Performance issues and crashes

[NoDMoD]

Hi guys,

so after seeing some new updates recently I decided to give the game another try, because I really do like some of the features.

However, on my PC the game still has major performance issues.

I have an I7 processor, 16 gig DDR ram, running on win 8.

Therefore I usually klick the turn button rather quickly, and at some point, it stills tends to crash. Also turn times become pretty slow after a certain period.

There is also issues when being in the city screen and clicking the turn button, that result in strange behaviours, throwing me out into the planet screen while klicking. There are some other errors I encountered, however I can not recall what exactly happened.

I am willing to make notes of anything specific if that is of any help to you.

Do you have a crash log included, that I can send to you? Because it happens every time and that's why I still do not feel able to play it.

Thanks!

[Nyphur]

Originally posted by the_nodmod:

Hi guys,

so after seeing some new updates recently I decided to give the game another try, because I really do like some of the features.

However, on my PC the game still has major performance issues.

I have an I7 processor, 16 gig DDR ram, running on win 8.

Therefore I usually klick the turn button rather quickly, and at some point, it stills tends to crash. Also turn times become pretty slow after a certain period.

There is also issues when being in the city screen and clicking the turn button, that result in strange behaviours, throwing me out into the planet screen while klicking. There are some other errors I encountered, however I can not recall what exactly happened.

I am willing to make notes of anything specific if that is of any help to you.

Do you have a crash log included, that I can send to you? Because it happens every time and that's why I still do not feel able to play it.

Thanks!

Hey the_nodmod,

Thanks for letting us know about the performance issues, we run the same setup as you on our dev PCs so there shouldn't be any difference but there are a few common errors that can cause performance issues:

FPS problems:
If your FPS is low on the planet and galaxy screen, this can sometimes be caused by the game accidentally using an on-board graphics chipset instead of your actual graphics card. This bug happens in a number of games, and the best way to solve it is:

• Press the Windows Key and Pause together to open your computer's System screen
  
• Click on the Device Manager link on the left hand side of the system screen to bring up the Device Manager window
  
• Click the triangle next to the Display Adapters section to list all of your graphics cards.
  
• If there are two entries here, one of them may be an on-board chipset on your motherboard such as the Intel HD Graphics 4000. Right click that one and click Disable.
  
• Your screen may flicker as your system switches over to the other graphics card. Start the game again and your FPS problems should be resolved.
  
  
  End-Turn Delays:
  If the game is stalling for up to several seconds when you hit the End Turn button, this is normal but is also something we're going to solve before release. This delay is caused by the AI doing all of its thinking and planets being generated when the AI explores or colonises them during the turn.
  
  All 4X games have these little delays when you press End Turn, but they don't appear to stall because they execute the end turn and AI code in a separate thread than the graphics rendering so that the graphics doesn't pause while waiting for the AI to finish thinking. We will be moving the End Turn and AI code into a separate thread when the game is feature complete, which will eliminate the harsh pause. We'll also spend some time making the AI more efficient before release to minimise End Turn delays in larger maps.
  
  
  Crashing during End Turn:
  Rare situations come up in normal gameplay that often don't happen during our internal testing, and they can cause crashes. This is unfortunately an unavoidable part of early access games and indie game development, and when it happens we'd love it if you could submit the crash report using the crash reporter that will appear. When a crash is reported, it tells us where in the code the problem is so that we can fix it.
  
  We don't have a crash log file, so if the crash reporter isn't popping up for you then please let us know as we have no other way to diagnose a fault that doesn't occur during our internal testing. If the crash is consistent and the crash reporter isn't working, you could send us your save game file that it happens in. If you need to do this, press start and R to open the run dialog, paste in %appdata%\Predestination\Saves\ and hit enter to open the save game folder, and send us a zip of the save to [e-mail] if possible.
  
  
  Getting kicked out to orbit:
  There's currently a bug in the End Turn code that makes the Planet Screen sometimes kick players out into orbital view. This has been fixed and come back several times, and we're looking into what causes it. I'm reasonably sure it's something to do with the AI scouting or colonising a planet, and I aim to fix this in the near future.
  
