When i build a large ship my game lags and glitches.

[ThinkOutsideTheHangar]

I recently made a large ship (529 parts) but it seems my game can't handle it. When I remove parts, the debug console says null.reference.exception. Is there any way to fix this or at least ease the stress on my computer? Note: I'm running this game on a alienware X51. I've never had this happen before. My game has very good FPS, and doesn't take long to load.

[Taki117]

You could try various texture reduction packs that are out there.

[TechnicalK3rbal]

Kerbal space program isn't multithreaded. Most (new-ish) computers have several cores, so it can only use one. Which isn't too much ram.

[The_Rocketeer]

Don't mean to be patronising but you've tried reducing your graphics settings, right?

[ThinkOutsideTheHangar]

No, that's not the problem. The graphics is fine. The game itself just collapses in a screaming heap when I load the ship

So is there any way I can allocate more ram to KSP? I have 5.88 GB free. Which is a lot.

Edited January 15, 2014 by Specialist290
Merging sequential posts.

[Bobe]

As far as I understand, the issue is not hardware, a high end computer will be bottlenecked by the engine's limitations. 529 parts is a lot, the engine simply can't keep up with the processing necessary to keep the game running at a stable rate. Do you really need that many parts, or are you just fooling around trying to make it as big as possible?

[The_Rocketeer]

I've made ships with many more parts than that. The game ran slow, but it wasn't "a screaming heap" and I've got less RAM than that.

Do you have any mods installed? Some of them can cause the game to really lag up, and I imagine that is exacerbated by large ships.

[DrMonte]

Note that struts are not included in parts count but definitely reduces performance. And mods...

[celem]

Yeah if I manage to crash KSP to desktop its usually like this. The issue doesnt seem to be having lots of parts on my ship, the deal-breaker is when i 'pick-up' a lot of parts in the editor (like trying to save a complex launcher as a SA or adding a piece to the very top of your design). Havent found anything that fixes this particular issue, but it does also seem to occur when reverting such flights and/or sending them to the pad. Any time there are a lot of parts 'up in the air' computationaly.

KSP is limited to I think 3.5G of ram. At least on a windows platform anyway, you may be able to assign more on a linux rig. As mentioned above, most of the heavy-load is not multi-threaded, so my quad-core actually under performs my old monolithic 2G single core machine. You can try going through control panel and setting the affinity for ksp.exe to restrict it to a single core (i often bump it up to real-time priority at the same time).

[ThinkOutsideTheHangar]

Yeah, im fooling around because I'm too lazy to build a space station, so I did the single launch 529 part one. I'll try docking with MJ.