multithreading the main issue with rimworld slowdown

[Shaggy]

to keep it simple the game should be multithreaded as a base function of the game, there is no rational reason (other than laziness which ty pretty much said why he wont) to multithread this game especially a colony sim with multiple calls and actions being made a ms and frame, the game is quite literally bottlenecked at 20ish pawns (parts vary the performance) this in a game especially like rimworld is to me unacceptable. i write this so i can actually play the game on later saves and enjoy one of the best colony sims ever made. it has no reason to be left up to unpaid modders to make your game multithreaded and baseline function in later stages.


again what is the actual point of having all this cool controlling mechs, powers, multiple colonies, farms, babies, clones, etc. if by your 20th or 30th colonist it slows down to 30 to 50 fps on double speed much less triple speed. what is the point? there is none, theres simply no point playing a game with all these cool features if by the time you get there the game will barely run at 30 or 60fps. which is what i think is a worse sin that no one really critiques but functions of the game being unusable as the game progresses like the 2x 3x speed. why just why? make the game baseline functional please for all that is holy thats all i am asking. we shouldnt need modders for this.

just a humble coder/gamer.

[Shaggy]

to also preface that i have 500 pawn worlds that run sub 30fps at normal 1x speed. this isnt just because of 2x 3x speed. the game at around even 100ish pawns will be sub 60 at 1x speed. not really including raids, even though its been a good while since i played. i just miss playing this game. its truely my favorite and i wish i could make another world like that but its just exhausting knowing that it will just slow down egregiously.

[MadArtillery]

Why a 500 pawn world????? Madness! Even 30 is quite high. These are some pretty darn big colonies!

[Astasia]

Go play a different game, this isn't meant to be a city simulator. The game has multithreading, more is added as needed to maintain expected performance for expected populations. The devs aren't going to spend extra time adding extra threading so a handful of people can play the game in an unintended way with better performance. Most people would rather the devs spend that effort on more useful things, like more content for the game. It's not "laziness" it's time budgeting, they can't do everything everyone wants all at once. What you want isn't realistic, so it's probably never going to be budgeted in.

[Aranador]

It is almost like people who post "multi-threading will fix it" don't actually know what is needed for multi-threading to do anything at all.

Anyway - not too long ago, Rimworld allocated a second thread to texture layering processing, and it almost didn't have any problems - so the Dev is aware of, and thinking about, how and where multi-threading can actually help this game.

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Shaggy:

to also preface that i have 500 pawn worlds that run sub 30fps at normal 1x speed. this isnt just because of 2x 3x speed. the game at around even 100ish pawns will be sub 60 at 1x speed. not really including raids, even though its been a good while since i played. i just miss playing this game. its truely my favorite and i wish i could make another world like that but its just exhausting knowing that it will just slow down egregiously.

You know, playing Dwarf Fortress, you learn to live with sub-1 FPS when you're playing with 200 dwarves on a huge map that's been heavily excavated. This isn't a twitch action game, 30 FPS is still perfectly playable for a management game, and if you can't handle things moving only half as fast, just... don't play with 500 pawns on the map, maybe? 500 pawns still in double-digit FPS is a genuinely impressive feat, and a testament to how much Tynan already has optimized the game. It already is multi-threaded, and a lot of mechanics I'd prefer to see (like 3d, fluid mechanics, more meaningful world map/faction gameplay) aren't implemented in the base game to just to keep the framerate high. (And I mod those things back in because fun gameplay is much more important than framerate e-peen measuring.)

Multi-threading, contrary to what some hype-huffers have taken as dogma, is not a silver bullet that fixes all problems forever. It has overhead and creates bottlenecks of its own that can slow processes down in a way that means simply having two or four threads do not simply double or quadruple your speed. Besides, if you're complaining that you're facing some slowdown while having a colony twenty times the size you're meant to, then obviously, even if Tynan somehow found a way to optimize the game to a quarter of the load it currently faces, you'd just be complaining that you have 30 FPS in your 2,000 pawn colony, and complaining that Tynan isn't doing the next buzzword... (Or maybe complaining that he doesn't go from 32 threads to 128, because this just pays dividends forever, right?)

