Slow FPS, lag and other limiting factors of Kerbal..

[boxman]

If you get unplayable framerates with 400 parts, then there is something seriously wrong with your setup.

I have a years old phenom 2 3ghz system with only 4gigs of ram, and yet 400 parts runs pretty fine. It is not before i reach about 1000 parts that the game turns into a slide show.

And when would you be happy anyways?? Even if they optimized it so that 1000 parts works well on any system you would just build a 2000 part ship and complain again when you reach the limit.

This is just what happens when they let us use "unlimited" amount of parts. Or do you rather that they limit the parts to 200 like pretty much any other game does??? Because that is the only way to truly fix this issue and I rather be able to choose for myself if i want to go big and laggy instead of a normal sized ship/station.

Either way I hope they do continue to improve performance which is the only thing we can really hope for.

There will always be a limit no matter how much you optimize it.

...lol, its been in "alpha" for over 2 years now, when did calling a game "alpha" become an excuse to release half finished product? I've been down this road before, (with Minecraft) it was released and it had huge issues, but people were like "its just alpha, you only paid $10.00 for it" and then time past, and they ignored huge engine and performance issues and just kept adding fluff on..and finally after like 3 years it was "released" and its still pretty much in alpha stage, some of the huge limitations of that game still plague it, because they wont' take the time to fix it.. the same thing will happen with this game.

And this shows that you dont even get the meaning of alpha. This game is clearly not for you, so just go uninstall it since it causes you so much pain and anger.

And if you actually knew about how development usually works you would know that optimizations usually come LAST.

Edited August 17, 2013 by boxman

[boxman]

While agree I could minimize my building style.. whats the fun in that?

Shoot you can get everywhere in the solar system on 100 parts.. but then what? the game is about BUILDING.

And alot of people are using this arguement that "it needs to be optimized after everything is added in.. I'm assuming most of you that use that argument haven't seen a piece of code..ever..

Do you think that big games like Halo add in sounds textures guns, maps ships etc.. before they get the engine running smoothly on multiple cores? HA! not a chance..

Truth is there is a difference between "cleaning up code" and actually coding the engine to work on normal computers.

And again you show that you are completely clueless. First the game developers never ever thought that people would build ships in the thousand range parts. Before .18 most people settled with ships with 100-200 parts, and the limitations only really showed after they added docking ports which is when people really started building big.

And about optimizations.. If you truly knew about coding like you claim, then you would know it would make no sense to optimize it when parts of the game/code is going to be completely rewritten from scratch anyways. If they optimized now they would have to optimize it again later which would be waste of development time and money.

Edit: And as others have told you there is a difference between multicore and multicore with physics. There is no plugin for unity that gives you multicore for physics.

Edited August 17, 2013 by boxman

[Guest]

I'll also remember everyone at the same time that the last two times the devs did structural and optimization updates (I.E. 0.19 and 0.20) there was a massive uproar of "why is there nothing in this update?"

Performance is going backwards IMO. Cracking, popping, hissing, stuttering, sound loss, longer loading times between scenes, and mods are not getting along with this version. I am experiencing lag like never before in numerous situations. The "foundation" needs work. You can paint your 25 year old truck and it will look pretty. If you ignore the engine, your truck will look pretty while setting in your driveway.

[Eric S]

when did calling a game "alpha" become an excuse to release half finished product?

I'm tempted to say "the definition of alpha." The game's alpha, by definition it's not a finished product. It's also not released yet, we just have access to the more stable development snapshots.

quite a few people have already posted a "workaround"... a multi threaded plugin for unity.... can't squad program one?

And if you'd been reading the thread, you'd see that the best multi-threaded plugin can't multi-thread the physics calculations, and the one project that was a serious attempt at upgrading the physics was abandoned. This isn't a trivial thing you're asking for. No one has succeeded yet, and yet you think that it's a no-brainer that squad should be able to do it.

Yes, it sounds like the terrain, especially the ocean coding, could use some optimization. I'm not going to try to say that the game's perfect as is, it's not, but they know that and they're working on it. I expect them to work on what they reasonably can, but I don't expect them to be the one group of people to slay the Unity thread-safe physics monster.

To be honest, the game is already worth what I paid for it from my point of view, despite the fact that I came in late enough that I don't think they've increased the price since then. I hope that they can overcome the physics problem somehow, but if they can't, then I still look forward to all the other stuff they're working on.

