Mun landing site becoming a lagfest?

[CkGordon]

I effing love Mountain Dew Baja Blast it is the elixir of the gods. Also every time I go to land at my mun base the game starts lagging almost as bad as taking off from Kerbin before I patched the oceans. I have 3 landers, a demv and 4 eva'ing kerbals at the landing site I don't know if that's whats causing the lag or if maybe its from the lights (using the areotech floodlights mod) it lags like crazy tho and it's killing me (literally) I'll be killing my horizontal movement and descending carefully then the game freezes for 3 seconds and when it comes back I get a slideshow of my now upside down and spinning capsule careen the last 200 meters into the Mun and explode or break apart.

[Vaccer]

If your pc has low specs it could be an issue with lots of stuff in the area of the landing site and your pc having issues coping with trying to keep up with everything there depending on how big the landers are. If not it could be the mod having lots of high poly parts or the parts having multiple objects not grouped before being exported into the game.

The floodlight though I'm not sure, I don't know how well unity does the lighting effects.

[CkGordon]

If your pc has low specs it could be an issue with lots of stuff in the area of the landing site and your pc having issues coping with trying to keep up with everything there depending on how big the landers are. If not it could be the mod having lots of high poly parts or the parts having multiple objects not grouped before being exported into the game.

The floodlight though I'm not sure, I don't know how well unity does the lighting effects.

This computer is a 3 gig processor (AMD Athlon II X2 250) , 4 gig ram, win7 64bit and an ATI Radeon HD graphics card 512mb. I don't really play alot of PC games (console gamer) other than Minecraft and Sim City and KSP so I'm not sure how these specs stand up to the game I havn't been having many issues other than takeoff at Kerbin with large ships or now landing at a populated landing site

[cardgame]

How many parts are in your landers, and how many lights do you have working?

Lights are a huge frame-killer, or at least they were in past versions. Not sure atm.

[CkGordon]

How many parts are in your landers, and how many lights do you have working?

Lights are a huge frame-killer, or at least they were in past versions. Not sure atm.

the landers are about 20-25 parts each the DEMV is 8 parts. The landers have 4 floodlights radially each and 2 blinking beacon lights on top.

[softweir]

Those floodlights could well be the problem. With them turned on, Unity has to process overlapping shadow data for 12 or 13 light sources in one scene, and with everything else going on that could well grind things down. You could try manually editing all light parts out of your persistence file (after taking a backup of it!), and that might fix things!

[CkGordon]

Those floodlights could well be the problem. With them turned on, Unity has to process overlapping shadow data for 12 or 13 light sources in one scene, and with everything else going on that could well grind things down. You could try manually editing all light parts out of your persistence file (after taking a backup of it!), and that might fix things!

I turned off all the lights in game. I even went back to the landing site where i dropped the DEMV (it was hard to control so landed about 6km away) because the 2 engines I left standing on the legs had 4 lights each so thats 8 and I had to turn those off by ramming them with my DEMV and watching em go tumbling and explode into pieces. Then I drove back to the base site and nope lag starts right back up. My landing site is the Mun arch thats ontop of the mountain near the northern side of that BIG crater. Even with the kerbals back in the landers and all lights turned off it lags the second I come into the area.

[animalcross]

Well its probably not a game problem cause I had a whole colony with around 15-20 landers down there... and I lost my savegame... (yells at PC)

[MaverickSawyer]

I think what he means is you need to go turn off the lights at the base. After all, you're wasting power

Realistically, the lights being off will reduce lag by a lot. I had some lights on a lander, and it caused all sorts of chaos until I turned 'em off. After that, smooth descent. Thank God for extra fuel!

[CkGordon]

Well its probably not a game problem cause I had a whole colony with around 15-20 landers down there... and I lost my savegame... (yells at PC)

Did you have any mods or lights? I have quite a few so narrowing down which one is causing the issue if it is indeed being caused by a mod will be a chore. I'll try restarting my computer (i never turn it off) and see if maybe it runs smoother then. Otherwise I may have to go into my settings and try reducing some of them. But like I said the lag is localized to my landing site which has me a little confused and thinking it's not my texture resolution or something.

[CkGordon]

I think what he means is you need to go turn off the lights at the base. After all, you're wasting power

Realistically, the lights being off will reduce lag by a lot. I had some lights on a lander, and it caused all sorts of chaos until I turned 'em off. After that, smooth descent. Thank God for extra fuel!