(And that's not even starting on the dubious parts of this argument... How do you know what's "the main issue with Rimworld slowdown" when you also say you haven't played the game in years, you apparently don't know it's been switched to multi-threading, and you don't even claim to know what is creating those bottlenecks, other than "pawns"... Oh, and it's your favorite game, but it's also apparently literally unplayable because you don't think it has the buzzword even though you didn't even bother to look up what Tynan had been working on before complaining he was lazy.) (Oh, and you generally don't put "prefaces" as a footnote/follow-up post...)

[pan terrorizer (with OnlyPans!)]

"Man, I will use lots of mods in my 500 colonist gameplay"

"Wtf, my game is so slow. Ass game"

[Wasted]

i dislike the entitled mindset of the OP

[apud.harald]

''Cool'' = toxic.

[Shaggy]

Originally posted by Wraith_Magus:

Originally posted by Shaggy:

to also preface that i have 500 pawn worlds that run sub 30fps at normal 1x speed. this isnt just because of 2x 3x speed. the game at around even 100ish pawns will be sub 60 at 1x speed. not really including raids, even though its been a good while since i played. i just miss playing this game. its truely my favorite and i wish i could make another world like that but its just exhausting knowing that it will just slow down egregiously.

You know, playing Dwarf Fortress, you learn to live with sub-1 FPS when you're playing with 200 dwarves on a huge map that's been heavily excavated. This isn't a twitch action game, 30 FPS is still perfectly playable for a management game, and if you can't handle things moving only half as fast, just... don't play with 500 pawns on the map, maybe? 500 pawns still in double-digit FPS is a genuinely impressive feat, and a testament to how much Tynan already has optimized the game. It already is multi-threaded, and a lot of mechanics I'd prefer to see (like 3d, fluid mechanics, more meaningful world map/faction gameplay) aren't implemented in the base game to just to keep the framerate high. (And I mod those things back in because fun gameplay is much more important than framerate e-peen measuring.)

Multi-threading, contrary to what some hype-huffers have taken as dogma, is not a silver bullet that fixes all problems forever. It has overhead and creates bottlenecks of its own that can slow processes down in a way that means simply having two or four threads do not simply double or quadruple your speed. Besides, if you're complaining that you're facing some slowdown while having a colony twenty times the size you're meant to, then obviously, even if Tynan somehow found a way to optimize the game to a quarter of the load it currently faces, you'd just be complaining that you have 30 FPS in your 2,000 pawn colony, and complaining that Tynan isn't doing the next buzzword... (Or maybe complaining that he doesn't go from 32 threads to 128, because this just pays dividends forever, right?)

(And that's not even starting on the dubious parts of this argument... How do you know what's "the main issue with Rimworld slowdown" when you also say you haven't played the game in years, you apparently don't know it's been switched to multi-threading, and you don't even claim to know what is creating those bottlenecks, other than "pawns"... Oh, and it's your favorite game, but it's also apparently literally unplayable because you don't think it has the buzzword even though you didn't even bother to look up what Tynan had been working on before complaining he was lazy.) (Oh, and you generally don't put "prefaces" as a footnote/follow-up post...)

we've already had modders do multithreading your entire argument is moot. on the same worlds i get 400 to 500 fps at 500 pawns. ive also played dwarf fortress and didnt get as much into it for the same exact reason. and this isnt what i was saying at all as you are making my argument a strawman hyperbole as you would know multithreading would let you choose how many threads per amount of cores per cpu. again its a scaling issue and one of the last problems of rimworld. i also know it because i was looking into the exact calls and bottlenecks into the core per call to know what the problem is and one core can only do one call per ms which will bottleneck into the frames. again idc if you want to have a glaze fest of the game it doesnt suddenly make the problem disapear. im also not saying the game isnt optimized there is only so much one core can do. if you dont know the specifics in the actual function programming then read a bit into it and understand a bit more but im not going to explain all of multithreading to you in a single discussion.

