Want to solve for fps/lag?

[Rasputin]

Here are some things I have learned.

• First off the person hosting probably shouldnt be hosting a 16 man server.
  
• Few/ no mods if playing campaign.
  
• How many items are bouncing around inside the ship? 10? 20? 100? Each time those objects move (ie, Moloc bumps the ship, water enters room, ship hits walls), it causes a sound file to play, so you end up with thousands of things happening on your computer every second. It has to calculate physics of every item bouncing around. On my ship, there are no additional items laying around. Zero (other than a few divesuits and ammo boxes.. We clean it every round (especially before big fights or in late campaign)
  
• As few containers as possible. I have noticed that extra containers creates a lot of FPS drop. Every time a player dies they leave a duffle bag and a toolbelt, + other items. Keep those items to a minimum. Do not have a Metal Storage container for every type of mineral. You need to deconstruct containers and toss out trash items (id cards, bodies, extra dufflebags, monstor corpses, partial minerals) every round. Every cabinet should be organized to use few slots. Deconstruct, toss, deconstruct is key. Fabricate and shoot is key too (convert 3 items into 1 and shoot it at a monster)
  
• Make sure items are stacked. Dont have 3 oxygen tanks next to a stack of 3 oxygen tanks. Combine them into one and make sure they are filled.
  
• Quartermaster is a full time job
  
• Some vanilla subs + modded subs are not performance friendly. They have bad programming with machines, too many lights, too big, too many items, too many things happening at once. Oh your sub is a mile long and has 16 coilguns, 64 junction boxes and
  an armory with enough guns to arm a brigade? Open sub you want to use before you start campaign in submarine editor and look at the stats on the upper left. Is everything red and orange? then it will likely have performance issues. Look around or build your own small subs. I will be releasing simple straightforward vanilla subs I built on workshop soon.
  
• Small subs + small crew (3,4,5,6 is plenty of fun). Turn up the respawn timer as well. This makes for less corpses laying around because of crew turnover, and respawn shuttle doesnt spawn in every 30 seconds during a fight and start humping the top of your sub or drag it down into the depths.
  
• Undertow probably needs to add more objects for cleaning up objects.

Keep these rules as captain and you will have way less FPS drop. Especially the FPS drop that you will start to see in mid-late game (why? Because your sub got filled up with items between early game and now) (containers are the real killer ive noticed)

[Buggy Boy]

It's unfortunate that there are more minerals / materials than would fit in one of those large cabinets, so perhaps ideally one would have two large cabinets next to the fabricator, but then it's not possible to reliably link two cabinets and have them displayed on the screen which is annoying. Without metal storage containers one would be limited to only 8 of each material, and there are times when a lot more than this is required.

[Rasputin]

Originally posted by Buggy Boy:

It's unfortunate that there are more minerals / materials than would fit in one of those large cabinets, so perhaps ideally one would have two large cabinets next to the fabricator, but then it's not possible to reliably link two cabinets and have them displayed on the screen which is annoying. Without metal storage containers one would be limited to only 8 of each material, and there are times when a lot more than this is required.

You're right.

My typical set up is 1 large cabinet attached to fabricator. Metal storage containers are stuffed to the brim with items. No matter what type. As long as its a stack of 5-6 items+ inside, then I dont care that they are mixed.

Every few rounds I go through and take items with stacks of 1 or 2 and combine the stacks.

So in 1 big large cabinet, depending on how far along we are I have between 5-15 storage containers max. All full. Rather than 25-30 containers all with different amounts.

[I HATE PEOPLE]

In my opinion the problem is really with the underlying resource usage of the game's processes. It doesn't seem to use multiple processor threads. CPU usage is always low for me, and yet the game lags when there's a lot going around. Not sure how the devs would address this from a technical perspective though.

[Buggy Boy]

Originally posted by COVID:

In my opinion the problem is really with the underlying resource usage of the game's processes. It doesn't seem to use multiple processor threads. CPU usage is always low for me, and yet the game lags when there's a lot going around. Not sure how the devs would address this from a technical perspective though.

Using multi-threading introduces overheads and potential problems that could make tracking bugs etc much harder, and could also make lower end systems less viable. If the devs can just recover the performance levels they had only a couple of updates ago then I think most fps problems will go away.

[夕妍]

D=< darn devs , aside from adding things, they should stick more to fixing things

[Rasputin]

Originally posted by Princess Muu-Muu:

Yeah. Just play the game without half the features and have a skeleton ship with no countermeasures to anything. Problem solved. :captainclown:

What features are being removed? All these new ships are basically super carriers when you compare them to the size of subs in early early access. You can build in any counter measures you want, you have to build it properly.

Items being cleaned is not really a feature its just a unspoken requirement because of the item/container build up over time in a campaign or level.

[ELi]

You make a lot of good points, and most are certainly true. But I'm afraid most of these are work-arounds for problems that only the devs can fix (or those building from source).
And they are more or less impacting the general game play in a bad way.

There are more things you can do to get better fps, at the cost of playability.
- You can set dead body despawn delay to 30 seconds from the default 10 minutes.
- Disable enemy spawns completely. Would run much better but be a dull world.
- Only play in Single Player.

And about items stored in containers (like stationary cabinets), they should not impact gameplay fps. If it currently does (I haven't tested myself) the devs should look into sqlite or another database for storing items.

Mods and the like and custom subs. There will always be those that are too demanding to run, and not the devs responsibility.

