Late game slowdowns are really a drag to be honest

[Chibi Life]

I find myself quitting and restarting almost always once the slowdowns start to hit. Rimworld was created in Unity and thanks to Monobehavior, Unity is not able provide native threading support for games. It means that Rimworld is effectively running on a single core to process all the ticks per second (TPS).

Rimthreaded mod was a good idea in theory but there's far too many problems that I can't even begin to list them all here.

I use Rocketman and one other mod to help performance but it doesn't really help the late game slowdown much.

I find myself craving late-game play because of all the biotech content which encourages you to tough it out late game to gene edit (not including all the fun mods to expand on it), but the slowdown is awful.

Generally I start off getting 3000 TPS using an uncapper at max speed, by the time I hit late game I'm down to 300-500 depending on what's on the map.

I don't really use 3000 TPS unless there's legit nothing going on, but I find a base TPS of around 900 to be comfortable without boring me when I'm just watching pawns work and assigning jobs to do.

I really think since the Rimworld devs have been releasing new content for awhile now, they should see if they can do anything to assist in the late game woes. The solution is obviously to take advantage of threading and there are various tricks to thread optimization in Unity including with pathfinding which is Rimworld's biggest performance eater. The goal is to move as much of the calculations as you can off of Update methods and into threads which can be tricky.

Worse part is this problem can't be fixed with a mod unless every modder updates their mods to accommodate a threading framework which will never happen.

I can't be the only one who can no longer continue once the slowdown reaches a certain point?

[Re𝕯isia]

Anyway ... i scanned through my menu's and cant find the TPS toggle... where do people get that?

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Edelgris:

The number was arbitrary for the purpose of an example and not meant to represent any genuine reflection of actual in-game situations.

I was also thinking along the lines of an eventual mod for people who want large animal farms, rather than implementing it directly into the game code.

As a mod no it's probably not viable as it would likely cause a lot of conflicts. Practically your concept is no different from just using larger animals anyway. Instead of 50 chickens use 5 horses, similar amount of yield. There are larger modded animals if you want to take it even further, several dinosaur mods for example where you can have brontos which are several times larger than horses.

Originally posted by Re𝕯isia:

Anyway ... i scanned through my menu's and cant find the TPS toggle... where do people get that?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2038874626

[gigamelon1981]

Originally posted by Edelgris:

When it comes to farm animals like chickens slowing the game down, would it be possible to have the game manage large animal groups as 'herds' instead of individually? For example, if you have 50 chickens, divide them into herds of 5 so the game only has to manage pathing for 10 entities, while less taxing operations are still done on an individual level?

Perhaps it could be made so that separating individuals from the herd could be done dynamically, in the event of an attack, disease, etc.

It is what the AI wars doing. They can spawn like 2 million ships in a single map without breaking my poor i3 to oblivion. They because there's 1 & 2 of the series. Oh Star Ruler also doing this. But i find pathfinding for let's say 20-30 objects shouldn't be taxing that much. I suspect it is not just the pathfinding process cost.
(20-30 chickens already shows a significant drop of performance on my PC, maybe more if you have stronger)
Now, let's compare it to 20-30 objects moving at the same time at Touhou (Faith) series, maybe 20-30 pinballs it shouldn't show exhibit the same performance drop since essentially it just moving like 256x256 pixel worth PNG times 20 or 30.

More than moving,
It seems to to evaluate what would happen within the created path. A lot of checks.
Maybe it can be turned down a bit, from real time to every 1s for instance.
Or perhaps simpler behavior algorithm for non humanoid objects.
Just words from a fool tho, I'm not a programmer or anything.

Oh why I'm bringing the AI war or Star Ruler because at the start, you can control individual ships there. Enemy came at singular entities. It rather important to remember that RW regards every animal at the "Wild Life" or "Animal" tab as singular, unique. They can mate, birth, injured, sleep, stressed, and producing something. Ships at Star ruler also have sections which you can design at the hexagonal dot editor. Losing the engine tile for example, will lose some propulsion. Not sure how they can safely merge from a singular to a flock and vice versa seamlessly, but it is an interesting proposition.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by gigamelon1981:

.... Oh Star Ruler also doing this....

Just an aside on Star Ruler (the first one) - It uses the same wavefront object model for all ships. That's unusual. While the wavefront object file format is still excellent and very broadly, nearly universally supported due to its simplicity, it's not usually used as the base file-type in video games. It has some limitations that are easier and/or more efficient to overcome with other file formats, which can help offset file-size/load differences. (I don't know what sort of renderer it was using.)

