Performance Improvements

All i'm going to say is performance of this game is going to be the biggest issue to solve if they want avoid the massive sim lag problem of the supreme commander games as that was a real killer for a lot of people who ended up not playing anymore.. But as it stands the performance they getting at the moment is nice but still needs a lot more work as they have mentioned in livestreams.

comparing a graficheavy (though i hear 2 is the weakest of the 3) game with a objectheavy game ....

Yeh, if only they had been aiming for good performance, on many different computers, from the beginning. Oh WAAIIIITTTTTT /sarcasm

I'm going to leave the client side perf discussions to @varrak as he has already done a great job of describing what he's been doing in other threads. He is pretty much dedicated to visual capabilities and client side perf. For example, he made all the strategic icons particles so they are done in one draw call, and the ambient occlusion so that everything has a bit of a shadow underneath even with direct sunlight. Again, look up those threads.

One thing you sometimes see late game is the appearance of low client frame rate because units stutter along. This can occur when there are so many units in the game we can't send all the updates inside our bandwidth throttle. We limit the amount of bandwidth to 2 MB. So our sim updates the state of the game and puts it in the history server. The history server, as described in Forrest's blog post about ChronoCam, figures out the difference between what the server knows and what the client is supposed to know. It then starts sending updates. At some point, it may run out of bandwidth due to our throttle. It then stops and picks up where it left off next tick. William has been working to make it prioritize what it sends you. For example, sending you trivial updates about ordinary unit movements on other planets is not important. Sending you updates about nuclear launches on other planets is still important though. In fact, sending you ordinary unit movements on the planet you're looking at but can't see because it is the back of the planet is not important. My recent playtest videos that say perf testing include this change.

Some additional plans we have include floating point compression, in which we can transmit most of our location and orientation data in about half the space.

@sorian has been working on fixes to make sure the AI doesn't cause bumps in the sim perf by ensuring the AI does work incrementally over time rather than in bursts.

There are additional areas both identified and not, but the point is there's a lot for us to work on for better performance, and we're working on it.

the icons being drawn in one pass is nice but they have other issues. they are on a curve surface and resized according to distance to screen (it seems to me). The live resizing (in fact any resizing) causes a number of issues for the icons.

the prime one being : they aren't pixel perfect.

next is the fact that we can actually see them being sized up and down ever so slightly as you zoom in and out, making the combination of pixels that compose them jiggle constantly.

then comes modding them.

they are not loaded live. We must restart the entire game to test a new icon.

shadowing doesn't work as it should. A number of differences in the way icons behave when modded and unmoded can be perceived.

shadowing the icons in any way shape or form, even replacing the original files causes these changes.

there is a several amount of performance decrease, constant game crashes, white borders for every icon. Shader malfunctions.



I take it you are aware of these things and share my opinion that the dark part of the woods that is icons in PA must be tackled again with the intention, this time, of making them fall in line and taming them once and for all.

Does this explain the low CPU/GPU utilisation I am getting late game? About 60% GPU and 40-50% CPU load, with low frame rate.

yes it does he just said, the bandwith is throttled to only 2MB, so its basically lagging on server side, so it doesn't to fully utilize your CPU and GPU to their full potential because of the throttled bandwith which was what I was thinking was causing the lag and massive slow downs on the first page here. If you have a good machine and its still running slow and your not even close to maxing out your hardware usage, then its not a clientside problem, its server and internet issues.