[Jackissimus]

This game is incredibly great! I would buy this game over any mainstream game without a blink of an eye.

20 years ago developers actually put some thought into making new game concepts. Games like Dune 2, Civilization, Daggerfall were completely new concepts, you could spend months playing them. Yes, they were buggy. In Dune 2 you couldn't even select multiple units with a mouse drag, you had to point and click every one of them. Civilization had such horrible graphics you couldn't tell a mountain from a forest. You couldn't even finish the main story of Daggerfall because of bugs. But I was playing them nonetheless, because I had no option, they were just so addictive. That's what a new game concept tends to do to you.

What do I get now? Civilization 5, brings nothing new, but is a finished product and good to look at, yeah great. 10000th derivative of Command&Conquer, it makes me vomit. Skyrim, which I got bored with after 3 hours of playing. Alibism has made its way into game development - people don't want to make mistakes, so they just rehash the old concepts. They make them seem perfect, but the reality is bland, because there is no novelty. People tend to forget how difficult it is to come up it with new games and the amount of thought that went into this game to make it fun - amazing.

Being the developers I would concentrate on finishing this game (it's closer than you think) and then maybe start working on KSP2. All the others do it, why can't you. People tend to forget that the reason we have games like Skyrim is because there were buggy games like Daggerfall to test some of the new ideas. To me the tragedy is that people stopped making Daggerfalls and only make "perfect" games.

NOTE TO DEVELOPERS: and other readers of this forum may hate me for it, but - hey devs, you don't actually have to listen to these forum posts that much. They already bought the game and they are mostly hardcore players if they read all the posts on this forum. You should concentrate on the untapped markets more, the casual players that have life outside of the game. People like this guy, who is complaining that he doesn't have the time to learn docking as it is presented in the game. Make docking more fun, that's what you are good at! And don't worry about performance too much - these guys are not going to make 400 part ships. They are going to follow the missions in career mode and then finish the game. This game isn't a simulation of Star Trek anyway, it's a simulation of a real life space program.

And I am not saying this just because I wish you well and want you to have more gamers and earn more money. I am saying this because I honestly want more people to learn about space. The more people the game draws, the better. I am already interested in space, I have been since the age of 7, I don't need to be drawn in, the casual players do. And the way to start liking something is to feel accomplished in it. Let them feel accomplished in space. Just make the game more fun. Please don't get drowned in the noise this forum sometimes generates.

[Levelord]

I'm tempted to say "the definition of alpha." The game's alpha, by definition it's not a finished product. It's also not released yet, we just have access to the more stable development snapshots.

The game being in an alpha state has nothing to do with the fact that the engine cannot use multiple cores. Even when the game is finished, it still won't be able to use multiple cores anyway. Parroting "it's just alpha" is not only irrelevant and somewhat ignorant, but also misdirects the discussion.

It's the fault of the Unity engine, plain and simple. It's an engine Squad chose for the game without fully knowing that the game will be as big as it is today, and got too far into development for a change in game engine to be reasonable. It's essentially what stupid_chris has informed you all in the previous posts.

If the OP needed to be frustrated at anyone, it should be the developers of the Unity engine for not trying to develop it further for using multi-core processing of physics.

Regardless, the amount of fanboy replies to this thread with strawman arguments is staggering to me. Even though I love this game to death I would never stoop down to the level of avoiding critiques of the games I buy. Some of you guys should really stop defending yourselves because you view criticisms of your favorite brand/games as a threat to your self image. It's not a sin to explore the game's flaws and talk about it.

[Ming]

NOTE TO DEVELOPERS: and other readers of this forum may hate me for it, but - hey devs, you don't actually have to listen to these forum posts that much. They already bought the game and they are mostly hardcore players if they read all the posts on this forum. You should concentrate on the untapped markets more, the casual players that have life outside of the game. People like this guy, who is complaining that he doesn't have the time to learn docking as it is presented in the game. Make docking more fun, that's what you are good at! And don't worry about performance too much - these guys are not going to make 400 part ships. They are going to follow the missions in career mode and then finish the game. This game isn't a simulation of Star Trek anyway, it's a simulation of a real life space program.

hey devs, you don't actually have to listen to these forum posts that much

Really, so posting suggestions, bug reports, concerns, etc. are of no value to the Dev's?

concentrate on the untapped markets more, the casual players that have life outside of the game

So, hardcore players do not have life outside of the game and therefor should be ignored?

