Why the game is slowing....

[segaprophet]

The Mac client of KSP is running very well on my early 2011 21.5" iMac (2.8 GHz Sandy Bridge i7, 16 GB 1333 MHz RAM, OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard).

It only gets a bit sluggish when launching ships with 400+ parts.

Everything is aces on my gaming PC, but that thing is a monster . .

[_Aramchek_]

I don't give a minced oath about what you think you need to run this game, I care about what the devs are telling people will run this game, and as such people are clearly going to be disappointed by their machines, which exceed the specs recommended, are handling it awfully.

You should care, instead of jumping on the "squad is blah blah, the game is not optimized/runs poorly on my system boohoo, but I refuse to do what I can do to fix it" bandwagon.

If you're told that x new radiator will improve the performance of your 1.2l engine but in reality it barely works, and really you need a 2l to use it, then you're right to be miffed.

Welcome to pc gaming, and again, try developing a standard for performance in a game where you can easily build monstrous contraptions the developer could never foresee.

It's not possible in this type of lego style game.

Under the right circumstances, minecraft..an 8 bit game, can bring even the most powerful pc to it's knee's.

As with ANY other pc game, the better your hadrware, the better your performance, if you don't like that, I suggest playing console games.

And if you don't want people making snide comments at you then don't, when told the game runs poorly on machines on which its touted as running acceptably on, say 'well it works perfectly well on my 4ghz machine!' as though that's a solution to any problem.

Firstly, you've taken that outof context, my statement about my hardware and performance was in regards to your comment that "even on high end machines the game runs terribly and it's all squad's fault", clearly, this is not the case as I, and other people here with what would be considered mid to high range pc's rarely complain about "bad performance".

Secondly, the point I was making, that you need a cpu with good single thread performance, and the faster it's running, the faster it can do the physics calculations, seems to be one you're consistently avoiding.

It is all well and good to say "it should be this way instead", but it is NEVER a good idea to ignore how things genuinely work under real world circumstances, and in the case of this game, have a decent cpu or accept that you will have slowdowns if you build gigantic ships.

Besides, your caricatures of my point and dull little 'Regardless, your claim that "ram usage will speed things up!!111", is highly inaccurate' comments hardly place you on the moral high ground, friend. All I have said is that the game currently runs poorly on computers which it should run better on, and that in .20 we've been told that the optimisation will increase performance; and that the people who just say 'get a better PC' aren't helping anyone and are just being boorish. All you've done is argue against a strawman and nicely exemplify my latter concern.

If you're expecting future optimizations to take you from 20 fps to 60fps, and are suggesting to people that such a thing will happen, then it's misleading at best, there is nothing straw about that, or pointing out that you will still need a powerful cpu in the future for best performance.

But, by all means, continue to avoid valid points and sling accusations everywhere you lie, just don't expect any half knowledgeable person to take you even remotely seriously.

The rest of what you've said is just more idle complaining as far as I'm concerned, and thus not even worth responding to.

[SecondGuessing]

More caricatures and strawmen, what a surprise.

I give up, there's no point discussing anything with someone replying to points you aren't making.

[Stealth2668]

I get 60+ fps launching 400 part ships at 1920x1080 with every setting maxed,and generally get much higher fps than that, so, NO.

Just no, the game runs pretty well actually, provided you have the hardware to do so.

The physics calculations are done on ONE cpu core and are very cpu intensive, if you do not have a cpu that is capable of having really good single core performance, you will get a lot of slowdowns.

Not at all, I get really good performance from the game, as I stated before, unless I have a lot of high part count vehicles all within that 2.5km distance wherin things go "off rails" and physics are calculated for every ship.

Minimum spec is just that, it's the slowest thing you can run the game on, but don't expect miracles, just like any other game.

The higher you are above minimum spec the better the game will run.

And I gots no problems on the [email protected].

I believe what SecondGuessing is trying to say is, for you the game runs well because you have a good cpu, but there's no reason why people with medium end quad core cpu's should be having problems. The game isn't optimised well and only uses one core which is probably the main issue. Needing a cpu like yours shouldn't be a requirement to play the game.

[_Aramchek_]

More caricatures and strawmen, what a surprise.

I give up, there's no point discussing anything with someone replying to points you aren't making.

You didn't pay attention to the points I made actually, you instead decided to be condescending and generally an unpleasant person.

I believe what SecondGuessing is trying to say is, for you the game runs well because you have a good cpu, but there's no reason why people with medium end quad core cpu's should be having problems. The game isn't optimised well and only uses one core which is probably the main issue. Needing a cpu like yours shouldn't be a requirement to play the game.

I think you are giving him more credit than he deserves, personally, likely because you are a decent person.

Regardless, this is a sandbox game where you can build amazing and complex vehicles, which need to have many variables, physics/drag/aerodynamics/part tolerances,etc., calculated in real time, the game DOES run on recommended specs, but , it will slow down under certain circumstances or if you get ambitious with the design of your ships, it is always going to need "beefy" hardware to run at it's best.

