lots of kerbals on board = massive fps drop

[Jimbodiah]

Hi,

I noticed that when I use the mk4 passenger module that KSP has a huge problem handling it. The physics timer is yellow all the time and frame rate is abonimable. Has anyone else noticed this, is it related to having 16 kerbals on-board? Is there a fix?

Edited January 16, 2016 by Jimbodiah
changed title

[YargJay9991]

Hey Jimbodiah,

Do you mean Mk4 or Mk3? You are using stock KSP right? I'll assume you mean Mk3, which is the largest stock size (in the marks) in KSP. The smallest being Mk0.

What are your system specs, these might help.

AFAIK, Mk3 parts have really weak joints, and therefore every Mk3 part you have may be moving in a completely different way to the others. This is horrible for physics engines.

Is the part used in conjunction with others (may be a high part count problem), or does this happen when there is only one Mk3 passenger module in the flight scene.

Other possible frame-rate killing scenarios include:
- Other craft in the scene. Physics still calculates for them too. The more craft in the area, the more there is to calculate, and therefore the harder the physics engine has to work.

- A bug that I'm not aware of. (I have no idea how this one could be fixed sorry)

- Your computer doesn't like KSP's Mk3 parts.

- The Kraken.... 

 

Other than these, I'm not really sure what your problem might be. If you could maybe include a bit more info, that would be great.

Happy Flying and Good Luck

YargJay9991

[Jimbodiah]

The suttle module.  Only a msall craft 15-20 parts at max, just one of those passenger sections. I think it's the 16 kerbals inside that cause the lag somehow, plus the three in my command pod.

PC is not the problem, 4790K with 16GB ram and all SSDs, GTX650Ti-Boost graphics. No issues with 100+ parts count ships, just the passenger section for some reason.

[pandaman]

Sorry, can't give you an 'answer' as such, but for starters have you tried it both with and without passengers to see if that makes a difference? 

This kind of detail may just help the devs track the issue down and make it easier to fix any bugs.

I had a similar issue with the ion engines a few versions back, it even seemed to cause lag in the VAB.

[Speadge]

please name the exact module u are speaking about.

[Wild Cobra]

On 1/3/2016 at 4:32 AM, Jimbodiah said:

PC is not the problem, 4790K with ...

Nice.

 

I have the 3.6 ghz version. You can get about another 6% improvement for the game by disabling hyperthreading in the BIOS, with that CPU.

 

I though about upgrading mine to that one.

[Jimbodiah]

I think I found it... It's not the Mk3 module, it's just the number of kerbals you have on board. If I have no Kerbals, the timer is green and fps is smooth. If I add 5+ kerbals to the craft, the timer is 50/50 yellow/green, if I add 12+ then the timer is yellow all the time... Hence a 16 passenger module and a command pod with 6 kerbals is freaking out my game. I had TAC LS installed and thought it might be that, but even just vanilla, the game freaks out with a lot of kerbals on board.

Edited January 16, 2016 by Jimbodiah

[Kerbart]

4 minutes ago, Jimbodiah said:

I think I found it... It's not the Mk3 module, it's just the number of kerbals you have on board. If I have no Kerbals, the timer is green and fps is smooth. If I add 5+ kerbals to the craft, the timer is 50/50 yellow/green, if I add 12+ then the timer is yellow all the time... Hence a 16 passenger module and a command pod with 6 kerbals is freaking out my game. I had TAC LS installed and thought it might be that, but even just vanilla, the game freaks out with a lot of kerbals on board.

Only 3 Kerbals are shown in the "IVA cam" view, but I would not be surprised if all 16 actually get drawn first. It wouldn't be the first clunky implementation in the game. If that's the case, hopefully it will get fixed eventually.

[Jimbodiah]

Generally I only do unmanned or maybe 2-3 Kerbals on board, but on tourist runs (where I tend to use the mk3 passenger pod as I send up 8-12 tourists at a time) the game would just become jittery as heck. I tried later with hitchhiker cans, but they have the same problem. Without any kerbals in them, they both run nice and smooth.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

You could try removing the IVA/Kerbal portrait windows with this config file that @swjr-swis so kindly provided?

Just copy paste the text under the spoiler into a notepad file, change the file extension ending to .cfg, then place it in your KSP "Gamedata" folder.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/129016-any-way-to-remove-animated-kerbal-portrait/ (Original post)

Spoiler

// MM-removeinternals.cfg
// single patch to delete all INTERNAL from command pods
// to alleviate fps problems with animated portraits
// NOTE: obviously portraits will be gone, and IVA will no longer be possible
// EVA and transfers can still be done by clicking the hatch of pods
//
// suggestion by NathanKell, initiative by FungusForge, implementation by swjr-swis
//
// usage: place this text in a file ending with .cfg anywhere in the GameData directory
// requires Module Manager to work
//
@PART[*]:HAS[@INTERNAL[*]]:FINAL
{
    !INTERNAL,* {}
}
// yep, all that comment space for a oneliner patch

Or if your not comfortable with all that mucking about, here's the actual .cfg file I made following aforementioned instructions.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3vx0ujwfkgp7euz/NoInternals.cfg?dl=0

[TheTom]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

Only 3 Kerbals are shown in the "IVA cam" view, but I would not be surprised if all 16 actually get drawn first. It wouldn't be the first clunky implementation in the game. If that's the case, hopefully it will get fixed eventually.

