Situation: At first things go alright, but even as I'm getting into the third or forth day I begin to see the characters making hesitating movements. This is not caused by what they are doing, but almost like a processing lag as everyone's doing their normal thing. Earlier today I had up to 60 townsfolk and although the hesitation were there, they weren't an annoyance. Till I put down the 3rd stockpile. Pretty decent 20x25 size, and all the characters slowed down to a single movement every 2 to 3... Ticks? yeah we'll go with ticks. The beetles need not be picked on in this post : ) This for me has been going on since I got the game way back in 28 or less build, and after giving it some time, I believe it's time I really address this. The movements of the villagers and the enemies are under the same Chugging factor of delay, however, farms and other non-(living?) things run at a normal pace. I have an i7 machine with plenty of graphics card, memory, etc to handle anything out there. That being said I fall back on one (perhaps) idea that may be of relevance. insert---tried all the usual stuff in config, steam and game prefs that I could try with (easy) access, regardless no change to what I'm writing here for better or worse. If anyone remembers Diablo 3 before Reaper of Souls, they will remember the Chug or Lag when players entered your game or ... well something else... Anyway, there was a command code that could be put into the shortcut to pretty much eliminate that by 'tricking' the game into believing it was running on a dual-core machine... Something along the lines of [cmd.exe /c start "" /affinity 0x5]. This is not exact but those smarter then me of these kinds of things will understand what it is. So... finally.... about time you rambling bandit, sheesh, my NCO's are gonna fall asleep listening to you... (cough cough) Q1. Is there a command line that can be inserted into the start shortcut that would cause this game to attempt to utilize the processer as a dual core, if not/so, then what else might there be to help with this. Q2. is everyone having the same issue and just likes the game enough to keep starting over and trying to stick with one regular sized stockpile Q3. Are there other areas that I should be looking at within the files / cfg / ini files that I haven't thought of or Q4. Is there something that is completely simple/stupid that I've missed all this time One more thing. And completely off topic. If you have a crew working in the kitchen, the Active stoves they are cooking on when you Conscript them are no longer available. I've made it a point that that crew never gets conscripted : ) Back to chasing Fishpeople around, Sethius
Sethius, Thanks for the report -- these things are so valuable. Does the 'chugging' interrupt the animation (which would mean it was a graphics problem)? Or are you getting the 'walking in place' stuttering (which would be a simulation problem -- which is what I suspect). There are still some bugs and unoptimized bits that cause this kind of behaviour, especially when the number of citizens gets higher. (There is still a lot of optimization to do -- and sadly I'm looking forward to it as it's what I enjoy most). I generally test to see if the game can handle 150 citizens, but we've been adding so much new code lately there's so much to test. If it is the 'walking in place' scenario -- could you post a console.txt from a game where this happens. I've included a log of performance to help track down problems like this. (And for the record, the engine has been built from the ground up to be multithreaded -- it's kinda what I do. It'll take full advantage of dual core out of the box and I'm looking for ways to expand that to quad core). And no: nothing stupid on your side. It's either us or... cosmic rays. I will let somebody who isn't the systems guy answer your question about the work crew. Thanks again, Micah
I have also noticed this lag. I get it after 40+ colonists and it mirrors the report above. I have a 3 year old i5 2500k @ 3.30. 8gb ram. GTX 560Ti. W7. This is by far the most stable build. I had the game running for 9 hours yesterday without a crash. I saved several times but did not need to re-load. I built most modules but some remained un built although resources were there for them. I noticed that kitchen was largely ignored although it had plenty of workers set to do nothing but cook. The chemist also worked seldom and only made fertilizer although there were dozens of buckets of opium available. The chasing of a colonist by a fish man followed by several non firing soldiers across the map is a frustration. Still tend to miss notifications - maybe they should flash or something. Much more enjoyable than it was a month ago.
The chugging is under the Walking in place stuttering. as for the console.txt, I didn't see one in the files of the game, however I'm suspecting it's the windowed box that pops up whenever there is an "XPersonHadNightmare="MissingTeddyBearCommand"" I ask this before I run program again, edit may erase this message how do I activate the console window in game to gain information that would be useful to you?
test results part 1 Affinity is the windows term to utilize the cores that your machine is running Mine is running 4 cores with hyperthreading, so it shows 8 cores Start game, when at main menu, press your windows key then open up your Windows Task Manager or CTRL+ALT+DELETE and do same. Under processes find ClockworkEmpire.exe, right click on it and click "Select Affinity" Test results for choosing 0 2 4 6 that were available smoothed the chugging out quite a bit, but there was still a bit of hesitance Test results for choosing 0 2 only. Much better. What this does is allow the game to just use the cores of your processor you choose. When done at the main menu when game is loaded, it will continue until you close the game, HOWEVER; when you go to start the game again, the DEFAULT setting of using all cores will return. I did not run a test for just a single core... sorry, other idea hit me, hence Part 2 below 1 test with a single core = yuck
Test results Part 2 Utilizing just the 2 cores (0/2) under processes I made the following tests in regards to STOCKPILES game saved had the following 19x19 (first one) =361 squares 18x6 (second one) = 108 squares 17x6 (third one) = 102 squares ------------------------- 571 squares total Test Part 1 was commenced with these in place each time with around 60+ townsfolk Added: a.44x35 squares === Ouch, chuggyness stepped way up b.4 sets of 15x15 === a little better but not all that much c.19x19 === good with a touch of chuggyness +12x12=== getting worse +12x12=== ugg the correlation of the number/size of stockpiles going up has a bigger impact on the hesitance and chuggyness more then the number of villagers you have at your disposal My next game I'm going to attempt to make my first stockpile a 35x35 square and see what happens. All these attempts were done from a saved game that had 60+ townsfolk and about 18 days in, load try repeat. Thank you all, and I hope this helps in some small way Sethius followup: new game created, made a stockpile that was 47x45 and chuggyness came into effect. ---Note:wasn't so much at the second I placed it, but the more townsfolk that began to interact with it caused it to really start hesitating.
Damn dude. I like the way you approach this! I have a very similar setup to you (i5 3450 (can't hyperthread afaik) / GTX 560 / 8gb ddr3 / w7(64)), so I think i'll try to play with this in the evening as well.
