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Bug/Issue Game performance (Lags)

Discussion in 'Starbound Support' started by Cat_Fuzz, Sep 20, 2016.

  1. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    Yeah, lag caused by Steam was supposed to have been fixed by the last patch, but apparently not completely. I haven't played through steam in over 2 years. No reason for it.
     
  2. Jilly Bob the Third

    Jilly Bob the Third Star Wrangler

    Of course starbound would run on a mid range pc. Not a toaster but a step up from a toaster.
     
  3. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    What is your point? Your posts are making very little sense and don't seem to really relate to anything.
     
  4. Jilly Bob the Third

    Jilly Bob the Third Star Wrangler


    GaryTheBeer said:
    Not sure if this was directed at me, but if so, I play many high end games without exiting Steam, and have no problem with lag in those games - even with other processes and applications running at the same time. This was a specific fix that caused Starbound to work without lagging.

    I'm saying starbound doesn't need a big beefy computer to run, I have gotten it to run quite well on a 1.7 ghz core I3
     
  5. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    He never said otherwise. So what is your point?
     
  6. Jilly Bob the Third

    Jilly Bob the Third Star Wrangler

    I already stated my damn point.
     
  7. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    What does it have to do with this topic? You aren't making any sense at all.
     
  8. Jilly Bob the Third

    Jilly Bob the Third Star Wrangler

    I'm just going to drop this and hope you do the same.
     
  9. Silverforte

    Silverforte Spaceman Spiff

    My previous post got deleted but I'll just remake it. The game has had performance issues since alpha, a lot of them have not been fixed. Getting an SSD can help with exploring because as you move around, the game is having to render new places and objects (blocks, entities). A faster read/write speed (HDD is bad for this with games) can help with performance issues in this regard. A decent GPU can help but the game seems more dependent on a mid-range to higher grade CPU and SSD. I had an HDD and it was terrible, upgrading helped but the issues remain. You can't make this game run perfectly in every situation. They say there will be performance enhancements or optimizations in just about EVERY forthcoming update, yet all these years later and it still runs like ass. A lot of these "fixes" people are listing in this thread won't help at all and I see a lot of placebo effect here. Your best bet is to play with vsync ON through your control panel (nvidia) and in full screen, not windowed. Also, having a lot of mods or using frackin universe can cause framerate problems as the game seems to get bogged down the more mods it has to load even if they're not being rendered.
     
  10. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    Basically true, but seems to be based on incomplete understanding.

    You are assuming any performance problems all stem from the same issues, which is incorrect.

    Having an SSD only helps with loading things into memory faster. It has nothing to do with rendering. Once in memory, the SSD is almost not used. So in theory, you could force the game to load into memory completely and there would be next to no load times again. Having an HDD isn't bad, but it is less than ideal. Modern games are demanding faster access to data with greater throughput, which is beneficial for all programs, but especially so for games with high res textures. You want to get those textures out of storage and into memory as fast as possible to avoide game lag or texture pop-ins.

    You can't make any game run perfectly in any situation, so trying to use that to single out Starbound is moot.

    There objectively have been many many performance improvements. this is an objective fact that relates to my first point. You seem to be assuming that any performance problems stem from the same issues.

    The reason why people say to turn off Vsync is because it causes problems whenever there is lag of any kind. It will try to keep the framerate constant, and it does that by basically filling in the frame gaps artificially. In more extreem cases, this can cause a "slow motion" effect, which most do not like.

    The reason why it is suggested to run the game in windowed mode is because the game doesnt have full control of your display, Windows does, and Windows will try to keep the display updating at its set refresh rate, which is usually 60Hz (60FPS), and also means the game isn't using vsync. This also has the benefit of minimizing screen tearing and stuttering, also it allows you to interact with other programs withou't interrupting the game since the display doesn't need to switch between the game's input back to Windows. Very useful for people with more than one monitor, like myself. (Once you go 2, you never go back.)

    Having a lot of mods doesn't hurt your framerate, but it does increase loading times at the start of the game, so that is related to the hard drive. What does hurt your framerate with mods is dependent on what content it adds. If it causes a lot of scripts to load and execute repeatedly, for example, will cause an impact on performance because those scripts are eating up CPU time that could be better used elsewhere. Also, this is why the game worlds are broken into chunks that are loaded and unloaded dynamically off screen. If the whole world remaind loaded even if you weren't there, the game (And thus computer) would have to process EVERYTHING going on at once. Meaning any water calculations, AI, weather effects, etc. This is why large colonies are quite the performance hit. there is a lot going on that your computer now needs to process.
     
  11. Silverforte

    Silverforte Spaceman Spiff

    You argue with everything people say on these forums all day long but you have no idea what you're talking about.

