Huge performance hit on Minmus

[FirroSeranel]

I'm running a heavily modded (178 mods) installation, and lately I've been having an enormous hit to performance (both FPS and physics rate) on and around Minmus. Everything else in the Kerbin system is fine.

With this particular ship (a Garage Hangar from @allista's hangars mod, with a return vessel and launch vehicle attached, a Feline Utility Rover and Trailer from @Nils277 in the hangar, but unloaded until touchdown), I get about 40 FPS and 80-90% physics rate during launch. Once I get to orbit, it goes up to 60 FPS and 98% to 100% physics. It stays there all the way to Minmus SOI.

Once I'm in Minmus SOI, I'm okay until high-detail maps start to load. At that point, it drops to about 30 FPS and 70% physics, and then progressively gets worse and worse the lower I go, despite shedding more and more parts.

By the time I'm near touchdown, I'm down to maybe 25 FPS and 50% physics.

Then I launch the rover, and drop to 20 FPS and 40% physics.

Then I launch the trailer, and drop to 15 FPS and 30% physics.

The thing is, I can run this exact same setup on the Mun, or on Kerbin, at smooth framerates and 80%+ physics rate. Plus the part count is fairly low (<90 at launch, <50 for landing, ~50 for the full rover and trailer, and many of those are science parts). It's Minmus specifically that's tanking it.

I read in an ancient forum post from like, 2014, someone who found (I think with @RoverDude's help) that a certain robotic arm from a certain mod had changed the physics range to 100 km, and thus the entire moon was in physics range, and that was the culprit. Could it be something like that? How would I check for that? What kind of config file would change physics range globally?

I run an FX-8350 and a GTX 970, with 16 GB of RAM, so I'm quite sure it's not lack of horsepower. Something's going wrong...

Mod list (All installed via CKAN (except for Kerbin Side, which was installed manually), all up to date according to CKAN and AVC)

Spoiler

{
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        {
            "name": "SMURFF-Extras-VenStockRevamp"
        }

 

 

 

Edited March 8, 2017 by FirroSeranel

[Nils277]

hmm, the only thing i know that caused performance issues with KPBS and FUR is the support for JSI Advanced Transparent Pods. Especially when RPM and ASET are installed. From your list of mods is can only see the common performance hungry mods like Scatterer, EVE and Distant Object. Maybe on of these mods has some optimization issues with Minmus. I don't now what KSPWheel does, but maybe when using a rover with many wheels, it also impacts performace.

You can try out two things to localize the cause:

1. If it is the physics distance you can try out doing the same on an equally sized or smaller moon like Bop or Gilly.
2. You can try to go to minmus with a stock only craft and see if it causes the same problem. This way you can find out if parts from some mod are causing the performance hit. 

Edited March 8, 2017 by Nils277

[evileye.x]

I have a theory.

Make a quick save when you have performance drop.

Exit to main menu, disable ground scatter completely and !important! restart the game.

Then load your save. If performance is the same, you have some another issue, not the same I have.

In my case, there are some places where  ( for reason yet to be known) any ground scatter drops my FPS to hell. 

[FirroSeranel]

Thanks, @Nils277,

KSP Wheel is a custom collider and wheel/tire wear module used by Kerbal Foundries (a variety of rover wheels, skids, screw drives, treads, anti-gravity repulsors, and tweakable landing gear). It's only used by those wheels, and has no effect on the FUR's wheels. The rover has 10 wheels, and there are three mini-trailers with two wheels each that I can leave behind one by one as EVA science power stations. It does have six anti-gravity units on the sides and roof to prevent flipping (which work brilliantly, with the side units set to .5 meter and the roof to 1 meter, by the way). So that's possible... except that this exact same rover design runs perfectly smoothly on Kerbin, and a very similar FUR rover. Plus the severe performance hit starts before I've even landed, at which point the rover doesn't even exist yet. Allista's Hangar keeps contained craft unloaded, then loads them when they're launched, to reduce part count.

I had considered Stock Visual Enhancements... I remember seeing someone using it to generate dust clouds over the Flats on Minmus, but the stock release doesn't do it, so i don't see how that could have any impact, with no clouds, nothing to scatter, etc.

I do recall having similar problems (though not to such an unplayable degree) on Minmus in the past, with modded installs and mod-heavy craft. I've also been to Minmus with totally stock craft with no trouble, but that was also on totally stock installs (during the 1.2 open beta). So that's worth a try.

The other small moons idea is a good idea as well.

As for JSI ATP... I had the same thought, so uninstalled RPM and ASET, with absolutely no change. I can try it with JSI uninstalled as well, but there's no change in framerate or physics rate whether it's on or off in the UI, plus the lander doesn't have any transparent windows at all, and still gets the hit.

Later today I'll try the other moons idea, and the stock craft idea to see if that narrows it down. If it is the physics issue, how would I even track that down, short of reading through every single config file in every single mod, looking for... what? I don't even know what the code would be to change the physics distance. Any ideas?

For sure, KSP Wheel would mess with physics, as it uses a more advanced Unity 5 wheel collider to override KSP's stock wheel collider for those wheels.

@evileye.x, I tried turning scatterers off... it helped somewhat. Framerate went back up to around 20 FPS, which is playable if irritating. Physics rate up to around 46%, which is again, playable but irritating. At the rates they were before, it was completely unplayable. Inputs being ignored, physics being really jerky, etc. So it definitely helped, but it's still much worse performance than Kerbin or Mun.

[FirroSeranel]

So where doesn't seem to matter.  Mun, Minmus, Gilly... all within 2-3% of each other in performance. Turning terrain scatterers off did help somewhat, and bring it into barely-playable territory.

How do people do these big modded projects, like building off-world bases with USI? Every time I go above about 50 parts, the game is basically unplayably laggy, and always has been, through three different hardware platforms now. It's getting very frustrating...

[evileye.x]

Try getting rid of SVE. Use EVE 7.4 instead

[FirroSeranel]

Hmm... I'm not sure that would help, really. It's physics and CPU that's bottlenecking, not GPU. And I really like SVE, in no small part because it gets EVE and Scatterer to play nicely together with ease. Kerbin is where the majority of SVE's improvements take effect, and actually I still have significantly better performance on Kerbin, than on the moons I tested. I'm gonna try losing a few more mods and see what happens.

I'm also getting some odd errors... Null Exceptions, and pointers pointing at things that aren't objects. No idea if it's a mod that's broken, or the base game, but there are a couple more mods I could live without.

Physics was also acting a bit weird on Minmus... loaded rover sections that weren't be controlled would slowly slide across the ground on their own, for example.

[bewing]

As far as physics bubble range goes -- if it's a mod that's changing it, it may happen at runtime, of course.

But if it's actually persistent, then the values are at the bottom of your physics.cfg file, and you can look at them and make sure they are all less than 25km.

 

[FirroSeranel]

On 3/9/2017 at 9:38 AM, bewing said:

As far as physics bubble range goes -- if it's a mod that's changing it, it may happen at runtime, of course.

But if it's actually persistent, then the values are at the bottom of your physics.cfg file, and you can look at them and make sure they are all less than 25km.

 

 

Thanks! I'll check that.

On 3/9/2017 at 9:38 AM, bewing said:

As far as physics bubble range goes -- if it's a mod that's changing it, it may happen at runtime, of course.

But if it's actually persistent, then the values are at the bottom of your physics.cfg file, and you can look at them and make sure they are all less than 25km.

 

 

Erm... can I ask what the values mean, precisely? Load and unload are fairly self-explanatory, but pack and unpack are less clear.