[SOLVED] KSP freezes up for a minute when approaching another vessel

[CoriW]

Solution: Turn down the "Pixel Light Count" and "Shadow Cascades" in the KSP settings menu.

Solution Edit: It also appears any Lazor mods will also cause this issue.

So recently I've been delving into a bunch of different mods mostly just to see what they're like and figure out which ones I want to keep. But I've begun to notice that whenever I rendezvous with another vessel so that I can dock to it, as soon as I get within about 2.3km of the other vessel, the game freezes for upwards of 30 seconds and then resumes. Although this is the distance that it loads the other ships physics and whatnot, I've never seen the game freeze up like this while loading other vessels physics, and it's extremely irritating especially when I'm trying to land near another vessel on a planet or moon.

Because of this starting to happen with my addition of mods to the game, I'm about 99.98% sure it's a mod that's causing this to happen, but before I go removing mods to see which one it is I want to just get a general idea about any mods that are known specifically to cause this problem or similar problems. So what I'm going to do is list all of the mods I use below and it would be great if anybody could let me know if they've had or heard of similar issues with any of the following mods or if there are any issues in general I should know about with any of them.

Kethane
MechJeb
QuantumStrut
SubassemblyLoader
DeadlyReentry
Haystack
CrewManifest
EngineerRedux
IoncrossCrewSupport
Protractor
RemoteTech
RomfarerLazorDockingCam
RomfarerRoboticArmsPack
KerbalAttachmentSystem
KerbalAlarmClock
FairingFactory

So this is my list of mods, and while typing this list up I have a growing suspicion that it may be the Romfarer mods that are causing my particular issue, although I am not sure of it yet. The reason would be because the Romfarer mods come with the ability to change the distance at which other vessels are loaded at in flight and even though I have it set to "default" this may be the cause of the issue... I'll check this when I can and report back later.

Even with that being said I'd still like to know about any issues with any of the mods listed above and would greatly appreciate the heads up if anybody knows about any.

Edited May 14, 2013 by CoriW

[hkedi]

when you get close enough the physics model loads for the other craft, and that can cause a big pause. Especially if it's a large craft, your frame rate should go through the floor. 2.1 K is the original render distance I think, so maybe the Romfarer and the native renderer are fighting with each other someway? Don't know, just throwing ideas out there.

[NeoMorph]

It's the textures loading. Pain in the ass if you have the res turned up full like I have but I like my rockets to look pretty. Same also with the number of light sources. I used to use a lot of lights on my ships but realised that the multiple light sources was probably causing problems too. If your ship is flashing like a disco then this is happening to you too.

I was down to 1fps when I had the pixel light count up to 32 lol. This game REALLY needs some optimisation (which will be in 0.20 yay). It will only be the databases in 0.20 afaik but any optimisation is a GOOD thing. In the meantime just play about with your graphics settings in KSP and use something like FRAPS with its FPS overlay to see if it helps, frame wise.

[Reavermyst]

it's also the physics engine loading the object as well. When you get withing 2500 Km(by default) that's when you come withing visual range of objects, loading everything from their appearance to the physics on those models. it's an issue that'll get optimized in future releases

[Dictator Dan]

More optimization?! \o/ Always welcome!

[JonoRig]

Don't forget that the more parts you add on screen, the worse it gets, so while it may be mod textures if its only two relatively "small" craft in terms of part count, if its a station, the lag and freezing during unpack will get much worse...

[CoriW]

Right so, the thing is, everything mentioned so far I indeed am already aware of, the problem is that this wasn't happening to me until I got a bunch of mods... I don't have my graphics set really high, and the ships are relatively small, so because this wasn't happening before I got the mods I have to conclude that it's a mod.

EDIT: Either that or I was just lucky my game wasn't doing it before and a mod made the game realize it's not optimized yet... xD I'll keep investigating the mods.

Edited May 14, 2013 by CoriW

[JonoRig]

Well there are known issues with robotic arms and quantum struts. Otherwise I don't know

[Dictator Dan]

About how many parts are we talking? Ill start to get some frame rate drop around 500 parts, and a 3-5 second pause when passing the 2.3-2.5km point, the more parts the greater the lag and pause. I find it good to find out what my PC can handle by just putting ships of 100, 200, 300, ect parts on the launch pad and checking the lag, so I dont end up in the bad spot of trying to dock a 400 part ship to a 1000 part station. That makes my computer cry tears of a defeated Kerbal.

[CoriW]

About how many parts are we talking? Ill start to get some frame rate drop around 500 parts, and a 3-5 second pause when passing the 2.3-2.5km point, the more parts the greater the lag and pause. I find it good to find out what my PC can handle by just putting ships of 100, 200, 300, ect parts on the launch pad and checking the lag, so I dont end up in the bad spot of trying to dock a 400 part ship to a 1000 part station. That makes my computer cry tears of a defeated Kerbal.

Well, I know for sure my computer can handle up to around 200 parts on screen and stay "green", and at around 300 parts is when I start to get any noticeable fps drop (down to probably around 20fps at that point) And the ships I'm testing this with at the moment are 7 parts and 65 parts, so like I said "relatively small".