    You read into something that was never there in my post:

    "You are assuming any performance problems all stem from the same issues, which is incorrect." I never thought this. I was clarifying with the person I was talking to not to assume too much because there are too many incomplete variables in the game and with the way it works.

    My understanding comes from hosting 3 dedicated servers with custom mods and switching hardware to perform tests. An increase in mods DOES affect framerate when loading into memory a player who was not previously there.

    For example, I just ran several tests as I try to relaunch a server. I start with no mods. Players outside of the stored memory approach each other, no stutter. I relaunch with 5 mods installed, one of which is Frackin. Because of the 100+ megs of mods now on everyone's machines (including the server's) there is now a delay in rendering (LOADING INTO MEMORY) for when players are called upon. I have the players approach each other after the mods are installed, 1.5 seconds of stutter as the increase in assets has delayed the efficiency of the game's ability to call data into memory. Mods do NOT only affect the initial bootup of the game and this is obvious to anyone who's played for more than 10 minutes with several mods installed on a server.

    Playing on other servers that use mods as a test to make sure it was not an isolated issue recreated this stutter for myself and others.

    In this game, rendering an object that was not previously there or explored (new chunks) can be helped IMMENSELY by a SSD. I have experienced this myself... Try driving a vehicle quickly from one side of a planet that has not been explored yet to the other on a server that has high CPU usage or low memory allocated to it. You WILL notice that the chunks begin rendering slower and slower as the game is trying to render these new chunks with fewer and fewer resources untied by previous information that has not been properly collected or removed from memory. It's extremely obvious, has been an issue complained about for years and does not call for a debate. It simply IS an issue.

    I also never said anyone should try to expect the game to run perfectly in any given situation. The performance updates you're claiming are "objective" have not helped the game get to a place where many people from a server hosting point of view would consider stable across the board. On a system with 32 gigs of ram, a 1gb/s connection, SSD, i7 processor, a server can be slowed to a crawl minutes after a fresh boot by people simply moving large quantities of a liquid or falling sand. The information is not properly trashed from memory, it simply stays there. On top of that, despite numerous claimed performance optimizations over the years, having more than 100 entities in an area can cause stutter. This would no longer be an issue as it has since ALPHA if there had been any significant optimizations in these areas as such claims have been made. If you host a server, you can see the data before your eyes which would disprove most of what you're saying... over and over, despite being corrected repeatedly. There are DROVES of people over the years who have provided data and complaints echoing what I've stated here. To argue with that is simply ignorant.
     
  12. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    I work in IT. It is literally my job to understand how computers perform. I don't argue with everything. I argue with people giving incorrect information.

    You were arguing that the game has long-standing performance problems since alpha. This is not true. Otherwise, citation necessary.

    Again, I work in IT. I manage many computers and several servers. Making sure the hardware is performing as it should is my job.

    the only way mods would impact performance is if they constantly need to be loaded from storage into memory. This is a hardware bottleneck usually with the hard drive, or not enough memory, so the game has to start using paged memory, which indeed would impact performance, but this is not directly a result of mods itself, it is a symptom of hardware inefficiencies. This is why having an SSD, or even an M.2 would seemingly eliminate this "framerate hit" of yours, because the bottleneck in the hardware has been removed.

    this can easily be tested. The game loads all mods when you start up the game. If the number of mods impacted frame rate like you say, then the title screen should show signs of this. However, at worst, the game might take a little bit to load up.

    It isn't the number of mods causing this, it is the amount of drive access being done.


    what you describe is a CPU bottleneck trying to generate new chunks, which is intensive work. It has little to do with the actual rendering process as the graphics of the game are simplistic and don't require much work to actually display on screen. Having an SSD or even a 5400RPM HDD would not change this. Well, it might if it starts getting into paged memory, but you should never have paged memory on an SSD. Otherwise it is dealing primaraly with RAM access.

    I never said you did. But you did say that you cant get Starbound to run perfectly in every situation as though this was an issue with Starbound, but the reality is, every game in history, past, present, and even future, has this issue.

    And that contradicts what I said.... how? The fact is there have been many performance updates, and they have all indeed improved performance across the board. I made no claim that it resolved all or most of the problems for everyone.

    Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You are dumping a high load of work on the processor and expecting it to plow on through it?

    Because... that is how computers work. They leave things in memory just in case it is necessary again. As new data comes in, it will dump data that hasnt been used in a while. And if you are implying that it doesn't even do this, then that is called a memory leak, which the game does not have. This is verifiable by just watching its memory usage. If it had a memory leak, then its usage would continually go up until it crashes.

    The game is processing the AI of 100 entities. What do you expect? Any game that runs well with 100 entities like that use very simplistic AI.