That is extremely true as a statement. It is quite likely they do a LOT of surplus drawing somewhere. We can hope THIS gets fixed in the Unity 5 release. I personally look forward to it - and have put KSP aside until then.

[Padishar]

On ‎16‎/‎01‎/‎2016 at 5:22 PM, TheTom said:

That is extremely true as a statement. It is quite likely they do a LOT of surplus drawing somewhere. We can hope THIS gets fixed in the Unity 5 release. I personally look forward to it - and have put KSP aside until then.

While it didn't explicitly mention this aspect, the crew portraits system overhaul coming in 1.1 was mentioned in a devnote a few months ago.  Unfortunately, it was before the forum migration so the post is a bit of a mess but you can just search for portrait to find it quickly...

[Jimbodiah]

I just measures fps rates with the same minimalist test ship (so not to bog down the game on it's own), with/without kerbals. No kerbals I get 60fps, with 3-6 kerbals it drops to 35-40fps. So if you have a big ship that means I go down to 15fps sometimes just by adding kerbals. I will not be doing any more tourist contracts as they are a pain to play. Along with the many Kraken issues when docking with stations, I too am enclined to stop playing for now until KSP can fix some of these issues.

[Jimbodiah]

Is there perhaps any way to disable the Kerbal animations all together and just have static images?

 

PS: Am I the only one that has this issue, or has everyone just accepted the drop in fps?

[swjr-swis]

17 minutes ago, Jimbodiah said:

Is there perhaps any way to disable the Kerbal animations all together and just have static images?

@Jimbodiah Rocket in my Pocket already gave you a link to a ready-made Module Manager cfg file that does disable the animated portraits altogether. No static images though.

[Jimbodiah]

Wow, how did I miss that. Must be old age   Thanks Rocket, and swjr for slapping me to wake up. I will try it right away.

[edit] Yeah, that removes them and gives full fps back, so that 100% confirms that the kerbal drawings are the issue. I just can't eva now 

Edited January 22, 2016 by Jimbodiah

[swjr-swis]

26 minutes ago, Jimbodiah said:

I just can't eva now 

You can't IVA, because the cfg removes the internals. But you can still EVA: click on the hatches, the EVA button will be there.

[Jimbodiah]

Wow, you learn something new every day. Thanks guys, you are life savers!!!

[InsaneDruid]

Even three 1-kerbal landercans stacked togerther with nothing else can have a huge impact on fps, if they are manned/kerballed. Try it whith Alt-F12 ->Performance Monitor. With the kerbals, while the average fps still remains high(ish), the fps falls back to a very low baseline multiple times a second, giving sluggish feel with yellow physics indicator bursts.

You can improve the baseline by editing PHYSICS_FRAME_DT_LIMIT = 0.04 to 0.001 in the settings.cfg. (numbers smaller than .01 will be capped to .01) With this, the low fps baseline will be about 50 instead of 25 or so.

[Jimbodiah]

Won't that freak out the game? I get "krakens" that tear up my stations almost every other time I dock in orbit with the standard value.

[InsaneDruid]

I have not thaaaat many parts on orbit, some comm relays and a 4-section, around 50 parts station that I disassembled and resassembled after the physics tweak, but it stayed intact.

Edited January 22, 2016 by InsaneDruid

[Jimbodiah]

Hmmm... I'll try that as well, but with the portrait edit I can play normally again for now.

[Nightshift83]

On 22.1.2016 at 6:25 PM, Jimbodiah said:

Won't that freak out the game? I get "krakens" that tear up my stations almost every other time I dock in orbit with the standard value.

Thats why you turn it all the way down to .001 in the config. The reason I haven't played the game for a long time was because after I learned docking, my first ship that was a bit bigger would get torn apart and I just left the game as beeing unplayable for me.

Then I found out about KAS/KIS where you could add struts while beeing on EVA and I thought that would be the solution to my problem.

Turned out with lowest physics-frame settings they were not even needed (at least for my 140t ship, might be improvements during versions too).

It really is very slow now with anything bigger (I run it on some very old Lenovo ThinkPad 2.7 GB Ram, AMD Neo X2 Dual Core L325).

I still put a lot of fancy mods on to it (EVE, clouds, planetshine, etc..), since I have the feeling that they don't decrease speed that much further. (just switched to Linux64bit recently maybe that helped a bit too.)

But I will try disabling the portraits right away and see what it does, since "I'm allways yellow" so to speak.

[Jimbodiah]

I changed the setting to 0.001 but I really can't see any difference in frame rate or physics time (yellow flashing). My timer is green about 95%+ of them time now with the removal of the Kerbal animations. And to be honest, I am not missing them one bit as you needed the Portrait Stats mod to know which kerbal did what anyway, it's one mod and 90% cpu load less.

[Bluebottle]

On 22/01/2016 at 9:25 AM, swjr-swis said:

You can't IVA, because the cfg removes the internals. But you can still EVA: click on the hatches, the EVA button will be there.

You can indeed EVA, but trying to get the kerbal back inside is where things go bad for me with that patch. The kerbal boards, but an uncontrollable doppelganger is left floating outside. Reloading the scene leads to a kerbal kraken, with the uncontrollable kerbal being hideously deformed (torn up) and flying off in a random direction, with a NaN orbit. They get recorded as an "unknown mystery object". Endless exceptions and the GUI locks up. I even had Kerbin flying around in what looked like a polar orbit of the Mun!

So, guess it's back to low FPS and IVAs for me.