Planetary editor is beyond anything i've seen in gaming

In the sense that it not only locks up the application itself, it literally locks up the entire computer, the taskbar, windows desktop, even prevents any ctrl+alt+delete or alt+tab.
When games usually crash, are glitchy in alpha or beta, at least the application itself stops responding, but after a few seconds the ctrl+alt+delete screen loads and so forth.

Here. Nothing. It literally locks up the entirety of the computer, leaving not a single shred of 0.5% cpu left for OS tasks. I know it's alpha but jesus.. This is NOT ready for any users. Can't you code in some sort of pauses or something so it at least gives windows ONE percent of my CPU to work with?

That's all i ask. 1% cpu load left to remain responsive.
Would that be too much to ask? Would it be completely unacceptable to have PA get only 99% of my processing power, in order to be able to fcking use my mouse cursor?

I'm sorry, but this kind of thing frustrates me to death.
I can accept games being unfinished, buggy, anything.
But i can't accept when game devs don't take into account the fact that outside-application processes MUST be given priority, at least bloody enough to draw a mouse cursor across the screen.
How am i supposed to close a crashed application if the double-clicks on the window (to bring up the "close this app, it seems to have crashed" window) doesnt respond for 10 minutes, not to mention another 10 minutes for that very dialogue box to appear or even the task manager itself.

Anything that interferes with out-of-game processes, unacceptable.
I don't care if it would generate the planets 2% slower.
You don't suck up 100% of my cpu and hdd juice in that manner.

...PA doesn't have multithreading support yet (not that I know of at least), meaning it can only use one physical core (or is it only 1 logical core? That would suck). PA should only be taking up 12-50% of your CPU, maximum, because that is all it is digitally capable of allocating. It is literally, at this stage, physically impossible for PA to use more than one core.

...

Are you still running on a single core? Are you like, talking to me from the past?

No, the game should be given priority for the best performance. And since this is a true alpha, this is exactly the kind of issue you can expect to run into. The devs can't predict stuff like this because they don't have all the computer configurations in the world to do so. So as an alpha tester, you get to find these wonderful nuggets of fail and report them so that they don't appear in the final release, which is when they shouldn't appear at all.

Also, the fact that it completely locks up your machine is in part a fault of any Windows OS, as few of them are implemented in a way that allows administrative powers to have full, unblocked control on demand, like on Linux (and Mac, I think). Although, I would have thought that by Windows 7, this would be fixed . . .

In any case, report the issue and move on. If you can't play, don't bother to try. Just wait for the next patch. It's not like you'll be missing anything important.

Where on Earth are you getting that information from? PA.exe uses all 8 of my cores in the editor and ingame?



That's 27 threads there, therefore the program is multithreaded

Your screenshot says PA is only using 14% of your total CPU. That's not 8 cores. Do you have an actual 8 core machine or is it 4 core hyperthreaded (like an i7)?

Multithreading is entirely different from parallel processing. Windows has been multithreaded since long before multiple cores became available. What mushroomars means is that PA does not currently support parallel processing.

How much RAM do you have? It is most likely that it filled your RAM (planets take up lots of space atm) and then it was trying to still generate the planet so it keeps going to disk to write out pagefiles and it tursn out HDD I/O is slow. It is locking as it keeps switching parts of the same applications memory between RAM and pagefiles. That would be my guess. I only have 4gbs of RAM and can't generate very large planets without locking my computer up. If you wait long enough it will respond again. It really depends on the size you tried to generate.

Actual 8 cores, FX-8120, I know that specific one shows low CPU usage (I was ingame not in the editor, I've had it go up to near 100% on ALL cores in the editor on a large planet. PA is not CPU intensive normally, on the performance tab all cores are showing the same patterns across implying the game is threaded (otherwise one core would have maxed)


Then explain this:

my seven year old computer with 4 gigs of ram and minimalist graphics card was able to create the largest possible planet (given enough time) and i was able to hold 15 frames while moving. performance is extremely variable right now you cant point any fingers just yet.

You don't care, but I care because I generate planets with 140 radius.

If your computer not enough powerful to process big radius just use smaller value.

PA easily use all my 4 CPU and 6 threads (I got i7 2600K with HT enabled). It's not only multithreaded, but also multi-process because UI rendered by dedicated process.

less than 10% cpu usage explained... thank you mushroomars it seems I was having a major brainfart there and forgot to think about the obvious explanation.

And no this is nothing new, or fantastically extravagant. Did you ever try the old Blizzard patchers? they would split-second hard reboot your PC instantly upon error, BSOD couldn't catch it, leading to severe hardware damage, I lost an SSD and a hard drive, half of the sectors on each were burnt. my motherboard and graphic cards also were damaged and caused instability, I had to send all that in to after-sales service and it was a bitch to diagnose seeing as alsmost everything was fried.

The stupid mistake I did was trying the blasted patcher a second time when the O.S. still booted. :|

i think this is a troll thread there is no way this person "cant believe how much proccessing its taking" im certain we have all seen and are fully capable of understanding how a screw up in code can cause serious proccessing problems and be fully capable of understanding that this is an early look at planet building and of course is going to have questionable functionality. besides there is pretty much no reason for this thread i would amagine that the devs are fully aware that the game is optimized and at random time brings even the best computers to its knees.

also you can change a programs priority setting so that might be something to concider

that only worked on old O.S.es nowadays you do that it doesn't change a thing.

http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/general/29925/

its right there, please read before you post.

'It's the operating systems scheduler's job to decide when and where threads of execution run, you don't need to worry about that.'

Sorry! I'm bad at computering. I forgot that multithreading and multicore support aren't identical...

I should know that too, I encounter that issue in Python 3 a lot...

But the game does still look like it has multicore support, since it gobbles up nearly all the CPU power when doing something intensive (such as generating a planet) like in



In a normal game, all the simulation (CPU intensive stuff) is done on the server which is why ingame PA barely uses anything of the CPU to begin with.

This thread is hilarious.

Yes, this game can use up to 8 cores easily without any problem, unfortunately I don't have multi-sockets hardware to test it too.

No, the Halting problem hasn't been solved yet, and computers don't run on magic. The OS is supposed to handle the priority of threads, of course. But if concurrent processing isn't planned out and implemented by the programmer, it doesn't happen.

It doesn't look like CPU usage will be a problem with PA. Their lofty goals make multi core support and optimization mandatory.