[Shaggy]

Originally posted by Wasted:

i dislike the entitled mindset of the OP

not entitled to want basic things that many other games have done with reasonable success. factorio, going medieval, any massive multiplayer game, etc.

[Shaggy]

Originally posted by pan terrorizer (with OnlyPans!):

"Man, I will use lots of mods in my 500 colonist gameplay"

"Wtf, my game is so slow. Ass game"

ive also done it vanilla, still the same result of having the entire game run off 1 world core also if you read the full discussion you would know i never called the game ass its one of the best colony sims out there. this is the last and main issue of the game. base functionality and performance at scale.

[Shaggy]

Originally posted by Aranador:

It is almost like people who post "multi-threading will fix it" don't actually know what is needed for multi-threading to do anything at all.

Anyway - not too long ago, Rimworld allocated a second thread to texture layering processing, and it almost didn't have any problems - so the Dev is aware of, and thinking about, how and where multi-threading can actually help this game.

multiple games have already multithreaded their games with enormous success. factorio, dyson sphere, going medieval, any massive multiplayer game. etc. again its already been done. we have the results of what one or 2 cores vs 16 can do and its not even close. im also glad that they are thinking about doing it because its the last main issue rimworld has is performance and optimization at scale.

[Shaggy]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Go play a different game, this isn't meant to be a city simulator. The game has multithreading, more is added as needed to maintain expected performance for expected populations. The devs aren't going to spend extra time adding extra threading so a handful of people can play the game in an unintended way with better performance. Most people would rather the devs spend that effort on more useful things, like more content for the game. It's not "laziness" it's time budgeting, they can't do everything everyone wants all at once. What you want isn't realistic, so it's probably never going to be budgeted in.

yet the features in the game with multiple colonies and pregnancies (to build the colony) cloning (also to build the colony) you will be at 30 within the year. its not a city building where its only 500, ive already prefaced the slowdown at 30 pawns i already know when and where the bottlenecks are, and there are mods already showing its not only possible but doable with an actual studio. again it is laziness when modders can do it but the main developer cant. this is basic optimization and improvement of game function not outside the scope like adding halo armor. also multiple games have already done it to wide success.

[Shaggy]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Why a 500 pawn world????? Madness! Even 30 is quite high. These are some pretty darn big colonies!

its ok but got bored with only having 30 wanted to have large colonies fight.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Shaggy:

yet the features in the game with multiple colonies and pregnancies (to build the colony) cloning (also to build the colony) you will be at 30 within the year. its not a city building where its only 500, ive already prefaced the slowdown at 30 pawns i already know when and where the bottlenecks are, and there are mods already showing its not only possible but doable with an actual studio. again it is laziness when modders can do it but the main developer cant. this is basic optimization and improvement of game function not outside the scope like adding halo armor. also multiple games have already done it to wide success.

There are no current mods that do multithreading AFAIK. RimThreaded was an experimental mod that was extremely unstable and didn't work with most mods. Adding threading is relatively easy, making it stable is very time consuming, and adding new content onto it that remains stable is also very time consuming. That mod was abandoned several versions ago, it was an interesting proof of concept but it fundamentally didn't work and the effort required to make it work and continue to work wasn't feasible.

The base game adds more multithreading with every update, pawn rendering was threaded in 1.5. The devs balance optimization work with adding new content to keep the game running smoothly.

There are no significant issues at 30 population. I've had 20 pop colonies with 2 fully kitted mechinators with dozens of mechanoids, a dozen guests, dozens of animals, and a visiting trade caravan, still running smoothly at 720 TPS 7+ years into the game. I regularly play very heavily modded with 200-300 mods and even with that can still maintain over 400 TPS for a decade into a run.

Stop speedrunning to 500 population if you want the game to run well. RimWorld is all about the colonists, if you can't name all your colonists, what unique value they provide to your colony, and their interesting story up to that point, then you probably have too many colonists and are probably playing the wrong game.