What to do about lag?

[Shame]

I left my game running for a few hours while duplicants drop off most of the debris into a single tile as the game was lagging really bad. I was running at x10 speed from debug because of course I would at this point in time, but the speed difference was negligible to that of the regular max speed due to the high drop in frames. When I came back most of the debris had been swept up (only exception was barren biome near the bottom of the first planetoid) but the game hadn't stopped stuttering, not even when exiting and opening it up again. The game hasn't lagged this bad this early before (I'm around cycle 350) and I only have 2 planetoids opened and no rocket interiors built yet. I have previously taken out all but a few save files of my colony and other colonies before, which has helped for some strange reason, wondering if that will still help, but if there are other ways to deal with it instead I would like to know.

[Angpaur]

Copied from ONI discord:
A few things have a major impact on game performance. The main one is pathfinding, which is 80% of the game's frame time.
To ease up on your CPU usage and have a better framerate:
- Consolidate Debris. This reduces debris pathfinding. Even better, make useless debris unaccessible.
- Restrict Dupes movement by blocking off areas with locked door. When access is disabled rather than the door locked, pathfinding will still attempt to access all tiles behind.
- Avoid excavating needlessly as this adds more debris and emptied areas are filled with gases, which have a bigger impact on performance than solid tiles.
- Avoid Jet Suits as they give access to lots of additional tiles, which are recomputed every frame.
- Move Pacus to 1x1 farms as they have a pathfinding bug which makes their performance impact bad.
- Move Decor Critters to 1x1 farms because the Decor is expensive to recompute when they move, especially those with large Decor radius: Tropical Pacu, Shine Bugs, Longhair Slickster.
- If you use a lot of Critters, consider using Decor Reimagined with "No Critter Decor" option turned on.
- Restrict Critters movement by as little tiles as possible. This has a much lower impact than previous tips.
- Manually restrict frame rate using external software. It makes the game behave more consistently and smoothes FPS.

[Jarcionek]

Originally posted by Angpaur:

Copied from ONI discord:
- Consolidate Debris. This reduces debris pathfinding. Even better, make useless debris unaccessible.

So sweep entire asteroid into a single tile...? This is going to take some time...

[fradow]

It should also be noted that Spaced Out! builds are often (or perhaps always) debug builds (versions of the game that are meant to be debugged by developers, at the cost of performance), which means they are going to perform worse than they should compared to current vanilla build, which is a release build.

This is to be expected because the DLC is still Early Access and not the final product.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Jarcionek:

Originally posted by Angpaur:

Copied from ONI discord:
- Consolidate Debris. This reduces debris pathfinding. Even better, make useless debris unaccessible.

So sweep entire asteroid into a single tile...? This is going to take some time...

Sweepy can help.

[Shame]

So as it turns out, removing/moving elsewhere previous saves for the same colony where the game can't access them will improve performance significantly. Anyone else who has performance issues, that is the simplest thing you can do, copying everything from your save elsewhere and leaving the last manual save data. I don't know why this happens, but it's something that has functioned the exact same for base game worlds as well.

[caseyas435943]

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

Originally posted by Jarcionek:

So sweep entire asteroid into a single tile...? This is going to take some time...

Sweepy can help.

Sweepy isn't worth using even if it used no power.

Build sweepers and let them move the stuff. They move stuff 1000 at a time. After I've dug out a map at the bottom I build sweepers. Turn them on and they move everything. Faster than dupes. A million times faster than the worthless Sweepy.

Piling the piles into 99 helps a ton. Instead of the game having to look at 99 pieces it looks at 1 piece.

All thou I never had any troubles with lag even with the whole map dug out. I know most people play game on lower end computers. With a good one ONI runs around fine with a little pause when it's auto saving.

But 2 seconds pause every 10 cycles is no big deal. Being it doing a ton during that time.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by caseyas435943:

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

Sweepy can help.

Sweepy isn't worth using even if it used no power.

Build sweepers and let them move the stuff. They move stuff 1000 at a time. After I've dug out a map at the bottom I build sweepers. Turn them on and they move everything. Faster than dupes. A million times faster than the worthless Sweepy.

Piling the piles into 99 helps a ton. Instead of the game having to look at 99 pieces it looks at 1 piece.

All thou I never had any troubles with lag even with the whole map dug out. I know most people play game on lower end computers. With a good one ONI runs around fine with a little pause when it's auto saving.

But 2 seconds pause every 10 cycles is no big deal. Being it doing a ton during that time.

Sweepers do not move liquids... unless they are in bottles, which sweepy can help with.

Edit: To be clear, Sweepy picks up 10 kg every tile of liquid or solid debris. He can hold up to 500 kg before returning to dock. If he returns with 500 kg it will take a sweeper minimum of 25 seconds to unload all of that into a rail system if it is the only sweeper using that rail.

Now the idea was to dump all of this debris into one tile, so that sweeper won't be on one rail. We are going to need sweepies in different areas with their own sweeper all merging their rails into one space. They share the rail. That 25 seconds is going to take much longer than 25 seconds due to the shared rail space. It's the bottleneck here, not the sweepies, so there is no reason not to use them.

Sweepy dock uses 240W only at night when the Sweepy recharges, and will cover about 30 tiles in either direction.

Auto-Sweeper uses 120W whenever it picks up and drops off stuff into the conveyor loader. It has 9 tile range. It would take at least 3.3 Auto-Sweepers to match the range of a Sweepy.
Conveyor Loader also uses 120W whenever it puts stuff onto the rails and you would need 1 for every 2 Auto_Sweepers as they have to reach at least one tile of it.

As you can see here, using just Auto-Sweepers and Conveyor Loaders would not be more power efficient, and would likely take just as long due to how crowded the rails would get.

[Jarcionek]

To be honest, I don't think it's worth using Sweepers and Rails at all. I have different structures in different places, some natural tiles left to support wild plants etc. I cannot just dig out everything and expect all items to be on the ground. Building the sweepers and rails system for that is not worth the effort in my view.

I will just mark it for sweeping for duplicants and set priority to 1.

[Thorgrimr]

Originally posted by Jarcionek:

To be honest, I don't think it's worth using Sweepers and Rails at all. I have different structures in different places, some natural tiles left to support wild plants etc. I cannot just dig out everything and expect all items to be on the ground. Building the sweepers and rails system for that is not worth the effort in my view.

I will just mark it for sweeping for duplicants and set priority to 1.

I did somehting very similar. Used 4 automatic dispensers (unpowered so they drop everything "instantly"), carefully selected all the materials needed (no criter eggs for example, sweep only) and used the move debries tool with a priority of 4 or less in diferent areas as i needed. It was a long process tho, but didnt had any iddle dupes for a long time.