klei really need to optimize DST better

[nimzowitsch10]

Might have to tweak the entire game or something but I think it's really important. The biggest problem alot of servers face is when there are a decent amount of spiders the whole server goes red or when there are alot of items on the ground it goes red. The time switching from shards still hasnt changed for me, it takes around 40 seconds to switch shards for me.

[Mike23Ua]

What game console are you playing on? I bought an Xbox series S they’re relatively cheap, but to get the entire game to run faster on your S you need to install it to your Internal Hardrive, usually this space would be reserved for X/S only games (cause they won’t play on a External HD) but I made an extra special exception for DST.

It is not a flaw proof plan though, because putting DST on your internal also means that it tries to save DST to your Quick Resume tab, and well Quick Resume sucks period… that’s a whole other topic for a whole other discussion.

But my point is that (at least on series S) the game seems to run smooth & fine.

I don’t know much about video game development but I think that Klei may be reaching their limitations when it comes to adding new content updates to older consoles.

For example GTA V has been around since 2013, and has released on Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, each of these platforms eventually ran out of space to continue to do updates for so they had to be discontinued and dropped.

Theres a game called HuntShowdown I’ve never played it but I was reading on the internets earlier today that they will be discontinuing the Xbox One & PS4 versions of that game and upgrading to X/S and PS5.

The reason WHY is because until they did that… content updates were literally being held back and limited to try and work with old hardware.

A problem Klei seems to be having right now with DST on Nintendo Switch, (I don’t know this for certain it’s just a rough guess)

Another popular well known game that is being discontinued for old consoles and upgraded to newer consoles is 7 Days To Die, in June they will be Delisting and removing the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game, and will be upgrading those to PS5 and Series X/S versions.

The reason why, is again due to newer content being significantly more troublesome to do for old hardware.

Im not sure what platform you play DST on, but my advice to you is to either upgrade your PC, or Upgrade your Console, because you can’t seriously expect Klei to continue to pump out new content updates that still run decently on PC’s made back in 2013 could you?

[nimzowitsch10]

I'm playing on a 11th gen i7 desktop with 16 gb of ram and hosting a  server still lags with 6 people and them doing regular stuff like haresting wood or farming spiders. Those two things are the biggest things thats causing lag. Also many hounds cause lag

[Horsheen]

No yeah I'm 100% with you, the lag gets exponentially worse with more people to the point where it's unbearable

[AliceShiki]

1 hour ago, nimzowitsch10 said:

I'm playing on a 11th gen i7 desktop with 16 gb of ram and hosting a  server still lags with 6 people and them doing regular stuff like haresting wood or farming spiders. Those two things are the biggest things thats causing lag. Also many hounds cause lag

My PC is much worse than that and I never had big lag spikes (though I certainly do need to wait a while to switch between caves and surface).

That said, I never played with 6 people. I usually play with only 3, so... I guess it's a thing of having too many loaded areas at once causes issues?

It's the kind of thing that is probably fixable by optimizing the code, but I'm not sure if it's very doable when the game has already been out for so long. They probably have a lot of legacy code there that is referenced heavily on the content that was added in later patches and that could break a lot of things if they were to change things around.

Maybe try playing in two groups of 3 people instead? It's certainly not ideal, but it's a work-around you can try if you're getting huge lag spikes when too many entities are loaded at once.

[Maxil20]

I think the main issue at hand here is DST can only process things on one core per shard. It’s most easily seen as the surface has consistent lag issues while the caves (where people rarely spend much time in by comparison) do not. There’s only so much that can get you, especially with many players on at once.

Sidenote, but I’m unsure why the loading times are so problematic for you in particular. I have a 12th gen intel core (with an RTX 3060 if that helps??) and my shard swaps take around/less than 10 seconds.

[nimzowitsch10]

@Maxil20 Somewhere along moon quay updates my loading times got like 3x slower. It has never changed back since and I've tried reinstalling but nothing works.

[Captain_Rage]

From my humble understanding writing an entire engine for a big game in Lua inherently comes with performance drawbacks.

[grm9]

1 minute ago, Captain_Rage said:

From my humble understanding writing an entire engine for a big game in Lua inherently comes with performance drawbacks

the engine is in C++ iirc

[Captain_Rage]

Doesn't the whole game run in Lua? Maybe parts are in C++, although I was under the impression it ran mainly or entirely in Lua.

 

Edit:

You are right, it uses C++ and Lua. In that case performance with many entities loaded in the game should scale better with better hardware. Too bad it seems not to take advantage of multiple processor cores very much, as mentioned above.

https://dontstarve.fandom.com/wiki/Lua

[grm9]

2 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Doesn't the whole game run in Lua? Maybe parts are in C++, although I was under the impression it ran mainly or entirely in Lua

engine is in C++ iirc, but most of the rest of the code is in lua

[AliceShiki]

21 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Doesn't the whole game run in Lua? Maybe parts are in C++, although I was under the impression it ran mainly or entirely in Lua.

 

Edit:

You are right, it uses C++ and Lua. In that case performance with many entities loaded in the game should scale better with better hardware. Too bad it seems not to take advantage of multiple processor cores very much, as mentioned above.

https://dontstarve.fandom.com/wiki/Lua

Unrelated to the topic at hand, but the Don't Starve wiki has migrated from the garbage that is fandom to Wiki.gg, so try linking to Wiki.gg instead of Fandom.

