Performance Improvements

... Performance Improvements, Performance Improvements.

I know, the game is still beta/ gamma, but I have serious concerns, that history will repeat like Supreme Commander 1 and 2. In SupCom it was the SimSpeed which got worse and worse in late games versus AI. In Planetary Annihilation - at this time - theres a similiar performance lost. In late games with AI the game begins to stutter. In a loop: It runs for arround 2-3 seconds, then it pauses for arround 1 second. I already have read a lot of posts regarding computer specifications. But even if you have a high end pc, you will get performance problems in late games. In the SupCom series it was an unsolvable memory bug in the game. Take this for example:
"
If you're referring to slowdown late game as the AI lags with pathfinding etc and the simspeed drops, then you'll likely still see it, it was never really patched out, just the way the game was coded.. Best way around it is to just play with smaller numbers of harder AIs, sorian IS better than vanilla too. And having as much processing power per CPU core as possible, since the AI threads all run on one alone (the tools to multithread the game often lower sim speed too, they're more for fps).
"
http :// steamcommunity . com/app/9420/discussions/0/846944689671608070/#c846944689683404951
(date of visit: 2014_05_10)
{sorry for broken links, but "as a new user you arent allowed to use more than 0 links in your post"}

I seriusoly hope that this wont happen to Planetary Annihilation again. The game can be/ get as good as possible, but if there are still existing such performance issues, it would be a huge tragedy, at least for me and the guys which loves to play massive battles. Talking about massive battles, I always connected SupCom & Planetary Annhilation with this feature/ genre. Not at least the producers are advertising this:
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RTS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Colonize solar systems, smash entire worlds, and obliterate your foes in epic battles with multiple players and potentially thousands of units. Planetary Annihilation is a next-generation RTS that takes the genre to a planetary scale.
"
http :// w w w . uberent . com/pa/
(date of visit: 2014_05_10)
{sorry for broken links, but "as a new user you arent allowed to use more than 0 links in your post"}

So what I really wanne see are great performance improvements.
I dont need another patch with more content (yes, apparently new features are always welcome, but first...), instead work on a big patch solely improving game performance. In my opinion that would be essential for further development. Even if you have to rewrite some parts of the engine, I dont know, I didnt study informatics, but the work would be worth it.

Regards

Source Seeker

More performance improvements are coming. If we're lucky some of the wizards devs might come and comment on what they've been working on recently in this regard

It would be interesting to know what sorts of planets/systems/number of units and AIs you've been playing with to know when the lag kicks in. A screenshot would probably be able to answer all those in one.

Welcome to the forums , I hope they and this game meet your expectations eventually!
Personally, I disagree with this thought slightly. Why stop adding new content and concentrate on performance, when by adding in more features you may negatively affect performance?
Obviously they need to make it semi playable so that we may play it as early backers and give useful feedback, but personally I think it only needs to run adequately, until full release.
Also don't forget that time has passed since SupCom, and the dev team, and their goals/ restraints have probably changed a fair bit.
I am optimistic that this game will run well on most computers by the time of official launch.

They need to implement most of the core features and units before starting the final optimization , that is the way game development works.

And right now the game runs on ubers server, this will not be the case when the final release arrives.

Performance improvements come out with every build.

Unfortunately Uber can't really optimize the performance, then add all the features. As some of the optimizations can't be added until more features area added.

We all want better performance, and better performance is coming.

Nah some serious perf work needs to be done.

I can play crysis 2 at an acceptable framerate but not this game.

The game is not done yet

As much as we would like sim improvements, there are finite limits to what they can accomplish.

Make a base game and make that as performance optimal as possible - leave it up to modders to destroy that.

Eventually that will be the Idea, if you make a perfectly optimized game, and then add new features to it because you are still developing the game, it will wreck your optimizations, or cause things that didn't need to be optimized before to suddenly require optimization. Leave the major optimizations for when all the core features are in.

Do bare in mind that although the game needs performance improvements, a lot of the slow downs durring late matches are mostly down to internet lag rather then the actual performance of the game. Mentioned this quite a few times where I would love to know what the frame rates are on one of their office machines in an offline match against several AI coz I bet its performance is almost double over how we have it online right now.

I don't know how much reasurch you have done but I do know that the problem you are describing comes from network bandwidth limitations. The simulation is currently being run on Uber's servers and then sent to us over the network and Uber is limiting the bandwith per player on their side. This is not to say they don't need to optimize that, but rather that the game is being optimized for level below what most servers will be running from.

I mentioned all of that because the network performance has nothing to do with the AI but rather the total number of units. Futhermore, PA has been coded from the ground up to scale properly with large numbers of units and does.

All the games played are running on about 1/4 the power of the average gaming machine on the simulation side(8 games on a modern 8 core server processer if I remember correctly). This means that when the game is released massive AI games on a good local machine should be possible.

Crysis 2 is a three year old small scale FPS. They could optimize each area for only the stuff you saw and not have the enemies an polygons in another area hurt the performance. PA is a brand new large scale RTS. You are not going to achive anything close to the framerates you got in crysis.

So I feel like that was a very long rambling post, sorry about that.
TL;DR: game is being simulated on something less powerfull than an average gaming machine and then sent through the internet to your machine to be rendered. You should be able to handle much more units on release.

Apples vs oranges and all that.

Trust me when I say the performance is coming. As people have noted what holds PA back is the server side of the equation rather than the client side.

PA is being built from the ground up for massive unit counts, during the Kickstarter campaign they stated the intention is for the engine to be capable of dealing with 1,000,000 units by scaling well with memory and cores (obviously that will require a serious server). At the moment, like the client rendering engine, the server sim is limited to a single core.

They are optimizing and squeezing everything they can with very little- once they run out of ways to optimize for that then they switch to multi threading (and given what the SpringMT engine is capable of compared to the single thread version the speed up will be big).

It is also confirmed that the client side render engine is going to be multi-threaded. The game is actually surprisingly fluid for saying they are only using single threads at the moment.

If PA's scale got any bigger, I'm not sure if most folks could even handle it.
As it stands I feel the average metal amount that is dished out should be rather reduced.
But for a game in-progress, performance improvements are essentially a-given. Most of these issues are server-side either way.

The only thing I have lagged in pa Is the servers down to 0.1 fps

Why is GPU and CPU load so low?

Because it's all done on the server.

So I'm assuming this is a good thing and means that once they ramp up the server performance we should be able to get a steady 60fps even in the late game?

Basically. What'll probably happen first is that they'll release the game, and people will be able to host their own servers. Meaning that you will be able to play singleplayer to as high of an FPS as your comp can manage.