An interesting game, but the game's design is such that a lot of value is placed on individual ships/ship types due to how "Ship Design" works, but gameplay reveals that the player can't place much value on them. Ship Design is truly unique and very clearly breaks the mold in "thinking outside of the box." (A unique ship design feature with overlapping components, indicating whether or not the components effect each other, and positional placement indicating, somewhat, physical location on the ship.) The tech curve is interesting, but short-lived. Some of the automation tasking is top-notch, yet... they didn't take it very far. (Automating supply, repair, support of construction/mining is great.) It would have been a good game if it had NOT been just a RTS/4X combat space-battle game and they had, instead, focused more on exploration, building, expansion, etc, with a different sort of combat element instead of faction/vs.

PS: I don't recommend it except for gamers truly interested in examining very unique game construction/systems. It is not a "fun" or "good" game in its entirety, but has some very interesting gameplay elements that truly deserve some positive recognition. I never played any of the others in the series.

This has been "Off-Topic Hour with your host, Mork Typestoomuch." :)

Note: The critical part above related to performance is that "ships" are really just logical points in space with one universal model visually marking each one. These are "instanced" (basically meaning duplicated copy/pasted in regards to 3D). Their stats/designs are likely just tied to the points in a table. Though, performance is still nice considering the "swarm" style of gameplay. There's not much in terms of 3D movement, with ship movement actually being a "layered" approach, so actual 3D coordinates are truncated, somewhat, for combat calcs, IIRC.

*****


On Late Game "Slowdown":

I've never experienced it. Not once. And, that's even when playing on an old i7 with 8 gig of Ram on a classic HD spinning platens..

Why?

Because I have only ever run a very tiny number of mods, when I did run the game modded, and do my very best to keep colonist numbers below twenty, which is the gameplay limit IMO, given that management features are lacking to make managing a colony over that number "fun." My limit is generally fifteen colonists. If I have ever purposefully had more colonists, I would have viewed that as a liability, not for "performance" reasons, but for gameplay reasons.

Managing large colonies in Rimworld is not fun. It's not the gameplay scale that Rimworld is focused on to present "good gameplay." It can also significantly effect the game's challenge, goal-setting, gruntwork, etc... It tips the teapot over, so to speak, when one has too many colonists. (If one enjoys playing with lots of colonists, use mods to fix the gameplay.)

Every single one of my maybe <10 mods I have run have been very thoroughly researched in terms of performance impact, stability, and gameplay. I have never, ever, just blindly installed a mod because it "looked cool."

I've run chicken farms, long ago when it was an interesting/fun/Rimworldy thing to do. I didn't have any issues, but that may have been due to the fact that I did, once, have a chicken farm get out of control... and stopped doing that. :) (Had lizard and turkey farms, too - I'm unbiased.)

There's a tendency for certain types of gamers to see certain performance indicators as a "game quality indicator" or even a "gameplay goal" in-and-of-themselves... They think that because they can retrieve some number from something that the better the relative number of whatever it is they get a report on, the better they are, the better the game is, the more positively confirmed their hardware choices, or the more valuable a human-being they are...


If you have fun, the game is fine. If you do not, then it may not be the game for you. If you place more value on a reported performance indicator number that doesn't likely effect the gameplay you experience, you may need to examine quality of life features unrelated to gaming, computers, or numbers.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Morkonan:

I never played any of the others in the series.

I always thought of Star Ruler 1 as being a fairly traditional if light space 4x, with some pretty interesting ship design and scaling concepts. With mods you could hit a pretty good balance to the game, but it was prone to crashing.

Star Ruler 2 just dove right off the deep end trying to be innovative on everything, it feels more like a board game than a space 4x. The map is a bunch of "tiles," the planets are connected together in complex chains like some sort of merging mini-game to level them up, and diplomacy is literally a card game. It did not do well and the devs went out of business. They did make the game open source years later, but I don't know if that got any attention.

Gigamelon sounds like they were talking about SR2, which added the hex based ship design. The mechanic in question though is how fleet ships work, every fleet was a single flagship usually with some attached support ships, the support ships were generally much smaller and the player could not control them at all, and in most situations they just drifted in formation around the flagship moving as one entity until entering combat when they started acting independently based in AI settings in your ship design. I don't think it was doing anything special with AI grouping though, the support ships were just extremely basic allowing you to have thousands of them in play.

Anyway, I think both SR1 and SR2 are worth trying on sale, they are very different games, but neither is amazing.

[iller]

Originally posted by AldouzTek:

Try upgrading to AMD Ryzen 9 7950X with 64 GB RAM and let us know if it made difference.

it makes way more sense to wait for the 78zzxx-whatever 3D stacked one that's coming out soon because that's where the single core threading will really shine versus all their other chips that have always been in that category of "most Rendering bang for your buck"

[iller]

Originally posted by Edelgris:

When it comes to farm animals like chickens slowing the game down, would it be possible to have the game manage large animal groups as 'herds' instead of individually? For example, if you have 50 chickens, divide them into herds of 5 so the game only has to manage pathing for 10 entities, while less taxing operations are still done on an individual level?

