Game performance

[Xadhoom]

Is there any way to improve game performance? 

i feel like the normal pace is too slow, so i often play at fastest but once you make a good sized colony (40+ dupes) i found that the AI becomes slow in deciding what to do and all animations becomes slow too. 

i did notice that limit tasks for each dupes did help somewhat.

also making sure that stuff on ground gets cleaned up and put in storage, seemed to make the game run smoother too.

 

Anyone have tried to see how it works to limit access to areas with doors? will it help make the game run smoother? my latest colonies have been built in a way were it wasn't feasible to section it of.

 

[Risu]

40+ dupes is never a good decision. A good sized colony is 10-20.
 

[Moggles]

You could try limiting path finding by creating smaller enclosed colonies using access permissions on airlocks. If you have 40 dupes path finding the entire map it will hurt performance. If you can reduce all dupes path finding by a half or a quarter of the map it might help.

I noticed that when dupes go to bed fps significantly improves because they only have one goal state of go to bed unless they need food or the bathroom..

[Masterpintsman]

What I notoced is that above a certain number of duplicats (short above 20 or so) game speeds above normal (=slow) get impacted harder as the pathfinding takes longer (irrelevant of game speed it seems to be the same time -in realtime- for all speeds), so the time they stand 'thinking' is noticeable longer in game-time on faster speeds.

Question: does anyone play the game on normal speed?

[Coolthulhu]

The game has major memory leak problem and so playing for more than 50 cycles in one "go" is a bad idea, unless you have tons of ram.

From what I've seen, the following things affect performance:

• Map percentage discovered - undiscovered map doesn't seem to use as much CPU time, as if it didn't have physics turned on
• Pathfinding complexity - tree-shaped (one central trunk and branches) and grid-shaped (long stretches of vertical and horizontal lines, not much mixing) seem less expensive than freeform. Completely locking off unused areas (caverns) should be even faster.
• Clutter - every item exchanges temperature with environment, so combining resources in compressors speeds things up

[Xadhoom]

i did some further testing today, it seems that sectioning up the area and limiting the number of places each dupe can go by using the doors, really do help performance. Each area had 5-6 dupes with most tasks for construction and cleaning up.

i placed all storage in a central area, with the most necessary items in storage with priority 6, areas that only used a certain resource were given a storage with priority 7. this way, important items were available to all areas (prio 6) and if a specific area were the only one needing a resource, like fertilizer for farms, were then moved from the central area to a specific area (prio 7).

i want to do some more testing before i'm really certain it helps, as it was a new colony and i only played to cycle 200 and 25 dupes (when the game crashed)

sometimes there were idle dupes, which i never have normally but still it was at times actually difficult to keep track of all the building i did on the map. it feels more efficient to do it this way.

[Townkill]

ive found that one of the best things you can do to increase performance is sweep everything up. Having huge amounts of items all over the ground definitely makes things take longer. Setting all unused tasks to priority 1 helps a fair bit as well ( paintings, statues, electrolyzers, fertilizer makers, stray plants)

[Drach]

Yeah having priorities set lower does seem to help, or at-least it did for me, also I had over 700 compactors, I used up alot of my resources to get down to about 500 and that also helped quite a bit. Along with clearing up unnecessary decor, since it maxes out at 50 anyways I reduced the number of paintings and statues I had. I was also very vigilant in my sweeping and never let debris build up. I do generally play at the fastest speed, only slowing down to mark out a build while letting them continue to do something. I generally stick to 22 dupes. With my setup if I use anymore I have serious performance issues, like my maps not loading, until the game crashes. All of the bases I've made are very open, I just clear cut pretty much everything until I get close to magma and make my basement there, towards the top I leave enough room for a hydrogen trap in my ceiling, but that's it, I've never limited my dupes path finding unless there was an area I didn't want them walking through, like oxygen production rooms, or my water cooling area. My personal opinion was the storage compactors had the biggest impact upon my performance, seemed like I got alot better performance once I got rid of a whole crap ton of them.

[cpy]

We need an optimization pass really badly.

[Xadhoom]

my report on sectioning is progressing.

i have currently 40 dupes in 5 zones, Top left, Top Right, Mid left, Bottom Left and Bottom Right.

but even so, in order for the game to run smooth, i now need to play on Medium speed. but if i remove the sectioning and let everyone use any doors i need to go down to normal speed to run smoothly. so sectioning the map do help preformance. but, my dupes have alot of travel time, 8000+ s per day. on a different colony with similar amount of dupes they only had 5 000+ S per day. so i guess the need for everyone to go to center to transfer items between sections add a lot of travel time.

for me the optimal situation did seem to be around 20 dupes, then game runs smooth for me and work on projects did progress rather fast.

[Masterpintsman]

On 4.7.2017 at 8:06 AM, cpy said:

We need an optimization pass really badly.

This.

And one that makes the game deterministic, independant of selected speed.

[cpy]

We dont need deterministic engine, we don't have MP so this one is cool.

[BlueLance]

The most recent update has given me a fair framerate boost

[cpy]

Yeah latest update was good but it wasn't really optimization I think, they just cut routing system for water. That's what they told us, maybe they did more under the hood improvements, but that's what I know. Please simulate one dupe on one thead. PLEASE?

32 core intel mayhem ftw. Imagine lag free 200 dupes or more.

[Risu]

12 minutes ago, cpy said:

Yeah latest update was good but it wasn't really optimization I think, they just cut routing system for water. That's what they told us, maybe they did more under the hood improvements, but that's what I know. Please simulate one dupe on one thead. PLEASE?

32 core intel mayhem ftw. Imagine lag free 200 dupes or more.

I don't see how introducing race conditions for every single interaction would improve the game.
 

[Xadhoom]

my personal experience so far is that the upgrade runs smoother, but there seem to be a big problem with memory leak or something, cause it slows down a lot over time for me, more then previous version.

[Masterpintsman]

2 hours ago, Risu said:

I don't see how introducing race conditions for every single interaction would improve the game.

Given sane data structures it would be possible to run the decision making of duplicants in parallel (in enough threads to saturate the CPU) without much problems, without making it a spinlock hell...

 

2 hours ago, cpy said:

We dont need deterministic engine, we don't have MP so this one is cool.

Not so cool when the game gives different outcomes depening on what speed you run it at (because different aspects of the simulation desync).

[Risu]

10 minutes ago, Masterpintsman said:

Not so cool when the game gives different outcomes depening on what speed you run it at (because different aspects of the simulation desync).

That's fixed. Not correctly... but it doesn't lose time anymore.

Now it just stretches the sim ticks out for as many frames as required.
Suppose to be stepping the sim for as many times as required on every frame.
 

[Masterpintsman]

18 hours ago, Risu said:

That's fixed. Not correctly... but it doesn't lose time anymore.

It just breaks buildings, as it seems:

 

[Risu]

2 hours ago, Masterpintsman said:

It just breaks buildings, as it seems:

 

Not seeing how that is possible as nothing but the power is outside of a sim step for the carbon skimmer.
Would need a better report as I can't even break the carbon skimmer at 30x time scale.