    IE Left 4 Dead. The AI is very basic and predictable. The levels have specific places where the AI can climb, they follow pre-defined paths, etc. In Starbound, the AI has no paths to follow, so it needs to calculate its pathing on the fly. This can be a lot of work.

    I have run a server. I have a personal server at home that I do all sorts of things to, including run game servers.
     
    Luthor614 likes this.
  13. enderwiggum

    enderwiggum Space Hobo

    Specs:
    GPU: GTX 1070
    CPU: i5 6600k
    RAM:16 GB
    OS: Windows 10 Home
    Running from an SSD

    I have been experiencing awful framerates since purchasing and installing this game. The game drops to 30 fps when it rains or when there are more than a few NPCs on screen. The game also hitches when warping to a new world or the ark as assets are loaded in piece by piece (my character is literally standing in a black void before the ground beneath him pops into existence). This sometimes happens even on the title screen.

    I love what I've been able to play of this game so far and I'd like to be able to experience more of it!
     

    Attached Files:

  14. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    Have you tried running the game directly from the exe? I wonder if it is related to the steam integration.

    Also try playing windowed, just to test. Do these individually though so you can see which one is actually having an effect, if any at all.
     
  15. CaptainTaz

    CaptainTaz Void-Bound Voyager

    Hiya, figured this thread is the place to post this.
    I recently bought starbound for a pal of mine, and me, her, and her boyfriend have all been playing. Early on performance was great, with only a stutter here and there.

    But I'm beginning to notice as time goes on that the game's performance is degrading drastically. I'm unsure if it's my mods (which are mostly cosmetic/music and simple features, the most invasive being a single race and "I want to drive/fly that van" mods.)

    Here are some examples of the performance drops:

    1. Game stutters while walking across a planet (FPS drops to 0 for a second, before everything resumes)
    2. An attack animation and impact sound will play when I hit something with a weapon, and the game will do 1 before killing an enemy.
    3. As I host through steam, my friends will stop moving on my end and they'll either experience a rubber-band effect or they'll teleport. (They report that I always am fine on their end. Also, internet is not the cause because we all have excellent internet.)
    4. This one is most prominent, breaking lots of blocks (background or foreground) with my 4x4 matter manipulator causes extreme versions of all three of the above, lasting between 1-3 seconds (which has killed them sometimes if we're digging downwards for ore.)

    I play this game windowed, and give the game priority via the task manager, and nothing changes at all. I've also monitored the task manager a bit and there tends to be CPU usage spikes whenever these stutters happen, though it never has used all of the CPU...

    Specs:
    Self-built desktop running on high performance mode
    OS: Windows 10 64-Bit
    GPU: GTX 950 2GB VRAM
    CPU: i5 6500 3.2GHz
    RAM 16GB

    to compare, I've hosted AND played a heavily modded Minecraft server/client simultaniously (Feed the Beast Infinity Evolved) with three other people with minimal to no performance issues, so I know this thing can take a lot of abuse, AND I built it less than 6 months ago so its not age either.

    Here's my mods I use (Figured it'd be easier to share the collection than spam up the thread with a mod list) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=915878274

    Any help would be appreciated.
     
  16. Gotcha!

    Gotcha! Pangalactic Porcupine

    5 weeks later, still waiting for help. I guess this post will be deleted as well; apparently it's easier to remove someone's voice than actually provide help. *thumbs up*
     
  17. CaptainTaz

    CaptainTaz Void-Bound Voyager

    I just realized I should probably also note that this lag has seemped into single player as well, I've been unable to mine on downtime when they're away because of it...
     
  18. enderwiggum

    enderwiggum Space Hobo

    Thanks for the reply. I tried both of those things with no improvement. The FPS bounces between 59 and 61 at its best and drops considerably at the ark. Can you make anything out from my log file?
     
  19. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    Unfortunately your log looks fine, and your system seems up to par, so I am out of ideas.

    It almost seems like a new issue if lag that has come up.
     
  20. MasterFoutsikas1922

    MasterFoutsikas1922 Void-Bound Voyager

    Hey guys,
    Here because obviously i have a problem.
    I've been playing this game since late Angry Koala - Early Furious Koala update, back then i had a seriously crappy pc but i could play the game "fine".
    I've been taking a break from the game from time to time. I started playing again about 5 days ago (fresh world and what not).
    I have no fps problems BUT, the world is either slow loading ( for example i will be walking and suddenly world hole that takes up to 10 seconds to load) or it will be something like ping lagg.
    I can walk and use items but everything around me is frozen, i will be attacking a monster then game freeze, suddenly unfreeze mob is dead. Also random lagg spikes (no fps drop).

    My specs are:
    Operating System: Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
    Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-6098P CPU @ 3.60GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
    RAM: 8Gb
    Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

    I'm running the game at 1920x1080 bordless (64bit version).
    Already tried fullscreen or windowed same problem.
     

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