Alpha 10 performance issues beyond turn 340 on huge map

As I replied in the SpaceSector blog comment, thanks a lot for your feedback, and welcome to the forums!

It's great to see people playing huge games with so many turns. So far, most of the reports we got, and the games we played, were on Medium and Large, so it's good to have some feedback on Huge as well.

As I said in the blog, we are aware that object pooling will probably be necessary everywhere due to how Unity manages objects and memory. We already do this in some places but not everywhere yet because the game seems to be running good in Medium and Large sized games with games around 200-250 turns, which allowed for people to play and provide feedback.

We took note of this and we’ll make sure to address it during the optimization phase.

And, by the way, since you played the game on Huge and for so many turns, let us know what other feedback you may have on the gameplay aspects, the good and the not so good as for any other feedback you can give us.

Thanks!

\Edit: By the way, could you please send us a save of that game so we can have a look? The saves are in: Drive:\Users\<user>\AppData\LocalLow\Praxis Games\ISG Please zip it and attach it to your post above or in a new post. Also, could you please let us know ho much RAM does your PC has? Thanks a lot!

 

No problem Khan, thanks for the save. To upload saves it's better to just zip them, as the uploader only accepts files with certain extensions, zip being one of them.

I loaded the save, man, what a game you have going there! So many colonies, powerful fleets. Trading with your neighbors while they are at war. Nice.

I played for 16 turns until Turn 355. Did some memory profiling and everything looks ok here. The game process started with around 2.5GB of RAM at the start (turn 339) but slowly dropped turn after turn until reaching around 1.1GB at turn 355. So, I see no memory issues on this side. I have Windows 10.

That said, there is a known issue that causes a huge slowdown on the game in the late game. This major slowdown happens after researching the Expert Logistics tech, which gives unlimited supply range. This causes the Supply Range layer to perform quite badly which makes the game considerably slower. Try switching off the Supply Range layer (the icon with the parachute on the bottom-left) and you should see a considerable performance improvement.

That could be causing you some of the issues, since you report the game being unplayable for you after turn 340. Expert Logistics will breakthrough in the game 8 turns later, so by turn 348 the game should become way less responsive.

However, you also report freeze ups, having to force shutdown and having to reload the game from time to time after turn 340, which does suggest memory issues. But it's strange because you have a lot of RAM.

Could the freezes be happening when you do combat (I got a freeze while playing the game during combat, and that was due to a bug)? Or if not, where exactly do you get the freezes, because these may be due to errors and bugs and not to memory issues.

Do you notice the problem more during or after battles perhaps? I did not do any battles in my 16 turns until turn 355 but I did a couple battles in another game after playing until turn 345. I also did not notice any memory issues there but I did get a freeze, due to a bug.

Could I ask you to check how much RAM does your "ISG_pre_alpha_10_64Bit" process takes while you play the game? Just to be sure if the problem is RAM, due to the supply range slowdown, or something else.

Thanks a lot!



\Edit: By the way, here's the save zipped and in ready format after uncompressed to be loaded in case anyone wants to have a look.

 

Could be. I noticed that Windows 10 does memory management much better than Windows 7 the moment I switched. I only have 6GB of RAM, and Windows 7 was becoming an issue. Now in Windows 10 I run everything fine with 6GB of RAM and the windows experience is really much quicker and smoother in Win10, no doubt about that.

Theoretically, the game should run fine on Windows 7. There are a lot of recent and demanding Unity games that support Windows 7. Steam's HW stats report that around 32% of all PC users use Win7. Windows 10 users are now on 57%, says Steam.

You report having issues with other games on your system, and your kids laptops as well. All have Win7. Let us know how it went in your Win10 PC. If the game has issues on Win7 we should have a look at that asap.

Thanks!

PS: By the way, the Chaos Chain weapon has a bug which may cause some enemy ships to become zombies. Just so you know if you experience that your combat stops at some point, it may be because of that. I've just checked that now.

 

130 turns is too soon to see performance or memory related issues. If the freezes you report are due to memory running out than the problem must be local to Win7 or to some other issue in your machine. You do report having issues with other Unity games. Could it be the way memory is being handled? Could you check if you're allowing windows to control the paging file size for virtual memory, for example? It shouldn't be that because you have plenty of RAM, but still it's worth a shot.

We had quite a few reports from people playing past 150 and 200 turns and no one reported having memory issues. I don't know which operating system they were playing on, could be Win10. We'll be asking people what version of Windows are they using from now on.

Let us know how it went on your Win10 PC.

Thanks.

 

Thanks for the info Konstantine, that is really helpful.

You are the person that has played the game the most so far. You're playing on a Windows 7 and don't report having memory issues or freezes of any kind, in large games even passing 350 turns. Seems like there's something specific going on here.

It would not surprise me that an older version of Unity (the one we built PA10 with) could have issues with Windows 7. And, Windows 10 does have better memory management. But, it seems that something else may be involved, some specific option or system configuration. So far, no one else seemed to have complained about memory issues and freezes due to that. However, people tend not to play on Huge.

Let's see what else Khan can give us on this issue.

 

Thanks a lot for the detailed report!

I could not reproduce the issue here. I occupied Vrauc III, but everything went fine. However, your analysis and data (especially the output_log.txt you've attached) allowed us to spot where the problem may be. Basically, the code got stuck in an infinite loop (therefore the zeros you get in the log), which then caused the freeze and memory to fill-up.

We don't know yet why you got this. Did you play only one game, or did you have the same issue on other games? If you played just this game, it can be specific to this game alone, for some reason we could not fully understand. When you load the Turn 366 game, and occupy Vrauc III, do you always get the freeze, or did the freeze happened just once and now you cannot reproduce this event when occupying Vrauc III again?

We'll analyse this in more detail and come back to you when we find the solution to this problem. In the meantime, please keep reporting when you get these feezes and memory issues, and send us the output_log.txt top part if you can, so we can check if it is the same problem that is occurring, or something else.

Thanks!

 

Ok, so you get this issue every game. Yes, if you could just make that test, of loading the save "Autosave - Turn 366" that you've sent us, occupy Vrauc III and see if you get the freeze, that would help.

Having the music turned off should not be related to this issue. The audio warning is one of the last long entries on output_log.txt, but the issue starts after that. It is related with the terrain generation process, which occurs when a system is visited for the first time. For some reason, you're getting values that cause an infinite loop in some cases, causing all of those "0" log entries. We're investigating this and should be able to solve the issue soon.

 

Yes, that one was easy It is fixed now. I attached a save for you after that point in case you want to proceed with that game.

Hope you had a wonderful time with your family.
Thanks!

Ok, so as suspected this doesn't happen everytime, which makes it harder to reproduce.

We know where the memory fill-up event and consequent freeze happened to you, the one of your latest freeze and report, where the log was full of "0" entries. So, we implemented a quick workaround for the time being.

In the meantime, I've built PA10 with this workaround as a patch (PA10a), so that hopefuly you will be able to play your current games without this problem. I've sent you the link via private conversation.

Let us know if the freezes persist with this new build. And if they do, please tell us any details you can give us, as for the save and the output_log.txt so we can check what else may be causing them.

Thanks!

 

Oh, I see that building with the new Unity version now requires this UnityPlayer.dll file to be in the same folder where the game executable is. I'll send it to you.

It seems that we should probably release the next version with an installer.