Closed Lag and slow gameplay

Welcome to game development. Please understand what this means. The game is not finished, is changing often, and is prone to issues.

The game performed better way back when because the game didn't do a whole hell of a lot. Now the game does a hell of a lot more, but the code isn't optimized, so it runs poorly.

 

i know i was playing about 5 mods on it like 1-2 months ago and worked fine
:I and i know its still in beta and its prone to issues but i think they should at least make a quick patch fixing the lag issue for now

 

As I said in your other thread, and here, the issue is code optimization, or lack there of. That isn't something you can make a "quick patch" for. Code optimization is one of the last things you do.

 

I have a little config that fix a lot in my pc (shit with feet) with only a AMD 1.63 Gh, 2 Gb Ram and a Nvidia Geforce 7200(i dont remember the name of the video board so much :c), I run the game so better with openGl and a mod called "Fps Booster V3" and it was a bigger diference.
Sorry for my bad english :c

 

I've seen numerous complaints, but I don't get lag at all from vanilla Starbound. I leave VSYNC on and keep a consistent 60FPS. And my specs aren't particularly impressive
8 core AMD FX 3.1 GHz
16GB RAM
NVIDIA 560 Ti for primary
NVIDIA 9800 for PhysX (which I don't think Starbound makes use of)
I have a SSD but Starbound isn't running off it.

But then I may be doing something relevant that helps. I run 64 bit OpenGL and I think that's what everyone SHOULD be doing. But I don't think that addresses the larger problems.

In Starbound/win64 there is a file called sbboot.cfg
and one of the top lines has this

Code:

"loadThreads" : 1,

which I changed to this

Code:

"loadThreads" : 8,

After all I have 8 cores.

That very well could explain why I'm more resistant to lag.

I did some stuff modding that pulled me down into the upper 30s for FPS and that involved a LOT of objects(far more than a screen's worth) with rapidly cycling animation. This would be like Outpost x 100. Also they where all light sources, but I don't think the light engine is the issue. After shrinking my object's PNG files in PNG Gauntlet(which doesn't actually hurt image quality but reduces files sizes), that brought me back into the 50s for FPS without having changed anything else! Now I'm increasing the animation cycle time considerably for these objects before releasing them (and and considering cutting animation entirely) but that isn't the point.

So here is what I think we can take away.

1. loadThreads should probably be increased by default, and for now you should consider just editing it yourself. I don't think there are many out there who don't at least have 4 cores(2 cores with hyper-threading is close enough) so I'd set this to 4 for vanilla. Or better yet have the launcher detect how many cores and set this accordingly. Even if it was set higher than their actual core count, it would just hurt efficiency a bit and that's much better than setting it to 1.

2. Starbound isn't handling asset loading well. More to the point I think it is reloading the assets every time the frame changes which means it reloads them far too often. Then other parts of the engine are waiting on the asset to load. That's likely the reason why a file size reduction has a dramatic improvement in performance. I'd assume they'd end up in cache but that doesn't seem to help much. Starbound should just keep all the image frames in memory (instead of reloading the asset) even if that does require a bit more RAM. The performance boost/lag reduction is well worth it. Very few people anymore have so little RAM that this should be a concern. Perhaps the even better idea is to keep them in the GPU's RAM directly.

Doing small little things to tweak performance is something you do after 1.0 and indeed that is the plan. These changes are more fundamental engine fixes and shouldn't wait. You want to get 1.0 right and putting this off could WILL hurt you in reviews. But one lazy fix they could do today is to run all their PNG files though PNG Gauntlet. It would also have the effect of shrinking the size of updates thus saving bandwidth for them and us. You have to rerun if for a PNG every time you edit it, but that still isn't so bad.

And changing that value in sbboot.cfg is also pretty easy to do. To call that a hotfix would be an exaggeration.