Feedback Stop Making Content and Optimize

Although my message is clear, I want to elaborate shortly. You guys at Chucklefish have been making impressive leaps and bounds with the content that makes up Starbound. That being said, stop, and take a step back. More than more toys to play with, the majority of players want OPTIMIZATION. Everywhere you look in the Starbound community, people are complaining about the game being slow, lag spikes, the weather, and in general the poor optimization of Starbound; which seems to have always been a problem with Chucklefish. Take a look at Risk of Rain. A similarly amazing game, tons of fun; but it's so unoptimized it may as well be a rusty arcade machine of a game. The Chucklefish team needs to get on top of making Starbound run smoothly and not use so much RAM and CPU (it's somehow using 123% percent of mine- yes, above 100%) so people can properly enjoy it. Honestly, it's just making me want to learn coding faster, so I can make a better and smoother game of the same kind; just so the poor people that have to put up with this can enjoy a Starbound-like game without raging at the performance. I mean come on, mousing over the Arc Portal gives you 1 FPS; and I'm not exaggerating, it's awful. Please fix your game, and stop throwing more content at us. If you don't have someone who can optimize it right now, get someone, it's a serious problem.

EDIT: To illustrate how bad the problem is, I've taken a small section of my CPU usage to show everyone. kernel_task is the name for all the functions in my computer making it run. http://imgur.com/a/A0jZL

It's a bad sign when a game uses five times more CPU than the computer does; and this is a full desktop computer, with the best bits I could get it with, not a dinky laptop.

 

I can feel your pain bro, I really do, and those lag spikes, serious problem.. But Im too hyped up for 1.3 although I know that so much new content will screw my computer

Plus: I use a laptop, and the only place I can play without the interference of the dreaded lagginess is the outpost, (not the ark area however, that portal is what i'd call a baby boomer, but the babies are lag and overuse of ze CPU )

 

Really, I just think that it's disgusting that they'd keep pumping out so much content without making the game properly playable.

 

Hmm, the problem is that there's lack of content once you reach the endgame, that's why many people play with tons of mods and FU is so popular. Mods shouldn't be the only option to fix what game lacks. So new content is welcome. It's sad to see many good ideas and great mods that could get implemented into vanilla without even slightest change having them in vanilla.

But you are right when it comes to optimization. My ship is laggy because of chests and crew. My 20 tenant colony is also a lag factory. Unfortunately it's not just NPCs, I tried to made a room with small chests with each chest containing different building block so everything could be sorted. Now even looking at these chests make the game almost unplayable. But sometimes everything of it doesn't happen directly after opening the game, for some time everything is smooth unless you load your game directly in area like that, then it's laggy. The game needs optimization and content, I agree that optimization should be a quite big priority.

Something is extremely messed up with graphics. I don't know how even beefy hardware can't handle 2D pixelated game but it's definitely problem with the game. I don't know how it is on your OS, but on Windows you can force refresh of the game window when it lags heavily, for example by minimizing and then maximizing the game and you get FPS boost and smooth playing for a 2-3 seconds until the lag hits again. It's a proof that it's problem with the game. Game barely handles fully equipped ship with crew. Who knows, maybe optimization could open a way for some more demanding content. I have a feeling that they will have to rewrite entire graphic rendering from scratch if they want to fix it, that's why they aren't doing it. Astroneer devs have the same problem, when they wrote the code first time they didn't expect the game to be that big so their game has now insane performance problems after some hours of playing but they are trying to fix it step by step and it's their priority.

 

From what I've found, the lag comes from the following: NPCs, storage containers, precipitation, water physics, all effects i.e. particles, animations in general, really. If their graphics rendering is this bad, they shouldn't be using it in the first place. They've had since pre-alpha back when you built a satellite dish to call Dreadwing to fix this; and nothing has changed. If anything, it's worse.

 

Kind of upsetting that this thread died.

 

My lag problems went away quite a while ago, maybe the same happened for other people as well.

 

Maybe. For me, the most recent update with the mechs - albeit extremely cool and engaging - has brought about lag spikes for me, all the time, at random times. There's also fixed ones whenever I teleport in and out of locations.

 

Not everyone on the dev team is a programmer, so halting content creation is rather silly.

Further, starbound is inherently mostly so I dependant. This is the nature of procedurally generated worlds. The gpu isn't doing the generation, and the graphical demand us quite low. The game using more processing power than the computer kwrnal itself is not anything to complain about. The kernal isn't doing much compared to the game egine.

You didn't even bother to post your specs.

 

Optimization is grand and all but Laz has a point, not everyone in Chuckiefisk is a programmer. I want optimizations as much as the next person but I also want mechanics and features ironed out as well, like only human bandits and quests sending you to the other side of the planet multiple times.

 

I wholeheartedly agree =3

 

Yep. I get random lag spikes and sometimes the issue of chunks not loading. No idea what causes this though. Maybe it's the steam overlay as I do sometimes use it to browse the internet in-game.