Spacepiratesandzombies.com

Hello,

I'm playing spaz around lvl 32 systems and when a lot of ships / actions / debris is out there, my game goes to 1 frame per second and most of the time my idle ships (sisnce I can't control them) die and I loose. Normally the game runs fine. My PC is old but my video card was bought around may. I tried playing windowed, lowered the options that I could.

Graphics arent important to me, is there a way to disable effects and stuff to make the game run smoothly?

Thansk!

Hmm, It may be the zombie critters. I will find my thread post on that. The CPU is doing most of the work, running lots of AI, but older machines cannot always handle it. I need to do more optimization as well. I will link the forum post in a few mins.

edit: Ok here is the post to try. There is a noCritters.zip file. Lets see if that helps.

http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1771

Well I'm not really far in the game, I still can't get passed that military guy that attacks my mother ship (a dude that helped me previously), so if by zombies you mean real in-game zombies that kind-of survice in the void of space, well I don't encounter much of them yet. I mostly fight CIV and UTA ships. When I go in big fights with 3-4 CIV and 3-4 UTA ships (at least one last in each) well, that's when I get the framerate drop.

I'll try the file you gave me tomorow night, thanks for the help, I'll ring back if it works or not. Thanks

hmm. You should not be receiving lag early game. That is really odd. Can you please link your console.log file? It is located in the directory with your spazgame.exe file.

Hello,

Sorry for the late reply, I hev been very busy lately.

Here is my console.log file:



Thanks for the help, I'll try the fix you suggested rigth away.

Perhaps the "Intel Pentium 4, ~3.00 Ghz" part simply explain the problem, this processor is inferior to an Atom in most benchmarks!

See Intel Pentium 4 Vs. Atom: A Battle Of The Generations.

Performance-wise, there are benchmarks in which the old Pentium 4 still does well. This applies to workloads that haven’t been multi-threaded or coded to take advantage of newer instruction set enhancements, such as SSE3. All others, though, run much faster on the dual-core Atom D510, mostly thanks to its second processing core. The performance difference is glaring.

Yeah this PC is like 7 years old. But it runs most indie games quite well. I play HON with no trouble for example. But if this is the case, well I was planning on ungrading before x-mas anyways, but I do think this hunk of junk should run this...

No critters file did not solve my issue. Thanks for any more suggestions!

(ohh and great game btw )

Hmm, I think that SPAZ may need to wait for the upgraded computer. It requires a lot more horsepower than most indie games. I continually try to optimize, but I do not think that I will be able to do enough optimization before Christmas for you to run effectively. On a positive note though, by then we will have a new free patch out with tonnes of new content!

Thing is I also suffer from this issue.. but my computer is brand new, with a dedicated 1.5gb graphics card, 6gb ram, and a quad core 2gh, oc to 2.8ghz, apiece.

Theres something that causes the slowdown, and I doubt it is the effects that occur on screen... because I can run a game of supreme commander 1 with about 2000 units on the screen and suffer no slowdown.

_________________
For death and glory! For pain and mayhem! FOR THE KING!
Champion of UT3. Incoming Bio-goop!
Enjoys: Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
My Insanity Mod: http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3107

1) Post console.log
2) Try the directx switch
3) Does reducing the screen size change your framerate? (this way you will know if you are CPU or GPU bound)

Uhh did they fix the issue yet with windowing the game yet from the beta... ie you hit windowed, and the game no longer launches.

_________________
For death and glory! For pain and mayhem! FOR THE KING!
Champion of UT3. Incoming Bio-goop!
Enjoys: Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
My Insanity Mod: http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3107

We have a launcher screen now that lets you set screen options. This should allow you to preemptively deal with any issues that come up. What was the last version that you played Palandus?

I have a very similar setup and WAS having the same issue with the frame rate stutter, i was even getting it on the menu screen with the ships scrapping in the background.
I run Kaspersky AV and run SPAZ on steam.

I added the steamapps folder and the torquegamebuilder.exe to the exceptions and trusted applications list and BAM....no more issues.

Hope this helps

I'm having much the same problem, but in my case it isn't an antivirus program that is causing it (I don't have one installed). It's definitely not graphics-related; changing the screen resolution, graphics settings, debris/effects sliders, or directx compatibility mode don't have any effect. I'd like to provide the details I've noticed in the hopes that they will help you find the cause.

The slowdowns happen at two distinct times. The first is during the death-throes of a dying ship or station. The dying ship is suffering from internal secondary explosions, it's crew is abandoning ship, etc. Once the final blast has come and gone the framerate picks back up quite quickly but not instantaneously. Smaller ships have shorter death-throes, so while they have the same effect it's less irritating. Your beams are probably cycling anyway.

The second time the framerate slows down is during a fight involving Civ or UTA ships, and probably only certain of those ships (it seems to be the huge ones, mostly). If it's just me fighting some zombies then there's no problem. If it's just me and a station and some zombies then all is well, even if it's a mining station. However, once you throw in some of the larger Civ or UTA ships than the game becomes a slideshow for as long as they are in the zone with you. You kill the last one and the framerate goes back to normal, but then another one jumps in and it's a slideshow again. However, it's not quite that simple. If there's no combat, then it doesn't happen either. So a traffic jam mission doesn't cause this, nor does a gate blockade if the UTA is friendly. Additionally, if the ship I'm piloting is killed, then the framerate jumps back up to normal until I become an active participant again, either by rebuilding a ship or by jumping to a different one.

