Hi Great game. Enjoyed playing a few multiplayer matches and diving into Galactic War. Some issue found however. As this is beta/gamma thought I'd not complain but share: Performance: On galactic war the game gets slower and slower as the more units are created to the point on a 6GB, Core I7 2.63ghz, Nivida 680 with up to date drivers PC the game is basically unplayable - you can't select units or issue orders reliably and units stutter across the screen. Eventually on a 4 planet system GW eventually crashed back to the main menu saying "lost connection to the server" after a lengthy pause of around 30-40 seconds. This is pretty frustrating. I've read through the other forum points but nothing really seems to point to the problem. This is the number one issue you need to resolve to make this game something I would play regularly. Path finding: Some units get completely stuck on parts of the map. My sub commander once started embedded in a structure and couldn't do anything all game! Game balance: Playing through GW you can encounter situations where the game is basically both unwinnable without the right tech trees in place and unlosable as the other commander doesn't have any orbital capabilities. For example I have a multiple planet level where the only orbital unit I have is the lander. I can never land enough units on another world before they get instantly wiped out. Well I say that but when I attempted to land 150 landers + units that's when the game crashed above! Equally the other side can't send any units to wipe me out. Stale mate... Lander Unit suggestion: Would be great if lander could carry more than 1 unit and also show more clearly if its occupied or not. I'll come back and play more when the performance issues have been improved. Regards!
Welcome to the forums! Performance is being constantly worked on and is far from done. Unfortuately, a lot of the performance optimizations cannot be done until the game is more complete. Pathfinding is being constantly working on and is getting better with each update. The pathfinding we have with this build is so much better than what it used to be. Game balance is far from complete. Uber has been made aware of the tech tree issues. This is the first pass of the Galactic War and many improvements and balances are yet to come. I've mounted invasions with 100+ astrauses no problem. Are your drivers updated? UI for the Astraeus is going to be improved. We won't be getting multi unit transports until after 1.0 release. Multi-unit transports simply take a ton of time to develop and are not high enough on the dev's priority list.
Ah - I thought I had most up to date graphics drivers but in fact they weren't. That has helped a little but not really solved the performance issues. Using Ctrl-P and task manager gives me the following: Task manager reports 25% CPU use (i.e. full use of 1 physical CPU of the 4 I have available) Rock solid 30FPS of "client" 5-15 FPS for server 0-10 FPS for "sim" Consistent network use even though I'm using GW mode - I also see the game stalling whenever the network isn't doing anything. I would guess therefore: The game is mostly (if not entirely) single threaded? Wonder if other cores could assist with path finding, networking etc The game isn't GPU bound but is either CPU or network bound - and I'm guessing the latter. What I'm not sure I understand in all this is why the game is constantly accessing the network? Is this communicating with a uber server maybe? I would have thought in GW where the AI controls all the other commanders this wouldn't be necessary? I am using powerline networking to my router but given I can stream multiple HD streams fine I don't think this is the weak link. While I understand the thought about optimization can come at the end once the game is feature complete (as a software developer I know this well!) I think you need to be careful here. By releasing to the public early you risk your hardcore RTS user base trying and abandoning very quickly because it is unplayable. I would have thought it might be an idea to concentrate on the performance of the core game before worrying about lots of extra features. Oh and one other small thought. With updated drivers and upping the graphics quality to uber (which makes no difference to overall performance for me) on the night side of a planet you actually can't see any units at all when using a very high resolution monitor. Makes the game hard to play.
Just a small suggestion, but try turning the steam overlay off if you're using steam. Some people find that disabling the overlay gives a fairly significant performance boost. Off Topic: I'm only a junior programmer (fresh out of uni) so there's probably something I'm missing here, but have they actually said why multi-unit transports are difficult to implement? As far as I can see it should be the same as the single unit transport but with multiple sockets for units. Simplistic Pseudo Code: Code: int MAX_UNITS = 6; int attachedUnits = 0; Socket[] unitSockets; pickupUnit() if (attachedUnits < MAX_UNITS) attachUnitToSocket(unitSockets[attachedUnits++]) dropOffUnits() for (i = 0; i < MAX_UNITS; ++i) detachUnitFromSocket(unitSockets[i]) strange :\