And don't worry about performance too much - these guys are not going to make 400 part ships.

Interesting prediction, where did you get the stats to support that notion?

They are going to follow the missions in career mode and then finish the game

Another prediction that totally stumps me on how you can make such an assumption. In other words, according to you, the sandbox mode isn't very important in terms of game satisfaction.

it's a simulation of a real life space program.

If KSP was truly a "real life space program" simulation then it would be beyond the scope of understanding for the majority of people who tried to play it. Rather, it's a "game" first and a quasi space flight simulator second. A unique, compelling, and wonderful game yes, but it still needs to balance "real life" with usability for it's average player base. This thread is all about balance. New features yes, but not at the expense of user frustration due to poor performance.

Note: I have no delusions about this KSP performance problem. Realistically swapping out the game engine is just too expensive in terms of direct cost and labor costs for a total rewrite. Also, at present Unity isn't going to provide much in the way of significant performance gains even with some tweaking. The only viable solution is, IMO, to acknowledge this performance "wall" and keep KSP development within the constraints of said wall.

“Magnum Forceâ€Â, Detective Harry Callahan: “A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitationsâ€Â

In KSP terms, Squad needs to be aware of its own limitations (Unity) and not have performance take a back seat to more bells and whistles.

Edited August 17, 2013 by Ming

[DMagic]

This thread is just chock full of people who should be dying to check out my CPU performance database thread.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/42877-CPU-Performance-Database

Head over and try out my rocket, make sure to scroll down and read about graphics limitations if you have weak GPU. It won't solve anyone's problems about slow performance. But at least we can have a more objective grounds for comparison when trying to figure out each computer's limits in KSP, just like Harry Callahan said.

[Guest]

I want to focus this thread on the O.P.'s point. Improve performance then add extras. This helps everyone including those, like me, who are always behind on upgrading to the latest equipment for whatever reason. A specific example of this is the lag occurring over oceans.

While the physics may be computer intensive, I think the terrain generation is far more, at least ocean generation. On the Mun and any other bodies without oceans, I get a nice smooth 40-60 FPS even if I have a 200-300 part spacecraft, and it's fine on my decent rig. The fact I can't enjoy flying a plane around Eve, Kerbin, or Laythe is why I'm currently upset with the game. If they are going to have it released now, at least let us enjoy the planet we start on.

I think this is an excellent point. Change can be made to improve our home planet. Also, the sound of the game is very important to many of us. Audio quality can be improved, or at least quality could be maintained from one version to the next.

[antiquark]

I would agree with the OP, and add that the lagginess seems more due to some high-order optimization that needs to be fixed. As in-- no I don't think that we have to get into the assembly code of the Unity engine, but rather, something is being done in a crude manner that could be streamlined.

Here's an experiment you can run yourself. Put a plane on the runway, and look at the frame rate. Then park that plane off to the side, and launch another plane. Keep parking them off to the side and keep track of the framerates. Here's what I saw:

- 1 plane = 30 fps (yay!)

- 4 planes = 3 fps (I want my money back!)

My guess is that the collision box of every part in every plane is being checked with the collision box of every part in every other plane. So you'd get an "N-squared" effect in performance. That could be streamlined for sure.

Also I would like to mention that multicore is no panacea! Only certain forms of algorithms are suitable for multicore. The idea of simply recompiling code to play nice with multicore is a pipe dream.

[_Aramchek_]

Regardless, the amount of fanboy replies to this thread with strawman arguments is staggering to me.

Oh here we go again with the ridiculous name calling, and the gist of it is always this. :"The game runs poorly on my five year old pc", or "the game runs badly on my ti-81, clearly this is the developers fault and they need to fix it so I can fly thousand part ships on my pentium 166 right now or else I'm going to rage quit the game".

This is far from a casual game, you need more than casual gaming hardware to play it, this is NO DIFFERENT from any other game out there.

So, please, just next time you feel the urge to call people who are not having troubles, either with the game, or with understanding what they've actually purchased, fanboys, do us all a favor and just keep it to yourself, because it's just dumb.

[Dewm]

Oh here we go again with the ridiculous name calling, and the gist of it is always this. :"The game runs poorly on my five year old pc", or "the game runs badly on my ti-81, clearly this is the developers fault and they need to fix it so I can fly thousand part ships on my pentium 166 right now or else I'm going to rage quit the game".