And while that may be a frustrating fact, it is a fact, just because you can run it, doesn't mean you can run it at a high framerate.

The developers have even kindly added a feature setting that can allow you to adjust the physics calculations for better overall performance.

Edited May 18, 2013 by _Aramchek_

[SecondGuessing]

I believe what SecondGuessing is trying to say is, for you the game runs well because you have a good cpu, but there's no reason why people with medium end quad core cpu's should be having problems. The game isn't optimised well and only uses one core which is probably the main issue. Needing a cpu like yours shouldn't be a requirement to play the game.

He shoots, he scores.

[_Aramchek_]

He shoots, he scores.

Read my edited post as to why that isn't the most reaonable expectation for this type of game, which is a point you purposefully avoid.

[SecondGuessing]

Read my edited post as to why that isn't the most reaonable expectation for this type of game, which is a point you purposefully avoid.

It's the expectation that the consumer is provided with by Squad.

And how you expect me to somehow know that you have edited a post and thus go back, re-read the edit and address that point, is beyond me.

[Stealth2668]

I think you are giving him more credit than he deserves, personally, likely because you are a decent person.

Regardless, this is a sandbox game where you can build amazing and complex vehicles, which need to have many variables, physics/drag/aerodynamics/part tolerances,etc., calculated in real time, the game DOES run on recommended specs, but , it will slow down under certain circumstances or if you get ambitious with the design of your ships, it is always going to need "beefy" hardware to run at it's best.

And while that may be a frustrating fact, it is a fact, just because you can run it, doesn't mean you can run it at a high framerate.

The developers have even kindly added a feature setting that can allow you to adjust the physics calculations for better overall performance.

Well ya, I agree a beefy computer is always better and ya it's a complex game but the point people are making and what I believe is the main issue is that it runs off of only one core and there needs to be lots of optimization (but it's alpha so that will come in the future). The main issue though is that if you have a quad core (probably most people), the game only uses 1/4 of your cpu power. If the game had multi core support, I think this game would run so MUCH better to the point where mid range pc's can run the game great even with high part counts. Imagine if all 4 cores of your pc were being used, I don't think you'd even have that problem you mentioned about fps drops with multiple ships. Your game would still run as smooth as butter.

[Tollazor]

Of course this game needs optimization.

Do you think John Carmack thought, awww this game will only really run on high end computers. Hell no. He busted his Assembly coding skills and programmed it at the most efficient level of computer programming for many of his important heavy use code.

Programming in c++ or whatever is not the most efficient level. Sure you can write code, then optimize that code. Then if you want further optimization you convert it to assembly (not via a compiler, but by hand). Then compile it.

Not only that, optimization is a specialty of programming. Someone who is good at writing physics simulations does not mean they are good at optimization. At some point in the lifecycle of KSP it would be wise to get a specialized optimizer to come in and go over their code and sort it out. Unless of course they have someone who is quite good at optimization already.

It also show cases the downside of using a 3rd party engine. Unfortunately a lot of base functions used in KSP are written by the Unity people. So optimizing the KSP code will only go so far, as it basically sits above the Unity engine layer, I would think anyway. I'm not sure if KSP developers can change every single aspect of Unity, if they could that would be sweet.

Anyway, bottom line is. A game such as KSP would have plenty of room for optimization, just because it runs OK on very high end CPU's doesn't mean it cant run better on lower end CPU's with a bit of loving.

[jayther]

Clearly, these two will never agree because the points they're making are on different sides of the fence.

The main argument here is not playing KSP with a 3-part ship, but with a ship of considerable size and amount of parts. In this particular scenario, _Aramcheck_ is arguing that any computer that meets the recommended specs will show some frame rate problems because of the amount of parts. Meanwhile, SecondGuessing is arguing that a similar computer should not have frame rate problems. Boiling it down to the bases, the points are essentially defining what "normal circumstances" are. _Aramcheck_ believes that a simpler ship is of normal circumstance, while SecondGuessing believes that normal circumstances include large and/or complicated ships.

Will SecondGuessing return to argue the original topic or will he continue with personal attacks? Will _Aramcheck_ do the same? Stay tuned!

[SecondGuessing]

Clearly, these two will never agree because the points they're making are on different sides of the fence.

The main argument here is not playing KSP with a 3-part ship, but with a ship of considerable size and amount of parts. In this particular scenario, _Aramcheck_ is arguing that any computer that meets the recommended specs will show some frame rate problems because of the amount of parts. Meanwhile, SecondGuessing is arguing that a similar computer should not have frame rate problems. Boiling it down to the bases, the points are essentially defining what "normal circumstances" are. _Aramcheck_ believes that a simpler ship is of normal circumstance, while SecondGuessing believes that normal circumstances include large and/or complicated ships.

Will SecondGuessing return to argue the original topic or will he continue with personal attacks? Will _Aramcheck_ do the same? Stay tuned!

I don't think it should be easy to run 300 part ships, but currently borderline systems are choking at 150 parts, which isn't enough to do quite a few things in the game.