game engine?

[Kitsune]

What game engine, if any, was used in making this game? If Unity, mono or the dreaded il2cpp?

[Alex [GER]]

I see in the lets plays the menue and the symbols - i think it is "Unity" engine :-(

[Chikin Sensei]

The graphism looks very Unreal Engine to me (and the DA doesn't really help in that department, but it could be worse). couldn't find info online though.

[ODS_Jungsoo]

We used Unity

[starkmaddness]

Unity doesn't use Mono anymore. It is C# only now. Not sure why you consider it 'dreaded'. It is not as fast as C++ but more industry standard than Mono and for their target audience (indie devs) it is a good choice. C++ in the hands of small companies without QA tends to lead to lots of crashes and memory leaks.

[thunda]

Originally posted by starkmaddness:

C++ in the hands of small companies without QA tends to lead to lots of crashes and memory leaks.

Because they dont know how to write C++. Nothing to do with the size of the company.

[Kitsune]

Originally posted by starkmaddness:

Unity doesn't use Mono anymore. It is C# only now. Not sure why you consider it 'dreaded'. It is not as fast as C++ but more industry standard than Mono and for their target audience (indie devs) it is a good choice. C++ in the hands of small companies without QA tends to lead to lots of crashes and memory leaks.

You misunderstood my question. I said il2cpp is the dreaded one, not C$. il2cpp compiles the game into a bastardized C++ and then into assembly. It has problems on some machines and also makes modding more difficult. Mono is an open source implementation of dot net and compiles into the same il code as C#. I much prefer c# for the above reasons you mentioned.

[Redglyph]

Unity has GPU performance issues, the RTX cards particularly are running very hot even without fancy graphics (some AMD cards too). That's why I'm usually very wary of it.

Then the fact it's a bytecode and garbage-collected language makes it unfit for real-time applications like games, and the Mono implementation of the GC is particularly infamous. The Mono runtime libraries are included with the game, it's easy to find - unless it's il2cpp which is the only other alternative. And contrary to what some may believe, C# and GC languages in general may easily leak memory too, all it takes is a circular reference (which happens often).

I'm not saying this particular game has any issue since I haven't played it yet, it's just a general observation on recent games. Some teams manage to optimize the graphics pipeline well enough (for ex. Encased was running extremely well, and Pathfinder: WotR was playable when lowering some of the options).

I don't believe small teams are not able to handle C++, it's the same problem if not worse for larger team and it mostly depends on the developers' background. C++ is harder to learn and good developers harder to find, that's why C# is favoured by many companies even if it's much less performant and easy to abuse when one is not aware of what is done behind the scenes. But good programmers can do a very good job with C# (and bad ones can botch a C++ application).

Thankfully the engine itself is written in C++ but that doesn't solve the GC freezes and possible leak issues in the application (game) itself, or the lack of support for modern cards with Unity unless the problems have been taken care of by the developers.

[thunda]

Originally posted by Redglyph:

(for ex. Encased was running extremely well, and Pathfinder: WotR was playable when lowering some of the options).

WotR is freaking trash from a performance standpoint. The same issue as with Kingmaker, the longer the game goes on the poopier the performance. Its also plagued by memory leaks, like Kingmaker. The savefiles get larger and larger, and during the last 10-20 hours of the game saving takes 5-10 seconds. This becomes a big issue in a game where you need to quicksave often. The menus become incredibly sluggish and slow. I get 90 fps in the menus during creating my first character. When I respec in late game I get 5-10 fps in the menus. 5-10. Opening the next page took 5 seconds.

During the end of my playthrough I started dreading opening any menus, like inventory or character menu because it felt horrible to use.

And my machine wasnt a potato. GTX 1080, 5600X, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz, Samsung NVMe.

[Redglyph]

Originally posted by thunda:

WotR is freaking trash from a performance standpoint. The same issue as with Kingmaker, the longer the game goes on the poopier the performance. Its also plagued by memory leaks, like Kingmaker. The savefiles get larger and larger, and during the last 10-20 hours of the game saving takes 5-10 seconds. This becomes a big issue in a game where you need to quicksave often. The menus become incredibly sluggish and slow. I get 90 fps in the menus during creating my first character. When I respec in late game I get 5-10 fps in the menus. 5-10. Opening the next page took 5 seconds.

During the end of my playthrough I started dreading opening any menus, like inventory or character menu because it felt horrible to use.

