This game engine is an embarrassment

[Hera]

A single threaded engine in 2023 that slows down to 15-20 FPS by year 2800 for a graphics that competed with AAA titles from 2004. I should be struggling with Cyberpunk 2077 and not a this game, but its the other way around.

Like, how do you mess up an engine so bad that selecting a couple dozen of fleets tanks your FPS to unusable? How can 2D graphics be problematic in the age of real time path tracing?

Steam think I played this game a lot, but its mostly just waiting five minutes for a month to pass on "fastest" while playing mtg arena in the foreground

Like optimize and thread your game logic, it should be embarrassing. This is a Bethesda title without the Bethesda modding community to fix it up.

[pappysshoes]

Stop beating up on this Hera Sig, the Engine sucks period, and just because Attention Spans wont play beyond 2500 doesn't mean Hera's wont.

The Engine needs fixed and it never will be, fixing it wont leach money through DLC'S which just make it worse.

I have a very High End Pc, all Components, I never play with more than 2-3 AI opponents for exactly this reason, no Gateways, sosf, just don't play a lot of the game.

Love Fanboy Apologists who always float the answer "Just do not play 50%+ of the game you paid for", or, "Don't use mods in a game that says it supports mods", we support mods but.

Typical gaming Company and the Lemmings who agenda for them, putting out as little as possible for as much as possible.

The Engine Sucks, Period.

Anyway Hera, you speak to deaf ears, it will never happen, just the next DLC and the Roaring Lemming Applause.

[Peter]

Publicado originalmente por Hera:

A single threaded engine...

Don't be obtuse. Start here, then read the other dev diaries that talk about performance:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-267-3-5-fornax-patch-notes-ai-performance-and-modding.1542303/

[Immortalis]

Publicado originalmente por pappysshoes:

Stop beating up on this Hera Sig, the Engine sucks period, and just because Attention Spans wont play beyond 2500 doesn't mean Hera's wont.

The Engine needs fixed and it never will be, fixing it wont leach money through DLC'S which just make it worse.

I have a very High End Pc, all Components, I never play with more than 2-3 AI opponents for exactly this reason, no Gateways, sosf, just don't play a lot of the game.

Love Fanboy Apologists who always float the answer "Just do not play 50%+ of the game you paid for", or, "Don't use mods in a game that says it supports mods", we support mods but.

Typical gaming Company and the Lemmings who agenda for them, putting out as little as possible for as much as possible.

The Engine Sucks, Period.

Anyway Hera, you speak to deaf ears, it will never happen, just the next DLC and the Roaring Lemming Applause.

You do realise that they cannot just “fix the game engine”, do you?

In the very best case they’d need to rebuild the game from the ground up which effectively means creating an entirely new game, certainly not something that you can do in a couple of weeks.

Plus of course there is the argument that they need to make sure that the game remains playable for lower end computers as well. They could certainly make the game “better” and even more “complicated” and “realistic”, heck they could even put in more realism when pertains to celestial bodies movement etc but whyever would they consciously choose to cut off anybody who did not buy his computer in the last six months? (Considering that it would still take a few years to develop the game).

And all of that even setting aside the argument of the cost vs benefit analysis since creating a new game engine is not exactly a cost free operation, in terms of both time and resources.

[Donauwelle]

Publicado originalmente por Immortalis:

In the very best case they’d need to rebuild the game from the ground up which effectively means creating an entirely new game, certainly not something that you can do in a couple of weeks.

Dunno about you, but id take a Stellaris 2 by now....
Its out since quite a while, and even tho i really enjoy the regular Updates the game gets years after release its really time to "re-do the Backend".....
I mean performance is a thing since ever.....
I started with Utopia release and there been already memes about Lag....

I7-12700KF + 64GB RAM + 7000ms NVMEs here....
800 Stars and arround 10 empires are fine for arround 100 years....
at 200-225 my gamespeed already halfed...

After upgrading my CPU MB and getting new NVMEs half a year ago i went for max-map max-empires, max-primitives, max plantes.....
I just wanted to try my new Hardware....
The Lag..... I still get vietnam style flashbacks from the Endgame-Lag.....

