's base.

Something has to be done regarding this lag issue because it will only get worse with future content updates,

[Popian]

23 hours ago, CuteC said:

more items to store, and thus more lag.

1 hour ago, CuteC said:

they are things that should be present in anyone's base.

Maybe you could identify things that you aren't using as much and store less of it or move to a secondary storage area?

[Masked Koopa]

1 hour ago, Popian said:

Maybe you could identify things that you aren't using as much and store less of it or move to a secondary storage area?

I don't think it's reasonable for a 2d game (and no, the fact that it technically takes place in a 3d plane doesn't change that) can have such severe lag from simply having chests placed down. The purpose of chests is to have a bunch of items in a more compact, sorted environment. If you have to spread them out, you'd be better off just dropping them on the floor. Chests should be the solution to items on the floor causing lag, not part of the problem.

This post isn't asking "help how do I reduce lag", it's saying "Klei, fix your game".

[Popian]

17 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

This post isn't asking "help how do I reduce lag", it's saying "Klei, fix your game".

I am not saying that the game doesn't have to be fixed. This does not seem to be something where V2C turns to look at it and goes aha here's the problem and it gets resolved.

The post comes with an implicit "I've done everything I can and there is simply no other option," and you know that more items = more lag so if you are asking for less lag why are you doing the action that gives you more?

[CuteC]

34 minutes ago, Popian said:

I am not saying that the game doesn't have to be fixed. This does not seem to be something where V2C turns to look at it and goes aha here's the problem and it gets resolved.

The post comes with an implicit "I've done everything I can and there is simply no other option," and you know that more items = more lag so if you are asking for less lag why are you doing the action that gives you more?

I am aware it's not just look at it and it gets fixed, but this problem is getting bigger and bigger with every update, something has to be done at some point.

I know having less items will give me less lag but throwing stuff away is not a good solution, anything we store may be useful in some way, if we don't need more of something we won't take it with us, and as I have already mentioned, more updates means more items we have to take with us.

Having a second storage is not a very good fix, first of all it defeats the purpose of a storage area if you place it far away from base, making it inconvenient to use, and also it will have the same fate as the main storage area sooner or later.

[lunararoma]

4 hours ago, CuteC said:

They're not really mods you can just let go once you use them, for example I can't possibly imagine how playing without combined status is like, I know that one was not part of the recommendation, but it's nice qol to have, just like those two mods.

That aside, I really don't think the mods are the issue here, as I said before it's those few situations but unfortunately they are things that should be present in anyone's base.

Something has to be done regarding this lag issue because it will only get worse with future content updates,

I agree that optimization patches are necessary for reducing lag. I also support features like global position and a simple health bar mod being added as standard settings. However, implementing these as mods has limitations. The two mentioned mods still cause a lot of lag, and there are alternative mods with less lag. So, for those experiencing severe lags, it is recommended to use alternative mods.

 

 

Free Research Pr

[maradyne]

...it sounds like both the issues with the chests and the issues with the prefab-tracking mods could be largely solved by completely unloading chested prefabs until the chest is opened. That could lead to a handful of other problems, of course. But with how much others have complained about it over time, it could be worth looking into?

For things like spoilage, could go the TFC route and calculate the amount of server time that's passed when the object is loaded in.
But it would depend on how many special cases like that there are...

Edited October 26 by maradyne

[Masked Koopa]

11 hours ago, maradyne said:

...it sounds like both the issues with the chests and the issues with the prefab-tracking mods could be largely solved by completely unloading chested prefabs until the chest is opened. That could lead to a handful of other problems, of course. But with how much others have complained about it over time, it could be worth looking into?

It very much surprises me that this isn't already done, truth be told.

While we're on the topic of lag, I think it's high time prefab "clusters" were added. Basically, autostacking, but any autostacked pile will "remember" the stack sizes, meaning trying to pick up from an autostacked pile will only give you whatever size the original stack had. Essentially, turn stacks of the same prefab into a single stack with an array of ints representing each original stack's size, and perhaps some code that displays the stacks's sprite multiple times in close proximity to make it look like there are still several stacks.

That way the game won't have to handle multiple prefabs, but the effect on player pickup speed will be minimal.

[Wonz]

On 10/25/2023 at 3:09 AM, chirsg said:

I've gotten issues lately with my hub where all the chests are. 

Chests need more slot for sure so there's less of them.  

[Antynomity]

11 minutes ago, Wonz said:

Chests need more slot for sure so there's less of them.  

Less chests won't really help this issue sadly, as it's most likely related to the items stored inside not the chest quantity, that's what it's like from tests at least.

[chirsg]

15 minutes ago, Wonz said:

Chests need more slot for sure so there's less of them.  

I don't know how it goes, but I have heard, and if someone is able to correct me with facts and logic, be my guest to make me look like a fool, but apparently chests function as if you've placed the items on the ground anyway. All the items are still in your loaded area.

Chests with more slots might exacerbate the lag, but I'm not against your agenda. I'm for extra slots in chests. They're just a small luxury more than anything anyway.

 

 

[Wonz]

8 hours ago, chirsg said:

I don't know how it goes, but I have heard, and if someone is able to correct me with facts and logic, be my guest to make me look like a fool, but apparently chests function as if you've placed the items on the ground anyway. All the items are still in your loaded area.

 

8 hours ago, Antynomity said:

Less chests won't really help this issue sadly, as it's most likely related to the items stored inside not the chest quantity, that's what it's like from tests at least.

 

Dang that problem sounds quite hopeless