How to stop Space Station Framerate drop?

[captainreynolds]

Hey everyone,

Bought the game about 6 months ago, currently running .20

This is my space station! The two star shaped objects are attached uav's that I use to move stuff around.

I've just started to run into some framerate drops (probably half speed) and was curious how I could bring the game back up to speed.

I have a GTX 670 overclocked with 4GB of video ram, and a 3770K 3.5 GHz i7 intel processor, so I'm a little surprised this small station has so much trouble. Any ideas to improve framerate?

Edited August 15, 2013 by captainreynolds

[Rockhem]

This is the result of the engine only being able to use 1 core of your processor, so i don't know any ways around it other than decreasing part count.

[Jackissimus]

You got two options:

- decrease part count

- overclock your CPU

Yeah, get rid of those RCS ports, you don't need them. The UAVs don't need that many solar panels either. Also check if the fps drops around the station generally or if it's only when you are looking at Kerbin.

[Dkmdlb]

How many parts? I get detectable lag before I get to 200 parts. The choke point is the CPU - it doesn't matter what RAM or graphics card you have, the lag is mostly the result of the single threaded physics calculations.

[King Arthur]

Try turning off your lights, they look pretty but they also stress the physics engine more than you'd think.

[sojourner]

I have always heard to use an orbit above 150km because it reduces the rendering needed for the planet.

[mellojoe]

Lag comes with large part counts. The physics engine isn't super optimized at this point so every machine has trouble currently. My station is sitting at over 400 parts and it lags like a mother---... you get the idea. Its bad.

[captainreynolds]

Thanks for your help everyone! Looks like the pure part count is the problem. Turning off lights, looking away from Kerbin, and moving the station to 175km has no effect on performance.

Am I the only one that thinks they should be focusing on optimizing the physics engine here rather than adding silly stuff like a crew hiring facility? For me personally at least, the game is all about building really big crazy things, like you would see in minecraft or other places. Don't see how I can manage doing that if the fps drops with even stuff like this on a fast computer. Little disappointed here, I see no reason to limit my designs because of part counts.

[PTNLemay]

Would reducing the graphics quality or the screen-resolution in the game settings help?

It's funny I have almost the same setup, but I went with a Ivy Bridge i5 instead of the i7. I haven't yet built big enough to get hard lag, but if I did I'd be willing to sacrifice full 1080p if it would help make the gameplay smoother.

Also I think the single-thread problem is a limitation of the Unity engine. The only way Squad could fix it is by switching to an entirely new engine or design their own, which I suspect is a lot harder than it sounds.

[Johnno]

I happen to like silly stuff. Besides, the optimization/engine topic has been discussed over and over, there's no way around it right now so learn to live with it or take a break until it's sorted.

I'm just amazed it took you 6 months to run into part count issues, especially since for you "the game is all about building really big crazy things". So yeah, either limit your designs to optimize your FPS, or splurge on parts and suffer the consequences.

[PTNLemay]

By the way, do you actually use all the power those panels produce, or did you just add that many for aesthetic purposes? (And it does look awesome by the way.)

Edited August 15, 2013 by PTNLemay

[NGTOne]

The issue isn't even CPU power past a certain point. I've never seen KSP max out on even one of my 8 cores, but the game starts complaining past about 550 parts, and REALLY hates me when I get past 1000. I think it's more a limitation of the Unity engine itself, as opposed to hardware (past a certain minimum threshold).

[captainreynolds]

By the way, do you actually use all the power those panels produce, or did you just add that many for aesthetic purposes? (And it does look awesome by the way.)

Thank you! I don't use hardly any power from them, although it would be cool if I could. I'm trying to replicate the ISS! http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0904/iss_sts119_big.jpg

And in response to your earlier post, from what I have seen lowering my graphics settings doesn't change the framerate either. I don't usually have any trouble with max settings on a normal launch.

I definitely get why they went with a pre-built system, I guess I just wish it were faster. It's pretty incredible as it is, I've wanted a game like this since I can remember. I'm sure they've done all they could with the physics engine given the limitations of Unity.

I'm just amazed it took you 6 months to run into part count issues, especially since for you "the game is all about building really big crazy things". So yeah, either limit your designs to optimize your FPS, or splurge on parts and suffer the consequences.

Thank you for your help! Just got a chance to play the game this past week, so I suppose it did take me 6 months to run into the issue.

Also, does anyone know how to find a part count on a ship in orbit like my station?

[Talonsin]

I share your pain mate. I landed a few different modules on the moon to setup a big moonbase and now I have so many parts in a relatively small area that I cant do anything with it because it has turned into a slide show. Sometimes it locks up so bad even hitting the space center key doesn't work and I have to alt-tab out and kill the game.

[chrischambers]

I share your pain mate. I landed a few different modules on the moon to setup a big moonbase and now I have so many parts in a relatively small area that I cant do anything with it because it has turned into a slide show. Sometimes it locks up so bad even hitting the space center key doesn't work and I have to alt-tab out and kill the game.

I am in the same boat, I have about 100 parts over many differant smalled craft parts.

I have also discovered that if you keep on cleaning out all the rubbish, then when you move around it redunces the lag.