Perhaps it could be made so that separating individuals from the herd could be done dynamically, in the event of an attack, disease, etc.

There's already a "Chicken Coup" Mod that does this sort of concept by just replacing the actual entities with static buildings. ....kinda boring, but if you're the "type of player" who just cares only about End game in any Genre of gaming then your entire mindset is only about Min-Maxxing anyway and generally wouldn't even flinch if the graphics suddenly turned 8-bit or monotone

[DasaKamov]

Originally posted by Neko Time:

I was just taught to speak with confidence even if you might be wrong

That's...a very bad life lesson. Confidently saying, "The Sun rises in the West! Grass is pink! The Earth is flat!" just makes a person look not just like a fool, but an arrogant fool.

[Zane87]

Originally posted by iller:

Originally posted by AldouzTek:

Try upgrading to AMD Ryzen 9 7950X with 64 GB RAM and let us know if it made difference.

it makes way more sense to wait for the 78zzxx-whatever 3D stacked one that's coming out soon because that's where the single core threading will really shine versus all their other chips that have always been in that category of "most Rendering bang for your buck"

True, will be quite interesting if AMD can challenge raptor lake on this front. They made excellent progress over the years but the "many cores go brrrr" policy of AMD always kept me a bit at bay since I mostly play games with high single core dependency, just like RimWorld.

And raptor lake is pretty damn good on this front already, my 13700k almost tripled the tps over the 10750h of my old laptop.

Really looking forward to the single core cinebench and Passmark benchmarks of AMDs newest chips and how much they can challenge/beat raptor lake chips.
Concerning V3 cache they already have a big lead, which is very apparent in Factorio for example. CPU market finally is exciting again :D

[Zane87]

Originally posted by Neko Time:

I'd still love some kind of performance optimization that can do things like make animal farms less demanding but I know it won't be that easy after all.

Maybe the problem is people assume because of how I speak that I'll be completely unwilling to change my views if offered a proper counter argument and get heated when replying to me instead.

I'll abstain from commenting on your first part.

Again, I'm totally with you in the wish for better optimization by Ty and his team, and I'd love to see Rimworld becoming a better large colony sim myself. Unfortunately, my hopes for that are rather low as for one, again, it's non -trivial and for another Tynan's vision still seems to be the story generator and smaller colonies that eventually win by leaving the planet.
Which in all my hours in RimWorld I never did and never even tried and I doubt I ever will as maintaining a large colony even in lategame is pretty entertaining to me.

Maybe I did misjudge your intentions however. If I came off too confrontational, which I'm sure I did, I apologize. I just have a rather short temper to what I (sometimes wrongly) perceive as troll posts (PTSD from the total war Warhammer steam forums).

[Chibi Life]

Originally posted by DasaKamov:

Originally posted by Neko Time:

I was just taught to speak with confidence even if you might be wrong

That's...a very bad life lesson. Confidently saying, "The Sun rises in the West! Grass is pink! The Earth is flat!" just makes a person look not just like a fool, but an arrogant fool.

Actually it's helped me more in life in leadership roles than hurt me. I try 'not' to be wrong in most cases and do a bunch of research on things. But in this case I haven't worked with threading in Unity or video games for that matter and jumped to assumptions much like you're jumping to assumptions cuz you saw me be wrong once and assume I go around acting like a monkey everywhere lol.

[Daijin]

where's the performance dlc tynan? i would even pay for it and buy your book too

[Emperor2000]

Originally posted by Daijin:

where's the performance dlc tynan? i would even pay for it and buy your book too

Performance, should always be a free update, don't give them Ideas, like this or other Companies will start to release Paid Patches.

[Robo]

Originally posted by Emperor2000:

Originally posted by Daijin:

where's the performance dlc tynan? i would even pay for it and buy your book too

Performance, should always be a free update, don't give them Ideas, like this or other Companies will start to release Paid Patches.

The videogame industry has enough issues already, and it doesn't help that a lot of people are waking up to said issues thanks to YT videos and such, so I think that will be the last straw that breaks the camel's back if it ever happens.

[MonkeyMummyMoney]

I find it to incredibly unreasonable to advise someone to upgrade their rig for one game. It'd be one thing if they had issues with most games, but OP didn't say anything to paint that picture.

At some point you gotta shift the blame for something not performing well onto the Studio.

That being said Mods are your best bet if you genuinely don't want to upgrade something just so you can muscle your way through obvious inadequacies for a single game.

Rimpy has a built in feature that compresses textures to DDS format, that gave me personally a huge improvement to performance and load-times.