[Darrenb209]

Publicado originalmente por Mummbles:

Publicado originalmente por Razorblade:

The complexity of Stellaris scales infinitely with the number of Pops, planets, etc. By playing an infinitely long game with an excessive number of empires (thereby bypassing the usual logistical growth ceiling), you're causing infinitely more calculations per year. No game engine could handle that; it's a logical design issue.

Stick with more default game settings, and you won't have issues.

They shouldn't have made a game in the 4X category if they didn't want people playing long games.
It's them not listening to the real player base that's causing the issues, they only listen to the people who want short and thrilling multiplayer matches... Too bad, really had potential to replace Space empires, but dropped the ball to make the wrong players happy.

It's not that they don't "want people playing long games" nor is it "them refusing to listen to the real playerbase"

It's that they designed the game for a specific time period and you're playing well beyond it.

What you're doing here is exactly like somebody complaining that their game of Civ that they've been playing for half a decade takes forever for a turn to end.

Designing a 4X game doesn't mean that you have to design your game so that players can play it forever without any lag whatsoever.

It means you design your game for a set period of time and then do your best to optimise for that.

Nothing more and nothing less.

But then your insistence that you're their "real" player base and those who disagree with you are "wrong" doesn't exactly suggest a person capable of comprehending that the company doesn't exist solely to pander to your specific niche usage of double the intended timespan.

Or in other words, yes, the engine is bad; It was old when Stellaris was made and wasn't even tweaked for the currently existing game, given how much it has changed.

But your complaints are also just genuinely idiotic entitlement and attempted gatekeeping.

And for the sake of it, since it's been brought up so many times including this thread and this very page but it refuses to sink in, yes, Stellaris is multithreaded. It has been so for years.

[Zane87]

Publicado originalmente por Hera:

A single threaded engine in 2023 that slows down to 15-20 FPS by year 2800 for a graphics that competed with AAA titles from 2004. I should be struggling with Cyberpunk 2077 and not a this game, but its the other way around.

Like, how do you mess up an engine so bad that selecting a couple dozen of fleets tanks your FPS to unusable? How can 2D graphics be problematic in the age of real time path tracing?

Steam think I played this game a lot, but its mostly just waiting five minutes for a month to pass on "fastest" while playing mtg arena in the foreground

Like optimize and thread your game logic, it should be embarrassing. This is a Bethesda title without the Bethesda modding community to fix it up.

Another one who doesn't understand ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about anything he writes.
- Slowdown is purely CPU-based, why you bring the GPU into your argumentation is beyond me and completely and utterly irrelevant.
- A ton of strategy games are single-threaded or mostly single-threaded. Stellaris as well utilizes multiple cores but the main strain is on one core only
- This is due to the way processes and calculations are handled, which in almost all games are sequential, not parallel. As such, effective multi-threading (which means in a way that actually improves performance, which is not a given as synchronizing between cores in turn costs performance and can lead to an overall reduction even if not implemented well) is very very hard
- You should feel embarassed by throwing buzzwords into the room without any knowledge about them. "What does he mean when he says words" is perfect to describe your OP

[❗️❗️ Annex ❗️❗]

I just had a battle where the FPS dropped to 1 and stayed that way. My doom stack vs the alliance doom stack. It was semi enjoyable actually as I could watch the individual plasma bolts slowly making their way across back and forth. And yes, the engine is pretty poor for 2023.

[Blood of Kerensky]

OP is dumb. You can't process these kinds of data in a syncronous fashion. It is simply not possible. I could go length and explain how syncronous coding works, but OP would not be able to understand it, because they are no software engineer.

[FloridaMan]

Publicado originalmente por Gustuv Wynd:

Medium map should really be the largest map.