But I think that the base game, in multiplayer with 16 people, vanilla subs should run without any major problems regarding FPS. The whole campaign and back. And that you should be able to have 10 000 clown masks stored in cabinets if you wanted to.

[Darkside99x]

Originally posted by Princess Muu-Muu:

Yeah. Just play the game without half the features and have a skeleton ship with no countermeasures to anything. Problem solved. :captainclown:

Worked for Space Engineers.

[Rasputin]

Originally posted by ELi:

You make a lot of good points, and most are certainly true. But I'm afraid most of these are work-arounds for problems that only the devs can fix (or those building from source).
And they are more or less impacting the general game play in a bad way.

There are more things you can do to get better fps, at the cost of playability.
- You can set dead body despawn delay to 30 seconds from the default 10 minutes.
- Disable enemy spawns completely. Would run much better but be a dull world.
- Only play in Single Player.

And about items stored in containers (like stationary cabinets), they should not impact gameplay fps. If it currently does (I haven't tested myself) the devs should look into sqlite or another database for storing items.

Mods and the like and custom subs. There will always be those that are too demanding to run, and not the devs responsibility.

But I think that the base game, in multiplayer with 16 people, vanilla subs should run without any major problems regarding FPS. The whole campaign and back. And that you should be able to have 10 000 clown masks stored in cabinets if you wanted to.

Good points from you & thanks for the extra suggestions. Although they are a bit harsh (maybe not dead body despawns)

You are right about the game should allow for 16 player subs easily. However currently it does not work with 100% performance like it used to.

That is why I made this thread. If you find yourself in a sub and the performance has dropped, this is what you can do to regain some performance. As a captain in a 99% complete campaign public server, I used these tricks in my first post to end the game smoothly with several more players. We killed 100's of monsters, worms, and looted tons of items, shot 10's of thousands of rounds and fps lag was almost none.

This is not a message to the devs or a commentary on whats wrong with the game. Simply stating how to fix some fps and lag.

[Eightball]

Originally posted by Rasputin:

Good points from you & thanks for the extra suggestions. Although they are a bit harsh (maybe not dead body despawns)

Screw that, I need my alien blood.

The devs have to fix their engine.

Originally posted by Buggy Boy:

Using multi-threading introduces overheads and potential problems that could make tracking bugs etc much harder, and could also make lower end systems less viable. If the devs can just recover the performance levels they had only a couple of updates ago then I think most fps problems will go away.

Lets be honest, it's 2022, if you don't have a multi core processor, then that's your problem, what are you doing trying to play modern games with a single core processor, lol. You've got more issues than barotrauma.

I tested it out anyway, it's nothing to do with the amount of items in your storage cabinets, it's purely monster spawns (and monster bodies) causing the lags. It's not water currents, either. And the bodies / monsters cause big ones, massive drops when monsters are spawned. Feel free to check it out yourself, try spawning 10-20 tiger threshers or crawlers, watch your FPS bottom out. Kill them, and watch your FPS still bottomed out. I know Buggy Boy knows of my testing, but if anyone else cares, I made a post on my results further down the forum. And it's an easy test to do yourself "enablecheats", "spawn "tigerthresher" cursor" x10-20. Watch your FPS go from 200+ to under 40- in an instant. And stay there even when they are dead.

[Buggy Boy]

Originally posted by Eightball:

Lets be honest, it's 2022, if you don't have a multi core processor, then that's your problem, what are you doing trying to play modern games with a single core processor, lol. You've got more issues than barotrauma.

Heh, well I don't expect anyone to be playing much on even a dual core these days, but I'll bet there are plenty of otherwise viable quad and six core CPUs around, I actually have an old AMD X3 (not my main gaming system) which I think is a three core from around the Core2Duo era, Baro did run OK on that system a couple of updates ago, a bit choppy in big multiplayer games but playable. I'm not saying that the game should be compromised to accommodate every old system out there, but clearly plenty of people are having problems so if the devs aim for the lowest common denominator then for everyone else it should be plain sailing.

My own experience with items would confirm to me that they also play a big part in fps. Test thusly: 8 bots (or maybe players, I've only done this with bots), two dufflebags full of stacked items each, watch the fps totally tank as you order them all to follow you around (inside the sub while docked). Have a couple of the bots drop their bags and the fps returns to usable. If it was just the bots and their AI then carrying bags wouldn't make any difference.

[Eightball]

Originally posted by Buggy Boy:

snip

Hm, I haven't tested the bag thing, maybe i'll have to do that. I really hope they get these issues fixed sooner rather than later.

https://imgur.com/a/e2SXU7n

11% of people are still on 2 cores. I'm guessing it's mostly old laptops, though.

[climbingeastofwinter]

Can't someone just make some binaries for us that'll run the game in parallel off of an nvidia rtx 30xx card? There aren't many problems a few thousand cores working together can't overcome.

Edit: This is sort of a joke. Unless someone really wants to do it.

[Buggy Boy]

Originally posted by climbingeastofwinter:

Can't someone just make some binaries for us that'll run the game in parallel off of an nvidia rtx 30xx card? There aren't many problems a few thousand cores working together can't overcome.

Edit: This is sort of a joke. Unless someone really wants to do it.

I think that would likely open a rift in space and time, allowing beasts of chaos into our realm, starting an era of despair and death about the earth.

[JossyFoxxy]

Dude the game runs on a single core... there's nothing to be done.