And my machine wasnt a potato. GTX 1080, 5600X, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz, Samsung NVMe.

Ouch. I had a GTX980 when I played Kingmaker and had no performance issue, except the long area loading times - that are the same on my new PC with NVMe - and the loot windows. But from my experience the graphics performances are random with Unity, depending on the card.

The rest is partly poor optimization and C# abuse. Then it will never be as fast as native code, for sure.

What you mention with the save files is partially because they store the whole debug log since the start of the game in each file, and information about all the locations, items, NPCs and so on in JSON files, so the size increases very quickly (the log alone was more than 100 MB at the end in Kingmaker) and all that must be parsed when loading. The compress ratio is not very good either. I played on GOG and it couldn't even synchronize the save files with their cloud system without timing out...

Then the loot is persistent, which is a problem on several accounts: it slows things, eats up memory and it's annoying to have this pop-up all the time when leaving an area.

[thunda]

Originally posted by Redglyph:

Originally posted by thunda:

WotR is freaking trash from a performance standpoint. The same issue as with Kingmaker, the longer the game goes on the poopier the performance. Its also plagued by memory leaks, like Kingmaker. The savefiles get larger and larger, and during the last 10-20 hours of the game saving takes 5-10 seconds. This becomes a big issue in a game where you need to quicksave often. The menus become incredibly sluggish and slow. I get 90 fps in the menus during creating my first character. When I respec in late game I get 5-10 fps in the menus. 5-10. Opening the next page took 5 seconds.

During the end of my playthrough I started dreading opening any menus, like inventory or character menu because it felt horrible to use.

And my machine wasnt a potato. GTX 1080, 5600X, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz, Samsung NVMe.

Ouch. I had a GTX980 when I played Kingmaker and had no performance issue, except the long area loading times - that are the same on my new PC with NVMe - and the loot windows. But from my experience the graphics performances are random with Unity, depending on the card.

The rest is partly poor optimization and C# abuse. Then it will never be as fast as native code, for sure.

What you mention with the save files is partially because they store the whole debug log since the start of the game in each file, and information about all the locations, items, NPCs and so on in JSON files, so the size increases very quickly (the log alone was more than 100 MB at the end in Kingmaker) and all that must be parsed when loading. The compress ratio is not very good either. I played on GOG and it couldn't even synchronize the save files with their cloud system without timing out...

Then the loot is persistent, which is a problem on several accounts: it slows things, eats up memory and it's annoying to have this pop-up all the time when leaving an area.

I just cant believe they didnt address the idiotic save file system in WotR. Parsing tens of megabytes worth of JSON takes forever even on high end CPU's, using that same system in the sequel.. No idea what they were smoking. That kind of system is just insane for a real-time application where you need to save often.

Or the fact that they couldnt even bother to slow down the saving process so that that the game wouldnt become literally unplayable for +5 seconds everytime you pressed F5. I wouldnt mind dropping from 70 fps to 40 fps for 20 seconds compared to 70 fps to 0-1 fps for 5 seconds.

And a simple fix for too much persistent garbage (useless loot) would be to implement a feature that was in another CRPG (the name escapes me), in that everytime you leave a location and leave loot behind, you can use a transport service to automatically loot it and sell it, for a fee. This would permanently delete these items from the world, and not just stuff them in some merchant's inventory. Would be lore-friendly for both Kingmaker and WotR as well.

[Jo]

Solasta

[BloodyPork]

Originally posted by Redglyph:

Unity has GPU performance issues, the RTX cards particularly are running very hot even without fancy graphics (some AMD cards too). That's why I'm usually very wary of it.

Then the fact it's a bytecode and garbage-collected language makes it unfit for real-time applications like games, and the Mono implementation of the GC is particularly infamous. The Mono runtime libraries are included with the game, it's easy to find - unless it's il2cpp which is the only other alternative. And contrary to what some may believe, C# and GC languages in general may easily leak memory too, all it takes is a circular reference (which happens often).

I'm not saying this particular game has any issue since I haven't played it yet, it's just a general observation on recent games. Some teams manage to optimize the graphics pipeline well enough (for ex. Encased was running extremely well, and Pathfinder: WotR was playable when lowering some of the options).

I don't believe small teams are not able to handle C++, it's the same problem if not worse for larger team and it mostly depends on the developers' background. C++ is harder to learn and good developers harder to find, that's why C# is favoured by many companies even if it's much less performant and easy to abuse when one is not aware of what is done behind the scenes. But good programmers can do a very good job with C# (and bad ones can botch a C++ application).