This is far from a casual game, you need more than casual gaming hardware to play it, this is NO DIFFERENT from any other game out there.

So, please, just next time you feel the urge to call people who are not having troubles, either with the game, or with understanding what they've actually purchased, fanboys, do us all a favor and just keep it to yourself, because it's just dumb.

The first part of your post is really only proving his point.... No one is playing on a ti-81, and using that as an example is absurd.. In my case, my PC is 2.5 years old.. But its still better then 99% of consumer PC's..

I think this is a great game.... I just don't want to see limitations down the road because of poor programming now.

You think its to late to do anything now? Just wait another year when they have that much more in the game.

[boxman]

Regardless, the amount of fanboy replies to this thread with strawman arguments is staggering to me. Even though I love this game to death I would never stoop down to the level of avoiding critiques of the games I buy. Some of you guys should really stop defending yourselves because you view criticisms of your favorite brand/games as a threat to your self image. It's not a sin to explore the game's flaws and talk about it.

It dosent have to do with criticism, it is the way he did it. Not only is alot of what he is saying completely wrong, but he also had to throw a bunch of insults like throwing out names like "super fanboys" even in his very first post in this thread.

He claims he is an expert on coding, but yet pretty much everything he says is wrong.

I think most people agree that it needs some optimizations, but this guy claims it can be easily fixed and should be fixed NOW even though that would not be possible right now.

And he talks like he is expecting no limits at all from such a game, when the fact is that we will eventually run into another limit even if the performance was doubled.

[Guest]

I agree with Dewm. If you're car isn't running as good as it was 4 months ago, then you would likely take it to a mechanic.

This is far from a casual game, you need more than casual gaming hardware to play it, this is NO DIFFERENT from any other game out there.

If that is true, then I'll likely be stuck playing my "casual games."

ninja'd by boxman

Edited August 17, 2013 by Otis

[Pixel of Life]

As it has been said, the fact is that Squad is already squeezing every last drop of performance out of Unity - it's Unity's optimization that's utter crap and prevents developers from unleashing the engine's true potential. Things will get much, much smoother when (if) Unity gets proper multi-core support.

[Guest]

As it has been said, the fact is that Squad is already squeezing every last drop of performance out of Unity - it's Unity's optimization that's utter crap and prevents developers from unleashing the engine's true potential. Things will get much, much smoother when (if) Unity gets multi-core support.

My concern is that KSP ran better,for me,with many more mods by the way, 3 versions ago. Why is performance getting worse? It doesn't seem like I am the only one pointing this out. How long does this trend continue? When does this become an unplayable game for me? At that point they lose me as a customer. I fear many potential customers could also be excluded, leading to the eventual death of the game's development, and the loss of the absolute best modding community I have ever seen!

[OtherDalfite]

As it has been said, the fact is that Squad is already squeezing every last drop of performance out of Unity - it's Unity's optimization that's utter crap and prevents developers from unleashing the engine's true potential. Things will get much, much smoother when (if) Unity gets proper multi-core support.

I'm aware of how they are squeezing everything out of the current program, but surely something can be done about it.

The new Mun looks many times better then it used to, and still gives me an astounding 60 FPS on average. I can have a single tank rolling on Kerbin from a discarded rover or crash and I can't look anywhere but up or down without the entire game turning into a powerpoint presentation. There has to be some better way to handle the terrain then the current fix.

[antiquark]

Squad is already squeezing every last drop of performance out of Unity

I doubt it! The way in which performance degrades shows that they're not optimizing things at the higher levels. I.e. four spaceplanes parked alongside the runway, shouldn't result in a lagfest.

[sal_vager]

Stuff is being added and changed with each update, and while some optimizations do take place it's impossible to account for every permutation of hardware and software on players computers.

There will be times where KSP will run better than others, this is unavoidable sorry.

[antiquark]

Actually I get the impression that struts slow things down a lot. If you run tests with strut-free designs, they seem to have a pretty good frame rate.

[rkman]

when did calling a game "alpha" become an excuse to release half finished product?

The fact that we have payed "early" access to the alpha does not mean the product has been "released".

[antiquark]

Actually I get the impression that struts slow things down a lot. If you run tests with strut-free designs, they seem to have a pretty good frame rate.

