Performance issues

[p3st|cIdE]

I know this is early pre-release software. My machine may not be super fast. But this game presently can become unplayable when frame rate gets low. I don't think it's the AI processing or pathing because it's slow even when paused. Probably graphics; it gets worse at high resolutions. But even at 800x600, zoomed in, it's barely playable for me. I can't find a FPS meter option anywhere so not sure how slow it actually is, but at around 8 or so frames per second one glaring flaw with the coding becomes clear: Mouse and keyboard events are only polled once per frame, and are not queued. It is not using official OS message click handling but instead is some kind of custom "is the key up?" "is the key down?" polling which loses events like mad. It makes trying to play at those rates extraordinarily frustrating. I got so fed up with it I ordered a whole new computer! ;)

Aside from that, I'm having a pretty good time with it. There are bugs but that's to be expected.

[Ethonal]

aside from making sure your hardware is upto date there are several things to try
1) make sure you don't have any idle gnomes (especially haulers). If so remove their professions while idle. (while there idle they constatly "scan" the map looking for work)
2)make sure you don't have lots of items on the ground, especially outside your gates. If so, clean them up. stockpiles seem to redice lag a little as the dirt is no longer "active" you can also sell dirt and other resouces you dont need to a market (when there)
3) make sure you don't have lots of enemies roaming the map freely. If so, go ahead and kill them.

this should help for the bigger maps and cities, if your only just starting and its laggy might wanna go to the main forums as something is wrong (assuming your machine is realy a middle game machine).

[ragnar119]

Hmm, its strange, try updating your GPU drivers, also antivirus can make problems sometimes, disable it to test if the performance improves. What GPU do you have?

[Mr Roboto]

FYI, you can toggle FPS info with F3.

[p3st|cIdE]

Thanks for the tips! I hadn't even tried building a market yet. I have a few idle gnomes, but they have food & drink, I think their legs are injured from fighting goblins & golems so they don't want to work. Armed with F3 knowledge, I started the game, loaded a map I'd been playing, and before un-pausing, I'm getting an unbelievable 116 FPS!!!! So I press space bar, and game runs for about 10 seconds at 116 FPS then quickly drops down to 6 FPS and stays there even after pausing the game again. So I'm at a loss. This is a normal sized map, but I get terrible performance even on small maps, doesn't seem to matter what phase of the game I'm in.

[Ethonal]

im still thinking its a pathing issue and something is looping, when you have time can you try making a small/normal map (turn hills slider to flat) and just build on the surface dont mine anything (i know you wont have any rescources), just unpause and spam workspots/forging/felling/farming after a min or two if this hasnt caused lag place a stockpile and set it to pick everything up (just lect click on the checkbox for general) if this doesnt cause any lag start a simple path with steps down deep into the surface (dont mine anything just build steps down) for about 10 levels then once you hit stone dig out a hall and see what happens

my thinking is your doing something the game isnt liking with 116fps at the start you should be more than able to play the game def on a small map, so with a more simple plan we can see if it is a bug hitting your pc and at what stage

if none of this casuses lag try and a new game and try again maybe taking smaller steps for each stage of mining ect

[HaidrGna]

I have noticed that there is huge lag, even on pause, when a gnome cannot reach his destination, if you have walled him in or out for example. In beginning I played with a walled in community to keep enemies out, if then new Gnomads would arrive the lag would start, only to dissapear as soon as a path was clear for them. Maybe you have something similar.

[Daftpunk]

I have not experienced any of the above. The only time I can see something like performance degradation is choppy music during save, or when I completely zoom out. Apart from that no issues whatsoever. I am on Core i5 3Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, Radeon HD 6770 although I think it's a bit funny talking about graphics card with pseudo 3d bitmap graphics. I think it could be your CPU.

[roostersauce]

Haidr'Gna experienced the same issues I did. When a Gnome is hopelessly stuck, such as when you're trying to fill in walls and they trap a gnome my game basically had uncontrollable lag. Once I managed to free them it went back to normal but in the meantime everything was slow and even clicking sometimes failed to work. Ever since I've spent much more time building things appropriately.

[p3st|cIdE]

Haidr'Gna your issue would be caused by A* searches searching the entire reachable map every frame (failing to find the goal). Dwarf Fortress has the same problem. Only way the developer could solve that is to put pathfinding on a separate thread or otherwise allow it to work phased over several frames if it's taking too long (asynchronous). I don't think that's my issue because since my first map, I have avoided getting gnomes stuck like the plague. My guess is it's idle gnomes looking for work, or possibly having hundreds of clumps of dirt and stone lying around. My gnomes won't work, so they won't take the clumps to the stockpiles. :( I will have time today to experiment and will see if I can figure it out. I do hope the developer fixes the keyboard/button event polling though! That style of polling only really works well for solid 60+fps, and you can't guarantee that on PC.

[p3st|cIdE]

Well I tried making a new map: tiny, flat, peaceful. Started off good, while zoomed in, about 100 fps, zoomed out, drops down to 50 to 60 fps (fluctuated). Scrolled around for a bit. zoomed back in, back to 100fps. But then after a few seconds, it dropped down to 6 fps and seems to stay there. I hadn't even un-paused the game yet!!! Didn't issue any commands besides scrolling and zoom out/in. I don't see how I could possibly have done anything wrong. In Task Manager, Gnomoria.exe is taking 6% cpu while it's paused and I'm swapped out to another app (it's full-screen). Memory usage is flat at about 115MB. After Alt+Tab back and forth a few times, FPS went back up to 96 or so, but I don't trust it; seems to hit extended periods of 6fps for no apparent (to me) reason.

[Daftpunk]

p3st|cIdE の投稿を引用：

seems to hit extended periods of 6fps for no apparent (to me) reason.

I have never experienced a drop in fps like that. I got gnomes stuck many times. No problems whatsoever. Could be driver related.

[lPaladinl]

This game doesn't require anything at all in the graphics department. Running any integrated chipset will do fine. It's the CPU that you wanna worry about. I'm only on a laptop with an i5 2.53ghz and the game runs smooth for me no matter what so far, and i've even managed to get my gnomes stuck/searching for a task while idle way too many times without any notice in frame drop. Granted i've never had more than 30 gnomes.

[p3st|cIdE]

It's a little old, but I have an Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.4GHz, 6GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit SP1, just a GeForce 9400 GT (DX10-class videocard). Not good for Skyrim, but should scream on a game like this. My driver's from Jan 2013, pretty recent. I'm gonna try updating and report back the results. Anyhow my new machine is due in about a week; I doubt even serious bugs could bring that beast down!

[Alastair]

I notice if I shut off my kingdome from new gnomes I lag really bad, because the new gnomes are looking for a way in so everyone is scaning, also my PC for some reason is not friends with open GL stuff, least thats how it acts I can play a high rez game like skyrim or warframe with small issues but MC and this game both use OpenGL and I lag with that.

[p3st|cIdE]

I updated video drivers, didn't help, although my Aero desktop performance improved in Windows Experience rating! Hmm when it's slow, Gnomoria.exe is using like 23% CPU (I have 4 cores and none of them are maxed out, so at least the game is multithreading somewhat properly) but when it is running ok, it's only using like 13% CPU. Other than that, I have no idea. No other processes are taking CPU. I did find out one reason why my gnomes were idle: I had them assigned to a military squad without the Militia perk, so they thought they were off-duty soldiers who were not supposed to work. I keep playing this game obsessively even though the lag is excruciating, so that must say something about how fun it is!