Thankfully the engine itself is written in C++ but that doesn't solve the GC freezes and possible leak issues in the application (game) itself, or the lack of support for modern cards with Unity unless the problems have been taken care of by the developers.

Good post.

Btw this game runs much hotter than wotr on my gtx 3060 laptop. The worst part is how reducing wotr graphic setting actually improve performance while changing graphic setting in this game doesn't do anything. Even at half res and everything turned off it still has 80%+ gpu usage constantly.

The thing about wotr is the poor performance leads to reduction in fps in some cases (like crowded area with lots of npcs) but it's not necessarily hot on the gpu, this one never get fps drop but it basically blast the fan at max speed even at menu or pause screens which really annoys me and reminds me of early release of battletech (which eventually got patched to run cooler). Unity games are often runs hot for no good reason, some of them even look like ♥♥♥♥ (at least this game actually look decent for the heat).

The other Korean indie 3d turn base tactics I play (Troubleshooter) uses OGRE3d which runs cool with little gpu usage which I like. Other 3d turn base tactics like Expeditions Rome uses Unreal which also runs much cooler and look decent. Actually I'm not even sure if Lost Eidolon look much better than old turn based tactics game such as Xcom2 to warrant the 3x or so usage of gpu.

However, comparing with other recent unity turn based tactics game, Hard West 2, this game runs hotter than that game even as well. Other unity games like Wasteland 3 and Disciples Liberation also runs much much cooler than this game.

Actually now that I think about it this game has to be the hottest turn based tactics game I have ever played gpu usage wise, and I've played like all of em. The biggest difference with other games is the fact that in other games you can turn down all the graphic settings to force it to run cooler, something you can't do with this game because the fan would still full blast even if I turn off everything. Tbh this might be the first game I play where my fan would full blast all the time even with vsync on (in other games I have played this is only possible if I uncap the fps).

What I don't get is if supposedly a gtx 960 could run this game as stated in the minimum req, surely there should be a way for my 3060 to not use full gpu right? Except that I can't seem to find a way to do that. Like I said I already tried turning off all graphical option and even half the resolution and fan is still full blast lol.

[thunda]

Originally posted by BloodyPork:

Originally posted by Redglyph:

Unity has GPU performance issues, the RTX cards particularly are running very hot even without fancy graphics (some AMD cards too). That's why I'm usually very wary of it.

Then the fact it's a bytecode and garbage-collected language makes it unfit for real-time applications like games, and the Mono implementation of the GC is particularly infamous. The Mono runtime libraries are included with the game, it's easy to find - unless it's il2cpp which is the only other alternative. And contrary to what some may believe, C# and GC languages in general may easily leak memory too, all it takes is a circular reference (which happens often).

I'm not saying this particular game has any issue since I haven't played it yet, it's just a general observation on recent games. Some teams manage to optimize the graphics pipeline well enough (for ex. Encased was running extremely well, and Pathfinder: WotR was playable when lowering some of the options).

I don't believe small teams are not able to handle C++, it's the same problem if not worse for larger team and it mostly depends on the developers' background. C++ is harder to learn and good developers harder to find, that's why C# is favoured by many companies even if it's much less performant and easy to abuse when one is not aware of what is done behind the scenes. But good programmers can do a very good job with C# (and bad ones can botch a C++ application).

Thankfully the engine itself is written in C++ but that doesn't solve the GC freezes and possible leak issues in the application (game) itself, or the lack of support for modern cards with Unity unless the problems have been taken care of by the developers.

Good post.

Btw this game runs much hotter than wotr on my gtx 3060 laptop. The worst part is how reducing wotr graphic setting actually improve performance while changing graphic setting in this game doesn't do anything. Even at half res and everything turned off it still has 80%+ gpu usage constantly.

The thing about wotr is the poor performance leads to reduction in fps in some cases (like crowded area with lots of npcs) but it's not necessarily hot on the gpu, this one never get fps drop but it basically blast the fan at max speed even at menu or pause screens which really annoys me and reminds me of early release of battletech (which eventually got patched to run cooler). Unity games are often runs hot for no good reason, some of them even look like ♥♥♥♥ (at least this game actually look decent for the heat).

