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It's been 6 months since I asked about the stutter


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It's still there.  Someone voted for it and you probably have the thread in order of rating rather than date (it seems to default back to "sort by rating" every time you open the thread) so it's showing on page 1...

Edited by Padishar
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11 minutes ago, steve_v said:

NVM then, I may have overreacted a little. On a related note, this new "voting" thing is horrible... 

Yes, I agree.  It makes sense for some posts in this sub-forum (and the others in this section) but it tends to confuse anything that turns into a discussion rather than a simple question.

There was a thread asking if we liked this Q&A format over in the gameplay questions sub-forum here.  Probably best to add a comment there...

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On ‎10‎/‎01‎/‎2016 at 5:24 PM, Padishar said:

Reducing garbage creation is the only thing that can possibly stop (or significantly reduce the frequency of) GC stutters.

Actually, this isn't quite true.  Forcing the heap to be larger would also reduce the frequency as it would take longer for the heap to fill up.  This is also described in the Unity docs I linked in another post.  It should be possible to write a mod that forces a large allocation of memory (but not so much that it kills KSP) and then discard it.  If Unity doesn't automatically shrink the size of the heap (and there are other tricks that may prevent this if it tries) then this should result in the heap having much more free space and the stutters should stay further apart.  I'll try to knock this up if I get a few minutes...

Edit: Even better, make it a button on the stock toolbar that triggers the extension of the heap by allocating and discarding a large amount of memory.  That way, the user can just click it if the glitches are too bad and they should get better (assuming more memory can be allocated without crashing the game).

P.S. I hereby place all these ideas in the public domain so any other person is free to implement them before I do if they feel like it... ;)

Edited by Padishar
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I'm not sure if this has been suggested yet, but try running 'dxdiag' and seeing if it crashes when attempting to run the DirectShow test. I know that when I upgraded to Windows 10, all my programs were affected by micro-stuttering, reduces frames by huge amounts even though I have a very capable system (and the problem never existed in Windows 8.1). I was never able to find a solid fix for the DirectShow issue, however upgraded to the latest version of Win 10 (version 1511) seemed to stop the stuttering and made my frames higher again, however DirectShow still crashes. Just thought I'd share some of my experience in the hopes it'll help you :)

I didn't see the part that said it was concluded to be GC. And I don't know how to delete posts in the new forum. Or enter advanced edit mode.

Edited by ToTheMun
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On 12/01/2016 at 0:23 PM, KasperVld said:

We have to make choices, and although the microstutter is annoying it's not breaking the game in any meaningful way.

That's debatable. Good performance matters for games, just look at Arkham Knight. Needing an extremely powerful PC to run a game that looks several years old, or having a lack of smooth gameplay no matter what, might not technically be bugs but they aren't good things.

I feel that generally KSP has been "carried" by being an inspired and unique concept but the execution of that concept is distinctly average. Every version of KSP that gets released still with performance problems and still with nothing-special graphics, the door opens a little wider to competitors who might take the concept and make the game KSP should be.

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54 minutes ago, cantab said:

That's debatable. Good performance matters for games, just look at Arkham Knight. Needing an extremely powerful PC to run a game that looks several years old, or having a lack of smooth gameplay no matter what, might not technically be bugs but they aren't good things.

I feel that generally KSP has been "carried" by being an inspired and unique concept but the execution of that concept is distinctly average. Every version of KSP that gets released still with performance problems and still with nothing-special graphics, the door opens a little wider to competitors who might take the concept and make the game KSP should be.

Best statement on KSP development problems I've ever read.

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  • 2 months later...

I'm wondering why this thread is dead since January, since KSP 1.1 has been released. This means Unity 5 and this also means that you guys hoped in vain.

The fun part is I didn't have this issue before 1.1 (or less frequent) and surprise surprise, I'm now in the club and since I didn't know better I posted my on thread on this issue:

In the original thread @SessoSaidSo made I tried to explain a bit about the issue because I feel that most players think it has something to do with framerate or "how good your computer is". In fact it is sloppy programming. Yes I said it.