Although, I've been doing some testing for a little while now (Just changing stuff and sending up Shuttles to my Space Station.) and I am happy to say that I have found the solution! Well, sort of...

So the first thing I thought to do was remove my romfarer mods, and while I was at it I went and checked my settings, and turned down my "Pixel Light Count" and "Shadow Cascades" (Previously at 16 and 8, which I changed to 8 and 4, respectively.) and when I went up with the next shuttle, rather than having the usual loading time upwards of 30 seconds, I only had to wait about 1 second! So now I know it was either the romfarer mods, or the settings... The next step is to re-add the romfarer mods and see if the delay changed, but I suspect it was just the settings all along.

[NeoMorph]

Like I said, Pixel Light Count and Shadow Cascades has a big hit. I dropped mine to 0 and it helps a lot.

Edit: was sure I posted that dropping them to 0 helped earlier... guess it was a case of typing too fast as usual lol. I was doing some docking in the middle of that post so I think I thought it and didn't type it.

Edited May 14, 2013 by NeoMorph

[CoriW]

UPDATE: So I went ahead and re-added the LazorDockingCam mod, and it turns out... It wasn't the "Pixel Light Count" and "Shadow Cascade" after all! So it turns out my initial suspicion of the Lazor mod lagging the game when loading in other vessels was correct, as soon as I re-added the mod and tried a rendezvous it took a whole 45 seconds to load in the other ship. So all in all, as much as I love the docking cam... I'm going to have to get rid of it.

[Flanders]

Thanks for solving this!

I recently also installed the docking cam (and a bunch of other mods at the same time), and have been experiencing up to a couple of minutes for loading vessels (going from VAB to launch pad, switching from tracking station and so on). It wasn't that slow from the beginning but got progressively worse, despite changing and lowering settings.

Was preparing to start from a clean install and reinstall mods one by one to identify the culprit. Now I hopefully wont have to, Thanks!

To uninstall the Lazor mod, do I need to do restore the original model files for the docking ports aswell, or will it just work by deleating the plugin data?

(lazor-readme said it should work, but you never know.)

[CoriW]

Thanks for solving this!

I recently also installed the docking cam (and a bunch of other mods at the same time), and have been experiencing up to a couple of minutes for loading vessels (going from VAB to launch pad, switching from tracking station and so on). It wasn't that slow from the beginning but got progressively worse, despite changing and lowering settings.

Was preparing to start from a clean install and reinstall mods one by one to identify the culprit. Now I hopefully wont have to, Thanks!

To uninstall the Lazor mod, do I need to do restore the original model files for the docking ports aswell, or will it just work by deleating the plugin data?

(lazor-readme said it should work, but you never know.)

Like it says, it should still work just fine. Although since I have the 0.19 zip file still I just copied the original docking ports back in just in case.

[NeoMorph]

Well this is bizarre. I have the Lazor Docking cam running and experience about 1 second hiccup when approaching another craft, even one that has a high part count. I also have TONS of mods instealled. My parts folder has 998 parts and takes up 1.8GB so with Lazor installed I should get worse hiccups.

What are your PC specs? Mine is the following (using PC Wizard 2012

Mainboard : Gigabyte P55-USB3

Chipset : Intel P55

Processor : Intel Core i5 760 @ 2800 MHz

Physical Memory : 12288 MB

Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460

Hard Disk : Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164 ATA Device (2000GB)

Hard Disk : Seagate ST3500418AS ATA Device (500GB)

DVD-Rom Drive : ATAPI iHAS124 B

Monitor Type : Samsung SyncMaster - 22 inches

Network Card : Realtek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

Operating System : Windows 7 Home Premium Home Edition Media Center 6.01.7601 Service Pack 1 (64-bit)

DirectX : Version 11.00

Windows Performance Index : 5.9 on 7.9

As you can see, not exactly top of the line either. I do get low framerates though... and an annoying hiccup every few seconds. Nothing like waiting 45 seconds to load. Actually, come to think of it, when I had 4GB of RAM I did have hiccups like that. How much RAM do you have?

[Tollazor]

I had an issue where I tried to rendezvous with a target and it would be running fine then suddenly hit massive FPS issue and would get worse and worse and worse. No matter what settings I change, it still did it. It was a game-stopper. So I tried something random and it helped immensly. Instead of decoupling and doing my rendezvous, I instead warped x100 for a few orbits. Then I tried my rendezvous and no FPS issues at all.

[NeoMorph]

I just added the Lazor webcam plugin... and when I started up KSP it showed me a new menu that I hadn't seen before... but it looks like it may help you if you want to get your Lazor stuff back and not have the loading probs...

As you can see, it lets you set the loading distance... so if you set it to short you shouldn't get the loading problem if you pass near to another ship. It seems to default to LONG which is the values you see in the picture. If you set it to DEFAULT though it drops down to 2500. Quite a lot of difference.

I think there must be a bug in the loading system where it isn't loading up DEFAULT when you install a Romfarer module.

Edited May 15, 2013 by NeoMorph