The other Korean indie 3d turn base tactics I play (Troubleshooter) uses OGRE3d which runs cool with little gpu usage which I like. Other 3d turn base tactics like Expeditions Rome uses Unreal which also runs much cooler and look decent. Actually I'm not even sure if Lost Eidolon look much better than old turn based tactics game such as Xcom2 to warrant the 3x or so usage of gpu.

However, comparing with other recent unity turn based tactics game, Hard West 2, this game runs hotter than that game even as well. Other unity games like Wasteland 3 and Disciples Liberation also runs much much cooler than this game.

Actually now that I think about it this game has to be the hottest turn based tactics game I have ever played gpu usage wise, and I've played like all of em. The biggest difference with other games is the fact that in other games you can turn down all the graphic settings to force it to run cooler, something you can't do with this game because the fan would still full blast even if I turn off everything. Tbh this might be the first game I play where my fan would full blast all the time even with vsync on (in other games I have played this is only possible if I uncap the fps).

What I don't get is if supposedly a gtx 960 could run this game as stated in the minimum req, surely there should be a way for my 3060 to not use full gpu right? Except that I can't seem to find a way to do that. Like I said I already tried turning off all graphical option and even half the resolution and fan is still full blast lol.

Could be mining some poopcoin in the background

[Redglyph]

Originally posted by thunda:

And a simple fix for too much persistent garbage (useless loot) would be to implement a feature that was in another CRPG (the name escapes me), in that everytime you leave a location and leave loot behind, you can use a transport service to automatically loot it and sell it, for a fee. This would permanently delete these items from the world, and not just stuff them in some merchant's inventory. Would be lore-friendly for both Kingmaker and WotR as well.

This was genius, I loved the scavenger system in Solasta. It solves many problems and works well with the story. There's no downside to it, this should be adopted in every game.

[Redglyph]

Originally posted by BloodyPork:

The thing about wotr is the poor performance leads to reduction in fps in some cases (like crowded area with lots of npcs) but it's not necessarily hot on the gpu, this one never get fps drop but it basically blast the fan at max speed even at menu or pause screens which really annoys me and reminds me of early release of battletech (which eventually got patched to run cooler). Unity games are often runs hot for no good reason, some of them even look like ♥♥♥♥ (at least this game actually look decent for the heat).

I have the impression it's related to light effects and shadows. When there are more light sources in games, typically torches in the dark, the GPU tends to get very busy and hot.

It must be related to how the pipeline is managed.

Originally posted by BloodyPork:

Other 3d turn base tactics like Expeditions Rome uses Unreal which also runs much cooler and look decent. Actually I'm not even sure if Lost Eidolon look much better than old turn based tactics game such as Xcom2 to warrant the 3x or so usage of gpu.

However, comparing with other recent unity turn based tactics game, Hard West 2, this game runs hotter than that game even as well. Other unity games like Wasteland 3 and Disciples Liberation also runs much much cooler than this game.

Expeditions: Rome runs very well and the graphics are very nice (the devs were happy about the change too, less struggle with the engine if I understood correctly). And Expeditions: Viking, which was on an older version of Unity, ran pretty well too.

I've also noticed these problems were only on more recent Unity games, starting with Solasta when they updated the Unity version during EA. Before it was running without any problem and after the update I had to give up on the game. To my knowledge, it has never been solved since (apparently they "can't reproduce the problem"... which I translate by "they can't get Unity support to help them with that" from other comments I read, but I may be wrong).

In some games like Pathfinder, reducing shadows and maybe some other options had a good impact on the GPU overstress. In Solasta, the only solution was to disable the shadows entirely, then it was fine... but ugly.

Originally posted by BloodyPork:

Actually now that I think about it this game has to be the hottest turn based tactics game I have ever played gpu usage wise, and I've played like all of em. The biggest difference with other games is the fact that in other games you can turn down all the graphic settings to force it to run cooler, something you can't do with this game because the fan would still full blast even if I turn off everything. Tbh this might be the first game I play where my fan would full blast all the time even with vsync on (in other games I have played this is only possible if I uncap the fps).

What I don't get is if supposedly a gtx 960 could run this game as stated in the minimum req, surely there should be a way for my 3060 to not use full gpu right? Except that I can't seem to find a way to do that. Like I said I already tried turning off all graphical option and even half the resolution and fan is still full blast lol.

Sad to hear it.

I wouldn't be surprised if a 960 was able to run the game just fine, actually, if it's better supported by Unity. 😉

So let's hope the devs are aware of this and can optimize the rendering then, there's still time.