Performance: Steam Version VS. Browser Version

[Wargon]

I bought GemCraft on Steam again (I already bought the browser version) because I really like the game and thought the performance would be WAY better because I can use all the power my computer provides, but that seems not to be the case.

My grafic card is doing NOTHING and CPU usage is less than 20% all the time but the game loses FPS very fast as soon as you have more than 1000 monsters on the field if you want to play at 9x Speed (I'm already playing with "Force minimum visual settings").

To get huge amounts of EXP you have to enrage all waves to 999 monsters so its simply not possible to avoid 1000+ monstes on the field even if you have your manafarm and your damage gem at the very beginning of the map.

Are there plans to improve the overall performance or is there something I can do?


Just in case you wonder, thats my Hardware:
CPU: i7 2700k
Grafic Card: HD Radeon 7950
RAM: 16GB DDR3 (at 1333mhz as far as I know)

[nnnnnnnnnnnn]

I dont think so. They "fixed" this in patch 1.03 think, but still there is not much you can do about that.
Maybe just in the next patch there will be a fix on this once more.

[darthmohawk1]

I recall Peter saying that the game, although ported to Steam, is still built on Adobe Flash and therefore can only go as fast as Flash allows. Not much to be done about that.

[Wargon]

Oh... it is still Flash, that explains a lot. Thanks.
...so there are no plans to use a more powerfull engine in a later version?

[TheSaxRunner05]

I hope so. +1

[AdApt*]

Thanks for the warning.

[thorvindr]

Yikes. I was considering buying this (totally worth the 3-dollar sale price) but I'm glad I read this. Flash need to be replaced. It needed to die ten years ago. It has an inherent memory leak that apparently can't be repaired.

So... Yeah. As much as I'd love to play GemCraft right now, I'm going to. I'm going to go play it for free on Kongregate and get the same performance I would get running this version.

[Bo]

Bummer :(
Thanks for the info. I played gemcraft games since chapter 0... I purchased the magicians pouch on armorgames when Chasing Shadows first came out and the biggest frustration I ever had with it was slow down or complete crashing during endurance runs.
(nothing better than spending an hour on a map only to get a few too many monsters on screen and browser stops responding.)

In the end I'm probably gonna buy it if only to support gameinabottle in the hopes he hires someone who can program in something other than flash.

[wotanii]

Your i7 has probably 4 physical cores. That means a single-core-application can theoretically use max. 25% or your cpu. The actual usage is usually much lower, because in a single-threaded application the cpu needs to wait for other hardware to do stuff (most notable for the ram to deliver new data.).

So 15-20% usage on an i7 means there is a maxed-out single-threaded application. Making a application multi-threaded is usually quite difficult.

Note: The Taskmanager will show the usage being distributed evenly between the core. This means the core take turns executing the process. (this is due to some crazy task-scheduling in windows.) There is still just one core executing the process at a time.

[xmontex]

wotanii, gemcraft cs uses all cores and has 12 threads. you can check resource monitor if you want.

Imo some things can be done to improve performance at the cost of some number accuracy:
1) merging gemshots: currently each tower/trap shot is independant - each shot checks for target and if gem has red component it checks EVERY monster on the map to see if its in range of the original target. My traps can deal > 600 hits per second in the end game. and i guess some people may push even further. in this case i would suggest to merge the shots and limit the amount to 50-100 "unique" shots. but after all the distance checks and armor reduction the damage would apply multiple times. i honestly think this would boost the performance ny quite a bit. the downside of it is that if some monster dies the rest of those multiplied shots would be wasted.
2) drastacally reduce visual effects: replace monsters with simple circles of varying size (for swarmling/reaver/giant). disable tower projectiles animation or limit those to around 10 per second. id gladly watch circles if that would improve the framerate... not too sure but i thing there will be only a very small performance increase due to this.
3) force chain hit (red) gems to search for additional targets in square rather than circle. i would expect medium performance boost from this.
4) i was too lazy to check how exactly are achievements handled but some achievements are checked with every trap hit and having 4 traps with 600 hits / sec hitting 1000 monsters each means 2400000 achievement checks per sec :) and heck if you lag really bad the the numbers may be even greater
around 30 different achiements are checked on each kill.
i would suspect "stumbling" achievement (hit monster with traps 100 times) to be some major lag cause.
i would suggest to recheck all achievements and change some of those from real time checks to end of battle checks. no idea on performance boost due to this

[Wargon]

@ xmotex
Interesting points.
In the brwoser version my best Mana-Farm-Gem had 12902 chain hit length and 28488 shots per seecond (Grade 63; Bloodbound: x1276) . ...maybe chain hit length and firerate are responsible for lag but in my opinion you cannot change that point because your Mana-Farm only works because it hits thousends of monsters at once at an immense firerate.

As far as I know Flash is very limited in terms of performance, I thinks its questionable if the game would run significantls faster with these changes.

I really was surprised that the Game dose not use my Grafic Card at all, but I thinks thats also because it is Flash

...so I hope that the Game will be ported to a more powerfull engine.

[thorvindr]

Originally posted by xmontex:

wotanii, gemcraft cs uses all cores and has 12 threads. you can check resource monitor if you want.

Imo some things can be done to improve performance at the cost of some number accuracy:

Yeah all that seems like it would greatly reduce the load on your system resources.

OR just stop using Flash because it's a piece of garbage. It's cool as a learning tool (I mean really, VERY cool) but you're going to sell a product that's literally just an Air app? You're out of your Vulcan mind.

You're shooting yourself in the foot by releasing a product that inherits all the flaws of a decades-old system that has no hope of ever being repaired. I'm not very familiar with Silverlight or .NET but I know they both provide a better user experience than Flash/Air.

Flex was a good attempt by Adobe to make everyone think they'd built something to replace Flash but I'm pretty sure Flex is just a framework for developing Air apps.

Having said all that, I'm going to play some more Gemcraft on Kongregate.

[SuuperW]

@xmontex: The biggest cause of lag is the terribly-done chain hit. I can run the game at a decent speed with several thousand monsters on-screen, while shooting at them with non-red gems. But putting a chain hit gem in a trap hitting thousands of monsters per shot brings the frame rate down to a crawl.

Any other improvements (since beacons have been fixed; I assume they're properly fixed, haven't played since that patch) on performance will be negligible in end-game.

[wotanii]

Originally posted by xmontex:

wotanii, gemcraft cs uses all cores and has 12 threads. you can check resource monitor if you want.

I agree with all your points except this one. And I haven't checked if this is true for gemcraft.

All Single-threads application show up in the taskmanager the way gem-craft does. This is due to scheduling on the OS. It is excplained here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8485947/why-does-a-single-threaded-process-execute-on-several-processors-cores/8486010#8486010

You can test this by pinning the process to a cpu. A single-threaded process will utilize >80% of the core without any drop in fps.