I did. I entered each lander through the tracking station and turned off all the lights. I even turned off the kerbals helmet lights and put them back in their landers. Then I drove to the DEMV landing site to turn off those last lights because I cant control them as they're debris which is why i had to destroy them by ramming em with my DEMV. Not a single light on now but still horrible lag in a 500 meter radius of my landing site.

[MaverickSawyer]

Hmmm... Pics of the base, if you have them? If not, describe the location and style of the landers. The information may prove useful. Also, other than the lights and the use of Cart plugin for the DEMV, any other plugins in play?

[CkGordon]

Hmmm... Pics of the base, if you have them? If not, describe the location and style of the landers. The information may prove useful. Also, other than the lights and the use of Cart plugin for the DEMV, any other plugins in play?

Location

[ATTACH=CONFIG]34329[/ATTACH]

Base

[ATTACH=CONFIG]34330[/ATTACH]

Plugins:

AviationLights.dll

cart.dll

Cartcommand.dll

EPS.dll

hstwLaser.dll

ISA_MapSat.dll

MuMechLib.dll

PowerTech.dll

zKreuzung.dll

Zoxygene.dll

Base is located right next to a mun arch.

[CkGordon]

Also,

Lander:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]34331[/ATTACH]

[CkGordon]

I tried messing with ALL the settings and nothing seems to help the choppiness in this one area.

[kamilDrakari]

It may be because you have a lot of mods all at once; the more different things (textures, models, code) your computer must load the longer and more severe the visual lag will become. I don't know if mods specifically make that much more significant, or if KSP pre-loads ALL the textures and models to prevent that sort of thing, but based on the specs you gave your computer shouldn't be having THAT much trouble. It's not great, but unless you have some of the sliders way up (I don't remember what they do, but I know there are some that default to single-digits and go all the way to 64) it should be able to play, especially considering your landers have fewer parts altogether than a single large ship. Calculating a dozen light sources without optimization could do it, but you said it kept going even while the lights are off. It might still have an impact so if you can I would try actually removing them from those landers.

EDIT: I went and checked the sliders I mentioned earlier, and when changing your settings I recommend reducing "pixel light counts" and "shadow cascades" first, especially if they are anywhere but very close to the left side. They go up very high but maxing them will make the game unplayable even on much more powerful computers than yours.

Edited October 6, 2012 by kamilDrakari

[Spaced_Out]

It's probably just the amount of ships/parts around. I only had 2 ships and 2 pieces of debris down at a site and I lagged badly bringing in a third lander.

I bet there's a lot of optimisation that can be done here. You can see sometimes when the game glitches that landed vessels are still having their trajectories calculated every frame and I'm sure there's more things like that.

[CkGordon]

It may be because you have a lot of mods all at once; the more different things (textures, models, code) your computer must load the longer and more severe the visual lag will become. I don't know if mods specifically make that much more significant, or if KSP pre-loads ALL the textures and models to prevent that sort of thing, but based on the specs you gave your computer shouldn't be having THAT much trouble. It's not great, but unless you have some of the sliders way up (I don't remember what they do, but I know there are some that default to single-digits and go all the way to 64) it should be able to play, especially considering your landers have fewer parts altogether than a single large ship. Calculating a dozen light sources without optimization could do it, but you said it kept going even while the lights are off. It might still have an impact so if you can I would try actually removing them from those landers.

EDIT: I went and checked the sliders I mentioned earlier, and when changing your settings I recommend reducing "pixel light counts" and "shadow cascades" first, especially if they are anywhere but very close to the left side. They go up very high but maxing them will make the game unplayable even on much more powerful computers than yours.

Ya I messed around with the settings and even lowering all of them it lagged. The lag wasnt unplayable but it was noticably not smooth. I think the mods might have been having something to do with it. My game took over a minute to load when starting up because of how much stuff I'd added so I decided to just delete KSP all together (persistance, settings, ships, everything) and reinstall it and start over using only the mods that I will miss which will be closer to 5 or 6 than the 19 I had installed. Also I'll go through the parts folder and delete parts I'll never use like alot of the parts from novapunch. Its a great addon but I never used the hollow stage decouplers or most of the structural parts so I could just delete those and have the game load quicker and hopefully avoid undue lag.

[moldevort]

I..uh..does anyone else see his first sentence? Is that completely random or did I miss something?