To reply to myself, maybe not. I took a one of my strutless planes (82 parts), parked several of them along the runway, and kept track of the frame rate.

* 1 plane = 45 fps

* 2 planes = 30 fps

* 3 planes = 5 fps (!!!)

Now the fact that it went from 30 fps to 5 fps with the addition of one plane, indicates that there's something erroneous about the performance optimizations. You would expect it to have a smooth transition as more planes are added, not a precipitous drop in performance all of a sudden! My question is, what's happening in the code itself when you go from 2 to 3 planes?

Dear Devs: time to activate that profiler in the source code!

[Eric S]

The game being in an alpha state has nothing to do with the fact that the engine cannot use multiple cores. Even when the game is finished, it still won't be able to use multiple cores anyway. Parroting "it's just alpha" is not only irrelevant and somewhat ignorant, but also misdirects the discussion.

I take it I failed to communicate, then. My "definition of alpha" comment was specifically aimed at the question pertaining to releasing unfinished software. I then went on to explain that the situation isn't as simple as the poster thought it was, and even mentioned that I don't think squad CAN add multi-threaded physics without an effort significant enough to risk killing the project, though other optimizations are possible.

It's the fault of the Unity engine, plain and simple. It's an engine Squad chose for the game without fully knowing that the game will be as big as it is today, and got too far into development for a change in game engine to be reasonable.

I couldn't agree more. KSP has had a significant amount of "feature creep" and the Unity engine hasn't kept up. Originally the game was to be a 2d rocket simulator, and it's gone beyond both 2d and just rockets, and even the rockets are probably far more complex than anything the devs originally envisioned. I don't know what other options were available for game engines back when they started coding this and I don't know how well Unity would have handled the final version of the game that they originally envisioned. Unity may have been the wrong choice for the original vision and the devs didn't see the limitations in time (been there), or it may be the feature creep that caused the level of problems we're seeing. Having had a career in software development, I know how these kinds of decisions can bite you in the tender bits.

Regardless, the amount of fanboy replies to this thread with strawman arguments is staggering to me. Even though I love this game to death I would never stoop down to the level of avoiding critiques of the games I buy. Some of you guys should really stop defending yourselves because you view criticisms of your favorite brand/games as a threat to your self image. It's not a sin to explore the game's flaws and talk about it.

If saying "Of course it's not finished, that's what alpha means, which isn't to say that your primary concern will or even can be addressed" counts as fanboy-ism, then I'd say we have different definitions. In fact, most of what I see in this thread isn't people saying that everything is fine, it's people saying that the OP doesn't have realistic expectations, for exactly the reason you mention. Sure, there is some level of it, but if you're staggered by it, you either have a very low tolerance or a broader definition of fanboy-ism

[_Aramchek_]

The first part of your post is really only proving his point.... No one is playing on a ti-81, and using that as an example is absurd.. In my case, my PC is 2.5 years old.. But its still better then 99% of consumer PC's..

It's worse than 80% of GAMING pc's though, I understand how people want to be able to build huge things in this game, but realistically to do so you're going to need to cpu power to do so.

Your cpu is based on an architecture that is at least five years old, it isn't genuinely legitimate to expect the best performance, and a lot of people understand that.

Another thing is this, I also sometimes get sub 30fps in the game, but when I think about what all is going on it's quite understandable why the game, with it's single cpu thread to calculate physics, runs my 500+ part ships at the speed it does.

Nor is how it runs a genuine issue compared to other notable games out there, there is a lot going on for your cpu to handle.

I think a lot of people have unreasonable expectations about the game, what is possible within the constraints of the game engine and how it should run on their aging, if expensive back in the day, pc's.

And they tend to blame it on "bad programming" instead of their own lack of understanding on just how intensive all those physics calculations really are to run in realtime, for hundreds of interacting parts.

[TicTacToe!]

I actually agree with a good chunk of what the OP is saying. By no means are we going to have a picture-perfect-runs-fine-on-a-plugged-in-toaster game in alpha, but there are still steps that could be taken to improve it. A poster above said that as each version comes out the FPS goes down and down, and whilst the complexity is increasing, with some updates the changes are quite a step.

Also, as a question, as I am completely incompetent on the issue: Will Unity ever become more than single-threaded? Because if it won't, in KSP's forecasted development period, isn't it worth thinking of a switch or fix now? Or we'll be restrained forever.