Though this is one of the few games that really needs CPU horsepower. A medium map with habital planets set as low as it goes will actually run well on my 12900k all the way to end game. It will be all single threaded, but the engine was designed for games like Crusader Kings and Victoria...of course it will be single threaded. Though if you play the 1.9 version...it actually works perfect for the original concept for the game. It isn't the fleets that kill the game performance...it is the pops. I really recommend giving it a try. it is a superior game in many aspects in my opinion. Probably 75% of my game hours have been spent on 1.9

Its almost comical how you said "cut the game down by 70 percent to mediate a problem the devs created so you can run the game on top of the line hardware released years after the game itself"

[Hera]

Publicado originalmente por Blood of Kerensky:

OP is dumb. You can't process these kinds of data in a syncronous fashion. It is simply not possible. I could go length and explain how syncronous coding works, but OP would not be able to understand it, because they are no software engineer.

Believe it or not there are other games out there. City Building, Strategy, RTS that are optimized for multi-core CPUs. Stallaris is not impressive and calculating population growth shouldn't slow down modern systems.

And, as I said above this engine slows down when you select multiple fleets. All that does is display their information in the UI about the fleets. And it tanks the FPS. You don't have a "these kinds of data" problem displaying information.

Speaking of asynchrousity, auto saving pauses the game. That sure the hell can be be done asynchronously considering the save games uncompressed are 200+MB.

That is a failure.

Publicado originalmente por FloridaMan:

Publicado originalmente por Gustuv Wynd:

Medium map should really be the largest map.

Though this is one of the few games that really needs CPU horsepower. A medium map with habital planets set as low as it goes will actually run well on my 12900k all the way to end game. It will be all single threaded, but the engine was designed for games like Crusader Kings and Victoria...of course it will be single threaded. Though if you play the 1.9 version...it actually works perfect for the original concept for the game. It isn't the fleets that kill the game performance...it is the pops. I really recommend giving it a try. it is a superior game in many aspects in my opinion. Probably 75% of my game hours have been spent on 1.9

Its almost comical how you said "cut the game down by 70 percent to mediate a problem the devs created so you can run the game on top of the line hardware released years after the game itself"

Exactly.

"Don't play on large galaxies" conflicts with galaxy size options when starting the game
"Don't play more than 300 years" conflicts with end year options when starting the game AND continue option after end year is reached. It also conflicts with mods that give you things to do.

[Elitewrecker PT]

It's not calculating population growth that slows it down, it's all the characteristics associated with pops (happiness, factions, ethics, job allocation, etc.) that are checked like every handful of days (already to spread it out).

[Cosmic Cat]

I have to agree with the players here that berate those who claim the "solution" is to skip large galaxies and don't play long games...
If that's the "solution", then why are there large galaxies or why does the game continue that long to begin with?.. Big brain "solution" right there.

[Ruffio]

If the game had been released for todays hardware, sure... But it wasn't. It was released like 7 years ago, for the hardware people had at that time. I have several games from back then that doesn't run much better on my current computer, as on the old one I had back then.

It's not as simple as to just re-write the entire engine, or swap to another one 7 years later and dump it out as a patch update. Rather than keep dump out dlc's for Stellaris, maybe it would been time for a "Stellaris 2".....

[Elitewrecker PT]

Publicado originalmente por Woob:

I have to agree with the players here that berate those who claim the "solution" is to skip large galaxies and don't play long games...
If that's the "solution", then why are there large galaxies or why does the game continue that long to begin with?.. Big brain "solution" right there.

Why can you try to run witcher 3 at 8K with ultra+ settings if you can't get aboce 30 fps...
Sometimes customization is "use at your own risk".
Even people who know it will slow down the game still do it, but they do it knowing what they're signing up for. Plus people who modded even larger galaxies.

[Axonteer]

Publicado originalmente por Jimmy Hunter:

"Just push the button to make the game not lag Devs. Other engines that have nothing to do with this game and how it's processed aren't this slow, so just fix it!".

This... complaining about a engine from a game that was released in 2016 being unoptimized for modern day systems and expecting the devs to easily swap out the whole engine basecode for something that works with multithreadding... oof thats just entitlement at oof levels... lole

Kinda "ah just rip out the engine of that car and put in a electric drive and throw some batteries in the trunk thats EASY just DO IT" ...

oof just oof..


And yea ofc i would love stellaris and cities skylines to support at least 8 threads but im realistic with my expectations about what can be done and thus never really get dissapointed... exept when i read steam forums...