... Fandom always comes first when you look it up in search engines though, because... Well, Fandom. Google likes fandom despite everyone hating it.

[Well-met]

it is embarassing that the game still runs on "shards" ngl.

any other game of the same age or older can handle sub-levels far better and easier.

[marshyds]

The fact that you have to run 2 servers for caves still sucks, even of you just want to play with 1 other person. Can't they just add the caves into the overworld BUT it's out of bounds? Make the cave entrances function like wormholes without the sanity loss. I don't know how darkness would work though.

Even if it takes a while, it would make the game leagues more accessible (correct me if im wrong and this would actually lag the game more)

[Mortalbane]

Spiders hunt and eat fps.
If you play on public dedicated servers, and don't deal with spider quarry while nests are below lvl 3, then at lvl 3 you will have a lag-fest severe enough to drop whole server to 5 fps.

Idk what hardware servers use, but i doubt it's that bad, and also those servers are the only option to play with others for a lot of people, who can't host on their own.

I mean, if you can't fix spider lags, maybe at least reduce the default amount of nests and their inhabitants?

[arubaro]

Also waterlogged biome consumes a lot of resources 

[CuteC]

Yeah game lags a lot, got a host with a good computer and the game lags really bad with certain requirements (spider zones, storage, above average trees, etc.), it also takes quite a while to load into the caves with the usual 10% chance of the game never actually loading and keeping you with the "connecting..." message.

They "fixed" the storage problem by basically placing a bandaid on the issue, it is going to happen again when there are more item types.

15 hours ago, SSneaky said:

one thing that could defiantly help long term world is if twigs (due to twiggy trees continuously dropping them) safely caught on fire and burnt to ash (which then would get swept away by the wind)

Twiggy trees don't drop infinite twigs, they only drop a few and they check for other twigs nearby the area for the cap.

[Mortalbane]

7 hours ago, CuteC said:

Twiggy trees don't drop infinite twigs, they only drop a few and they check for other twigs nearby the area for the cap.

True, but probably still unhealthy.
You have 3 objects instead of 1 (tree + 2 twigs vs 1 twig plant), and those checks probably use some computing power.

7 hours ago, CuteC said:

They "fixed" the storage problem by basically placing a bandaid on the issue, it is going to happen again when there are more item types.

Never understood what's up with those tiny chests. Like, how can a chest fit less items than my body? Without pockets btw. Can't we build a bigger chest using more boards?
Why do we need storage area of 15 chests, when in most games we do fine with 1-3

[Maxil20]

6 hours ago, CuteC said:

They "fixed" the storage problem by basically placing a bandaid on the issue, it is going to happen again when there are more item types.

I mean I can’t really see how else they would fix the issue without some sort of dark wizardry that would take immense amounts of effort to do. Compressing potentially infinite amount of an item type goes a long way for storage. Really the only thing that needs improvement is ways to mass store things like food or single-stack items, since the best way at the moment is gift wraps/bundles and those quickly add up to be way more then any stackable item ever could.

[grm9]

14 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

I mean I can’t really see how else they would fix the issue without some sort of dark wizardry that would take immense amounts of effort to do

storing items as data instead of prefabs in the world, like how bundles do, the only problem is that things also wouldn't spoil, thermals' temperature won't change etc. but they could use longupdates for that

[Toroic]

Main thing is that the game is only minorly multithreaded so it (mostly) is bound by the performance of a single core.

The upgrade to 64 bit helped dramatically, but I recommend smaller worlds if you’re going to have 6 people and stick to minimal mods.

The only additional upgrade from there is a dedicated server instead of self-hosting.

[CuteC]

16 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

I mean I can’t really see how else they would fix the issue without some sort of dark wizardry that would take immense amounts of effort to do. Compressing potentially infinite amount of an item type goes a long way for storage. Really the only thing that needs improvement is ways to mass store things like food or single-stack items, since the best way at the moment is gift wraps/bundles and those quickly add up to be way more then any stackable item ever could.

I am not sure if you understood what I meant, the storage issue is that chests used to cause MASSIVE lag because of the huge amounts of chests and stacks you needed for your items, with the chest upgrades you can now cut down your storage space and lag by a lot, but it WILL happen again once there are more items, specially if they do not stack and are useful (like the getaway boot).

[Wonz]

All my homies hate webber.

Klei servers at least in europe have 12 slots but start having epilepsy at 9 players.

[grm9]

6 minutes ago, Wonz said:

Klei servers at least in europe have 12 slots but start having epilepsy at 9 players

when was last time you've played? i only remember lags after someone loaded like 10 t3 spider dens that were able to spawn spiders

[DegenerateFurry]

My desktop runs the game fine, but it's kind of a ridiculous gamer rig. 

The laptop I'm on due to an extended vacation of sorts, though? I don't even get 60 FPS. It can run HL2 and its episodes just fine, and Minecraft on a server while running Fabric optimization mods is doable, but DST is too much for it, hosted or otherwise. That tells me the game could probably use an optimization update.