I've been with KSP since the very early stages of the game. And I'm not bragging or exaggerating here, I just happened to search for a space sim shortly after Squad came up with their homepage and I was immediately drawn in and joined the forum in July 2011. I've played KSP every now and then with some bigger pauses in between. I was never much of a community person, I posted a few vessels and read some threads but generally I get put off by forums since nowadays most people tend to ignore most of written texts and respond only to parts of them, as seen when this issue comes into discussion, people who have NO idea about how programs work or what Garbage Collection is post things like "just buy a new graphics card" or "You're complaining about a truck stopping in the VAB? That's an animation.". By the way, he didn't mean the stop and go animation of the truck, he meant the small stutter after the truck starts.

However, KSP was always buggy. Basically that was part of the fun of it in the beginning. The Kraken which meanwhile has its own whole family became an actual equally hated and beloved member of the KSP community, its even an easteregg now.

That being said, these times are over now and KSP grew into a really beautiful game with countless possibilities. And countless loose ends that need to be fixed now. Yes, wheels have issues now and you're working on it but you can work around that by setting the friction to manual and 0. However, we cannot get rid of the stuttering or things like multi-part-bases getting ripped apart because the distance from the ground is measured by the root part and not by the part being closest to the ground. I tried to build a multipart mining station on Minmus and eventually gave up on it because I got too annoyed by having to edit my savegames.

And it's pretty frustrating to lose hours upon hours of gameplay to a bug:

?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-forma

Looks pretty decent? Well, If I press F5 and F9 it will explode because the big tanks are 5 centimetres lower than the lander capsule.

KSP is no small community project anymore, it is a full priced AAA title now. Please dont make it a full priced EA-title.

No new features until there are no more bugs. And stuttering every 5-10 seconds is a bug caused by sloppy programming and creating too much garbage, nothing else.

This is not acceptable:

20160423033957_1.jpg

 

Oh and no, this has nothing to do with the mods I use, this also happens in a blank install. I really love KSP, but I think I'm close to making a big break because in the current state it's no fun to play.

Simple rule of programming: stability and performance > features.

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Hi there, Im not enjoying KSP anymore since this issue.

Like you Broco before 1.0 i didnt have a lot of that micro freeze. But now ? Waouh, im getting big spikes ( 60 to 8 Fps) for 1second !

It's not a FPS problem but something is calling the procs while ingame !

Test on a fresh install of windows, on HDD, on SDD, with and without OC of GPU/CPU

tested the Unpark fix, nothing at all.

We are only few people to have this, but please help us guys..

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I see this thread is still alive... and so is this performance issue. :mad:
1.1 appears niether better nor worse to me, general performance improved but stutter remains pretty much unchanged.

 

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I just signed up to state i am in the boat as well. I was totally stoked for the 1.1 release because I have had the problem with the micro lags since 0.18 iirc and thought it would be fixed now. And it bothers the hell out of me. So installed the game. Stock. First spaceplane. Trying to take off, game runs perfectly smooth. Then half a second pause on take off... 20 Part plane. Making it uncontrollable to me :/ The "micro" lag strikes yet again. And to me it is so off putting that I immediately quit playing again, disappointed.


This really needs to be addressed somehow. I really love the game, but having something freeze is so detrimental to my experience, that I do not want to play it :( And I have tried everything. Running it on Linux, Windows on SSD and HDD... no avail.

Edited by orthi
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On 24.4.2016 at 10:39 PM, rabzoue59 said:

We are only few people to have this, but please help us guys..

I don't really think this only effects a few people, I think most people got used to it and/or think it's caused by their hardware.

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Well.

I was just excited waiting for 1.1 but now im just Frustrated-o-Lot.

My Rig that runs smoothly 'Witcher 3' Stutters on each 5 Seconds for half second ? Just Like before. Weren't we told that the stutter is/was a unity 4 problem ?