[mellojoe]

Also, does anyone know how to find a part count on a ship in orbit like my station?

Go out to orbital view. Hit the little "i" in the right hand side of the screen.

[squirtgun1234]

thats in .21 only

[captainreynolds]

Go out to orbital view. Hit the little "i" in the right hand side of the screen.

Perfect, that did the trick in .20 actually.

My space station is evidently 338 parts!

[DMagic]

It's those little parts that really add up in my experience. Things like lights, extra solar panels and RCS thrusters look nice and can be useful, but it's best to avoid using them. To deal with RCS thrusters you can use a tug to dock things, or you can create some kind of detachable docking system, so that you don't need to keep all of the RCS parts after everything is docked.

For terrain rendering you can just get above 160km and you should avoid any slow down related to that. Or better yet, use the ocean terrain settings tweak to increase performance: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/43253-Default-Terrain-Quality-Without-most-of-The-Lag%21, though that's really only an issue with relatively weak GPUs.

And if you want to compare your performance to check if something is wrong with your setup in particular go to my CPU performance thread and test my rocket. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/42877-CPU-Performance-Database. You can compare your performance to others with a similar CPU to see if you are getting results at least somewhat similar to theirs.

[DAVIDESCOTT]

I don't understand why the physics engine runs at all for things like space stations, selectively turning it off would seem to be the easy solution.

For an object in orbit with no engines firing and no spin, they should just turn off the physics engine entirely, and only turn it on when there is a substantial impact (ie a docking event where the impacting object is moving faster than 0.2m/s or the like.

[Nachtwind]

Am I the only one that thinks they should be focusing on optimizing the physics engine here rather than adding silly stuff like a crew hiring facility?

No.

Optimization normally happens in LATE stages of game development... not in early alpha stages in which we are in. Time spent on optimization would end up being wasted as update .xx breaks it again and squad would have to spend that time again on optimizing.

Also there are problems that Squad connot fix - yet. (Once unity implements some things the game should run smoother..)

For me personally at least, the game is all about building really big crazy things,

I suppose everyone thinks differently here. I rather focus on designs "as small as possible"

like you would see in minecraft or other places.

See above comment

Don't see how I can manage doing that if the fps drops with even stuff like this on a fast computer. Little disappointed here, I see no reason to limit my designs because of part counts.

Well.. the thing here is: physics.

Since all the parts interact you have decreasing computation time with higher part counts - naturally. But if you compare it to minecraft.. Minecraft mostly runs without any physics. If you start "adding" physics you end up bringing down every fast computer as well. Try it - create a large plane of dirt that starts dropping or water or blow up stuff big time.. you will see what i mean

What i could advise you is going into the game settings and reduce the time spent on physics per frame.. that was a big change on my system to decrease it from .10 to .03...

[Zerro]

By the way, do you actually use all the power those panels produce, or did you just add that many for aesthetic purposes? (And it does look awesome by the way.)

My station is at 200km

I get lag too probably because of part count. I'm going for aesthetics and symmetry with my station than full functionality.

Now my station probably DOES have many parts that I probably don't need for aesthetics (ie: RCS engines that were used for rendezvousing and docking) So I was wondering if there's a way for me to go into creative mode/cheat and just remove those parts so that I can reduce part lag? Or would I have to start over and relaunch the modules with less parts?

[sojourner]

Time for you to build your Station Mark 2. Just pretend you're Tony Stark. Always building a better suit.

[PetWolverine]

Am I the only one that thinks they should be focusing on optimizing the physics engine here rather than adding silly stuff like a crew hiring facility?

You're not the only one, but it's a matter of how software development works. As Donald Knuth famously said, premature optimization is the root of all evil. In context, it's more about optimizing the wrong parts, but it applies equally well to optimizing at the wrong point in the development process, and for the same reason: Once something is optimized, it becomes much harder to change.

Optimizing the physics, or anything else, at such an early stage in development would lock it in to a large extent, or at least make later changes more difficult (read: longer time between updates). And considering the physics model currently lacks reentry heat and has only a placeholder for drag, there is much that needs to be done before optimizing.

For me personally at least, the game is all about building really big crazy things...

To some extent that's because that's all there is to do in the game right now. It's easy to forget that despite KSP's relative polish, it's still in alpha. Career mode doesn't even exist yet; when it does, hiring crew will probably be an important part of running a successful space program. More generally, features that seem like "silly stuff" now will coalesce into an actual game in the future, whereas right now all we have is a sandbox with the only goals being whatever you decide you want to do.

Believe me, I'm frustrated by part count limits as well, but the reality of the situation is it's going to be that way for a while. If we get to release and 400 parts is still a slideshow, that's when I'll be disappointed.

[captainreynolds]

Wow, a lot of great responses, and you all make a good point. I guess I keep forgetting this game is in alpha stage (given how much we can all do with it!). Definitely makes sense to hold optimization once huge chunks of the game itself are still being created.

I'll lower my physics time per second - I am curious though, what kind of effect will this have?

And you have a good point - I now have two tugboat type things to dock stuff. Looks like it is time for station mk II!

Edited August 15, 2013 by captainreynolds