  Thanks for the heads up on these problems. If you have any other questions or problems, please let me know.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[NoDMoD]

Thanks for the response, I know that turn times are defined by the AI calculations in any turn based games, but I mentioned it becsause I am certain, that there is a lot of room for performance improvements, does this game support (or will support) multi cores?

As for the crash reporter, I think this didn't come up, but I will give it another try and let you know what happens.

[Nyphur]

Originally posted by the_nodmod:

Thanks for the response, I know that turn times are defined by the AI calculations in any turn based games, but I mentioned it becsause I am certain, that there is a lot of room for performance improvements, does this game support (or will support) multi cores?

As for the crash reporter, I think this didn't come up, but I will give it another try and let you know what happens.

The game is running on a custom engine built using .NET 3.5 and XNA 3.1 so it does support multiple cores and how we decide to use them is up to us. We would like the game to be more feature complete before we move any existing code over to a second thread on another CPU core, as multithreading can make diagnosing some bugs difficult.

Someone else also reported that the crash reporter failed for them, I will look into this as we use a third party crash reporting tool.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

[NoDMoD]

So I gave it another try, I have to say it ran smoother this time and the crash report tool actually opened. I saved the report and clicked on send aswell, does it automatically send it to you, or should I send it to you via e-mail again?

[G Willikers]

So an Intel HD 4000 isn't going to run this game so well? At the moment that's all I have to work with.

I read in a dev post last february you guys were hoping to have this game playable for low end systems by last May, but there didn't seem to be any followup. Is it currently playable with an integrated chipset and if not, is there still a plan to make it playable?

[Best4Gamers]

well i have the same issues and im using only my Radeon card ... i getting errors and crashes alot from doing difrent things.. hope you fix it soon cuz this game is realy cool :)

[Nyphur]

Originally posted by the_nodmod:

So I gave it another try, I have to say it ran smoother this time and the crash report tool actually opened. I saved the report and clicked on send aswell, does it automatically send it to you, or should I send it to you via e-mail again?

Good to hear it's running more smoothly! Clicking on Send should be sufficient, it emails the report directly to me and enters it into our crash tracking system at the same time.

Originally posted by G Willikers:

So an Intel HD 4000 isn't going to run this game so well? At the moment that's all I have to work with.

I read in a dev post last february you guys were hoping to have this game playable for low end systems by last May, but there didn't seem to be any followup. Is it currently playable with an integrated chipset and if not, is there still a plan to make it playable?

The big problem with integrated GPUs is that the specs will say it has something like 1792MB of memory but it actually only has 16, 32 or 64MB of dedicated memory. Some parts of Predestination use large rendertargets and pre-defined vertex buffers that require a certain amount of dedicated video memory.

In our official minimum specs, we currently advise players to have a graphics card with at least 1GB of dedicated video memory. A 512mb card should also work and we have experimental low-resolution textures for old 256mb cards. We do still intend to produce further low-graphics modes and see how low we can get the minimum video memory usage etc, but of course this will have to be done once the game is feature complete and we're in the beta/finishing phase.

Please keep in mind that there are no guarantees that we'll be able to make this work even when we get the time to attempt it, it'll be experimental work on our own custom game engine and many other XNA-based games have yet to solve the compatibility issues with most integrated graphics chipsets. If we can manage to make this work, certain features like the 3D ship designer, UI blurring, Anti-Aliasing etc may also have to be disabled or reduced in resolution to make it possible.

Originally posted by Traveler:

well i have the same issues and im using only my Radeon card ... i getting errors and crashes alot from doing difrent things.. hope you fix it soon cuz this game is realy cool :)

The crashes will be from other errors and bugs in the code, and I'm working as hard as I can to solve these as they're submitted while also working on the remaining features. Please do keep sending in those crash reports, they're extremely helpful and every one helps me make the game more stable. Once the game is feature complete, we'll be focusing solidly on bug fixing and iteration until the game is stable and ready enough for release.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer