Impressive lag on planet

Hello everyone, enjoying your game ?

I am, a lot ! Patience has been rewarded. Congrats to the dev for this new stable update ! =)

I am, unfortunately, experiencing an interesting bug - lag on one of the planet.

Here is the situation :

I am playing in multiplayer with a friend of mine (and sometime another one). I am running the server on my PC without any problems.
Ingame, I finally beat the first boss and wanted to test a new planet of another system. A "Mostly Harmless" one for a start.

The planet in question is the one attached, named "Gamma Iota CMa 387 VII b", of the solar system "Gamma Iota CMa 387". It is a forest planet.


When I first beamed down to it, I realized I couldn't put any torches on the ground. Several seconds later, I realized i DID put a lot of them ! I experienced a massive lag ! As if my ping rose up in any game though it is not the case.

I was afraid the new planets were going to lag as well but no, another "Mostly Harmless" planet I tested was just fine.

My player could move easily, but everything else was slow to respond. Enemies, mining, even the map itself (just like in minecraft when sometime you see the chunks being loaded up).

I am opening this thread to ask you if you had the same problem ? Is it because we are still in the beginning of this new update ?
Is it something from the server, the planet, my game ?

Thanks a lot for any advice / help / anything.

Happy Starbounding !

 

Did you explore the surface entirely... One possibility it could be due to some dungeon having wire stuff, like the apex testing facility. Just things to check out.

I know on my single player runs it lags only around places with lots of wiring. Well spikes in lag really, that die down eventually. But that is in single player.

Could be a latency problem due to these type of facilities. Where you get lag from them normally and being in mulitplayer would amplify the problem do to having to ping a server and waiting on that server to send its' info back.

Other than that I really don't know what could cause such, but is something to check out. Does that same planet lag in your single player experience as well?

I am just giving out ideas, and only guessing, but hope it helps in narrowing down what within game.

Outside game making sure not much is running at the same time usually helps, but I am assuming you had already done that.

 

Thanks for the ideas, I'll test them later when I'll be alone, it might be the answer !

I'll report back here in case I found something

Cheers!

 

I hope they fix the lag issues eventually.

 

Reporting back!

Solo or Multi doesn't change anything, still lags.

The lags are quite important (20sec to load a portion of the planet. At least there is an invisible wall so you don't fall into oblivion).

I went East (right) and lags everywhere. I encountered a boss (and survived easily as it wasn't doing anything). Still same lags after advancing further...

I went West (left) and lags everywhere, but I encountered a MASSIVE Avian (bird people) city (soon after beacon start)

I did not reach the end because I had other things to do and it was quite slow to load the rest of the planet anyway....

Maybe it has something to do with this village, I don't know...

In the meantime, there's plenty of other planets to visit ! =D

 

Quite possible, only way to test that particular theory of the village is to find another one on another planet.

If that one lags as well, then I can say it is a strong possibility.

That is a nice run of tests. Generation in terrain shouldn't affect much. Structures, ie dungeons & cities, might have a little impact. More so in earlier unstable & nightly build. I only know of unstable as that is the one I play on. (which note is the same as stable right now far as I know.)

Is odd though that it does this, I might have a look but those coordinates are extremely far from where my start is. Since my start probably got changed, but kept the same home coordinates and places marked. I haven't booted up another new character to see. I just know worlds were refreshed some time ago when the stable hit for obvious reasons (unstable playing)

Anyway at least you know the specific planet to avoid and maybe what to keep in mind if sighted again similar behavior in another planet. I just know it only lag spikes with me in single player with wiring, but settles down. Doesn't do what you have described. Haven't run into any planets that did that yet. Well happy adventure to you, as I'll probably do the same when I get a chance.

 

This "lag" is new to the update, but is happening to a lot of people apparently. Anyone can test this by replaying the first mining mission. Run through the base without killing anything and eventually the enemies don't even try to attack you anymore. They're just frozen or only moving slightly. This occurs less often when there's not much going on, but it's noticeable a lot when doing a lot of digging, as it will appear your mining tool stopped working, then suddenly all of the blocks will just disappear.

 

That may be so, but I happen to be one that it is not as much effect. My lag usually dies down after a while and stabilizes to a degree, or at least that is what it appears. I have noticed many posting this and that, but since I have not begun on stable I can't really say much on it. So it might be generalized with the update as you mentioned, but also might have more so in specific instances as well.

It is all about narrowing down what causes most of it. The mining facility I have not had any lag unless I run on the direct x version; oddly since I thought that was meant for windows computers primarily. Mine runs better on the open gl 32 & 64, 64 being the one recently I am using.

It will vary with each system granted, as each pc is not build the same, nor has the same apps & programs; that just shows difference in people's preference anyhow in what they keep on their system.

Regardless there are probably many causes, but have found where mine spikes; and that is usually around wiring of some kind. which makes sense. Or when something like steam decides to download while I am playing. Really aught to play without steam running in those instances, as it does run better for me without it running. Not by much, but stops the auto update that I like to have on with the games. Also when other external programs decide to update on their own. Not much I can do with that, but wait til they are finished. Namely the virus protection software.

I may not get much as others experiencing, but can understand the basics that people are. Just makes me wonder what portion, but yes entities can cause that effect, as it did in an earlier unstable build... So it is to look out for things like that to narrow down.

That is a good thing to check out as well, and all dungeons, villages, mini-dungeons... Might be rendering errors or something else bogging this or that down. We will have to see and keep mentioning it until it gets better. Helpful when people point out things like that. So feedback is always welcome.

The more info on the matter the better I always say.

 

I've been experiencing this as well but only on one planet. I'm playing single player and only have one mod running and it's just a vanity outfit so I don't think the mod is the culprit. The lag on this particular planet was bad enough to make me quit exploring it and I moved to another planet and everything runs fine there. Before I started playing on the new stable update I made sure that I deleted the contents of my player and universe folders so as to have a clean start. Not really sure what was the problem on that one planet because everywhere else Ive traveled has been fine. Also may be worth noting that I didn't see any large structures on the planet. No huge Avian temples or anything.

 

^It's related to this almost certainly.
There are places that lag badly on my machine even in single player, and they're all either:
1) Large villages (like the Outpost especially)
2) Complex dungeons (like the Apex testing facility)

I suspect it's due to the massive number of scripts running for NPCs and wired gadgets in those areas, but I'm not certain as to why those assets would cause that yet. (bad optimization?)

 

I don't know about bad optimization, but might need more. I mean you can only optimize so far before you are running into something that has a possibility to be the reverse, like certain new content yet to be added.

But scripts kind of makes sense, however for me it was entities and wiring... So not all villages and dungeons have that spike.

Granted as you mentioned I notice more when large amounts of entities and wiring mostly, but yes those probably just need more optimization, and I am sure they will get to those over time gradually when they can. After all there is still the rest of the adventure path, and the other 2 paths to be added needed to be done.

The apex testing facility is mainly the wires all over the place. if you have ever seen how many wires goes in to that, it is like running a complex redstone device on minecraft, it will cause a bit of lag on some machines. So in theory it is the logic that is slowing all this down. Scripting I would think would be quick to process in comparison to that. Even if similar. Still stands though a possibility since the more things running within the game at once the more the processor has to process. So then it will be more or less at which the speed it goes through all that.

Which should be rather quick; for all we know it could be due to bugs or glitches, which is another possibility; hence narrowing things down to have at least a direction or place to look. I am in no way a programmer, but do know this and that in basic conception of it. Layout mainly, if that...

So in short the game will always need to be optimized to a degree while all this is still in development towards the final product. I can say though it has reduced in those areas since early unstable thankfully. Still though...

My guess is it is mainly on the rendering, as in villages there are many many entities. All those objects laying around plus the npcs moving around, and sometimes even the npcs in combat with other npcs. Reason I mentioned entities.

Back to the apex facility all those shocky things are entities as well, but on top of that they may have overlapping sounds. That is a lot of sound coming from one facility, even if not all of them are heard, it still plays along with keeping those entities viewable. Then there is the wiring on top of that. So there is a lot going on in those facilities in comparison to the villages.

 

hmmm weird because ive started getting serious FPS problems on magma planets. i have no clue if its the fire rain but dam i cannot for the life of me scout the surface of any magma planet

 

Come to think of it, the planet I had trouble on was magma as well.

 

something tells me they messed up on optimization on this