Without being offending but i ask: Thats it ?

Wish fun indeed to those masochsitic ones who continue in stuttering on. i wont. Too annoying.

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4 minutes ago, Padishar said:

Not by anyone that knows what they're talking about...

Hmm i can not judge if others know what they are talking about, but i may barely, barely suggest that the 'creators' of the unity engine just offer at least one or maybe, maybe even two sufficient and probable way's to get rid of memory garbage/artifacts without stopping game progress for 0.1 up to 0.5 seconds. Hell this is 2016 now we are not in the 1950's where the computing machines sometimes got to a 'halt' because real existing and crawling bugs entering the prozessor room and got stuck between electric contacts.

actually its like driving with square wheels and would render this  'Engine' (in my eyes) useless.

 

 

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33 minutes ago, Padishar said:

Not by anyone that knows what they're talking about...

I strongly suggest this is an official dev-thread mentioning that the stutter is a 'Unity 4 Problem' are they know what they are talking about ?

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16 minutes ago, Sirad said:

Hmm i can not judge if others know what they are talking about, but i may barely, barely suggest that the 'creators' of the unity engine just offer at least one or maybe, maybe even two sufficient and probable way's to get rid of memory garbage/artifacts without stopping game progress for 0.1 up to 0.5 seconds. Hell this is 2016 now we are not in the 1950's where the computing machines sometimes got to a 'halt' because real existing and crawling bugs entering the prozessor room and got stuck between electric contacts.

actually its like driving with square wheels and would render this  'Engine' (in my eyes) useless.

This is actually a well known and (fairly) well documented limitation of the Unity engine due to how it is implemented.  There are many places that discuss ways to reduce the effect, all boiling down to reducing the amount of garbage the game code creates during scenes.  KSP can quite easily allocate and discard over half a megabyte of memory on every rendered frame which is, simply, far too much.  If this were reduced to a few k per frame then the garbage collection would run ~100x less frequently.  Would you complain if the stutters only happened once every 10 minutes?

It certainly isn't like driving with square wheels but, to use an equally silly car analogy, it is more like Squad have forced us to drive with the handbrake on, there's nothing really "wrong" with the engine, it just isn't being used in the "correct" way.

2 minutes ago, Sirad said:

I strongly suggest this is an official dev-thread mentioning that the stutter is a 'Unity 4 Problem' are they know what they are talking about ?

You can "strongly suggest" anything you like.  However, I know that a lot of the stuff mentioned in that thread is very out-of-date and quite a few parts are not exactly accurate because it is aimed at people who do not have the detailed technical knowledge to fully understand the real issues.  In that particular case, there used to be a horrible audio stutter along with the visible one but this was (almost entirely) fixed sometime during the life of Unity 4 and the GC no longer (well, almost never) blocks the audio threads any more.

Edited by Padishar
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32 minutes ago, Sirad said:

Why ?

Because:

39 minutes ago, Padishar said:

KSP can quite easily allocate and discard over half a megabyte of memory on every rendered frame which is, simply, far too much.  If this were reduced to a few k per frame then the garbage collection would run ~100x less frequently.  Would you complain if the stutters only happened once every 10 minutes?

...this is, simply, the wrong way to write code that runs under Unity (or any other system that uses a garbage collection based allocator).

If you actually mean "why is KSP like this?" then the main reason (IMO) is that it is very easy to make this sort of mistake, the developer has to be constantly aware of how much memory is being allocated on the heap and write the important bits (i.e. any code that is run on every frame or physics update) to create the minimum garbage possible.  The Squad developers have not done this, but as for the real "why", only they can say.  It would certainly have been very easy, while the game was in early development, to just ignore this and write code the "simplest" way (which is often highly inefficient in memory allocation terms).

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35 minutes ago, Padishar said:

Because:

 

Oh Sorry for, i just forgot to state that i only asked a rethorical question. But the answer may fit in this case, anyway.

Edited by Sirad
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