Initial loading time becomes longer and longer?

[XIII]

Did anyone else experience the initial loading time becoming a lot longer? You know, the section telling you it takes 20 seconds at most. At first, it was more like 12 seconds for me, but now I timed it and it takes 1 minute 10 seconds.

Nothing important, that's rather short, just strikes me as weird. Does the game somehow check on all your vehicles and saves or so?

[DreamScape]

Yea more stuff more folders more saves makes load up take longer. Mine takes a min also :/

[XIII]

So it's normal. Well, it's not like the game has too much loading times otherwise.

[Videogames]

Broken precaching is broken.

-also
1. The loading screen worked back in the 2016 versions.
2. The new loading screen is an actual lie because the game is totally 100% actually frozen during the entire length of it.

[R1tzo]

Mine stutters not only during the initial loading, but during the battles when all the crafts load and spawn (last time it took 10 minutes to stop terrible lag and fps drop). Sure, I put my single 1.5 mil res railgun battlecruiser of totally ridiculous sizes, but hey, the designer mode handles it well...

[XIII]

Originally posted by Erwin the Fox:

Mine stutters not only during the initial loading, but during the battles when all the crafts load and spawn (last time it took 10 minutes to stop terrible lag and fps drop). Sure, I put my single 1.5 mil res railgun battlecruiser of totally ridiculous sizes, but hey, the designer mode handles it well...

I did notice stuff like that, sometimes I got to restart my game. Notably, the performance seems much worse whenever there is combat.
Makes me wonder if the combat produces a bunch of data that Unity's infamous garbarge collection gets overwhelmed with.

But LOL at that 1.5m battlecruise, the game isn't really made for that.^^'
Even my 470k battleship can take out entire enemy fleets, and it's not even pariticuarly optimized.

[R1tzo]

Originally posted by XIII:

I did notice stuff like that, sometimes I got to restart my game. Notably, the performance seems much worse whenever there is combat.
Makes me wonder if the combat produces a bunch of data that Unity's infamous garbarge collection gets overwhelmed with.

But LOL at that 1.5m battlecruise, the game isn't really made for that.^^'
Even my 470k battleship can take out entire enemy fleets, and it's not even pariticuarly optimized.

And mine is just a playground of railguns, batteries and RTGs to power them. Wanna take a look? :P

If only I could know WHY the game produces a bunch of that data and whether it has some use except for gathering digital dust.

[XIII]

Originally posted by Erwin the Fox:

And mine is just a playground of railguns, batteries and RTGs to power them. Wanna take a look? :P

Thanks, but I'm too afraid of killing my PC xD

If only I could know WHY the game produces a bunch of that data and whether it has some use except for gathering digital dust.

I got no clue about coding, but from what i gather it's basically this:

Code, variables, calculations and everything temporary that are produced during gameplay, which all has to be stored in your memory. Eg your ships targeting systems tracking the enemy, your gun (which has it's own mountain of code) aim and adjust for ballistics (speed, drag), the physics and hit calculations of a shell hitting the enemy, the destruction caused by the shell, the changes it causes in the enemy system. Some things have to be caculated every single frame. All of that creates a metric ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of stored data, all taking up memory.

And since a game like FTD (similar to KSP, Space Engineers, etc) has crafts out of thousands of blocks, there is limited space for optimization, so efficiency suffers even more.

So the problem is, much of that stuff is needed only one time, or for a few frames or second at most. That's were garbage collection is comes into play, it's all about cleaning the memory out of all the useless remainders of data that aren't needed anymore. Unity in particular seems to usually rely on some kidn of automated garbage collection, which is easier for the coder, but lacks in efficiency and is a cause for long term performance issues in many of the more complex, Unity-based games.


At least that's my assumption, I've seen similar patterns in Kerbal Space Program. Unity gets better with every update, which is why almost all Unity games get performance bosts with bigger updates, but it's not perfect either.