Of course, I must say that I am impressed that you've written a game where the combat simulation is entirely decoupled from the graphical framerate. Fights are often still winnable as long as I'm cautious; I just have to be able to predict with some accuracy where they will run to next and try to put all of my beam spam in that spot. It might be half a second until the next screen update, but at least I know that half a second worth of stuff will have happened when it does show up.

Oh, almost forgot. I wanted to post my console.log file, but the game isn't generating one. Is there anything I can do to make it write out the log?

I think for a console.log file you need the game to be run as an administrator.

We are going to figure out that darned slowdown eventually. It really bothers us too. I have an idea in the works that may go a long way toward fixing it as well, but only time will tell. Thanks very much for the detailed analysis as it does help me narrow down the problems. The issue is almost non existent on my shitbox now, but I can still find spots where the frame rate dips and I know that is where to strike.

This solution I am working on though will remove the symptoms instead of the slowdowns themselves. What it comes down to is if the framerate drops below 30 fps, the AI will be allowed to not think for the frame that you wouldn't see anyhow due to the slowdown. It is a little complex but it boils down to skipping pointless calculations, while retaining things like physics updates and collisions etc.

Alternatively for newer machines some machines offer overclocking support... in a pinch this could mitigate the problem. That or install the game on an older machine with a faster single CPU.

_________________
For death and glory! For pain and mayhem! FOR THE KING!
Champion of UT3. Incoming Bio-goop!
Enjoys: Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
My Insanity Mod: http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3107

Also, for the windowing problem it was one I sufferred from in beta and in v1.001

_________________
For death and glory! For pain and mayhem! FOR THE KING!
Champion of UT3. Incoming Bio-goop!
Enjoys: Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
My Insanity Mod: http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3107

One place where I can perfectly reproduce it is the first "defend the clockwork" mission. Shortly after the big enemy ship warps in, the framerate goes down. Maybe you can profile the AI routines to see which ones take the most CPU?

Hello,

firstly, I would like to thank you for very nice game which entertained me more than e.g. Crysis, Warhammer, Rock of ages, Orcs must die....
secondly, I gratulate you to making me (by the quality of your game) to actually buy your game the thing is that I play games very often, I switch games a lot (went through like 10 games last month) etc, all pirated versions (I never upload, though). So, good job, you changed an old pirate to buy a game :-p

thirdly, my problem. I played pirated version. All seemed to be fine, but about... dunno, level 30? 50? probably, the game started to lag in bigger fights. A horrible and very first lag was in a mission where many Tugs went after my fleet, and they had these pirate icons on them. Now I am at level 75, in chapter 4 and it starts to be unplayable due to lags. Now I bought your nice work, but the problem remains.

I spent last few hours by reading the forum here. I tried no critter and no sound files (nice work on providing these files, thanks!), also I tried directx compatibility, but nothing changes it. I am sorry if I am actually in already solved problem, I might have missed it. My pc is 4gb ram, GeForce 8600GT and AMD Phenom II X2 550, so I guess that hardware shouldnt be the problem. Drivers are all newest (at least sound and gfx drivers are), windows 7, fresh new installation. Disabling Avast AV doesnt work. Reducing the debris and effects doesnt seem to work either. I have a save from my level 45: attacking a lonely lvl 2 space station with 3 ships, largest ship Right hook, already starts to do some lags, still quite playable though. At level 75, fighting against 3 Sunspots and a starbase is unplayable :-/ not mentioning zombie maps - thats also very bad lags. I tried versions 1.000, 1.009 and now 1.011 on Steam. With all versions I had lags. I just installed the Steam version and hit continue ingame and the game found my saves - could there be some placement (on HDD) issues in this?

I am sorry if I missed some banality... Can you help me with this?

my console after lvl 45 one-minute fight against starbase with its drones and 4 ships in total... :


//-------------------------- 11/27/2011 -- 22:06:53 -----
Processor Init:
AMD (unknown), ~3.13 Ghz
(timed at roughly 3.13 Ghz)
FPU detected
MMX detected
3DNow detected
SSE detected

Math Init:
Installing Standard C extensions
Installing Assembly extensions
Installing FPU extensions
Installing MMX extensions
Installing 3DNow extensions
Installing SSE extensions

Input Init:
DirectInput enabled.

Initializing chunk mappings...
o 'TEXT' maps to TextChunk
o 'SCHK' maps to UnknownChunk
o 'SCHK' maps to SimChunk
Loading compiled script D:/Programy/steam/steamapps/common/space pirates and zombies/common/main.cs.
Loading compiled script D:/Programy/steam/steamapps/common/space pirates and zombies/game/main.cs.
% - Initializing Common
Reading Display Device information...
Primary Display Device Found:
Vendor Id: VEN_0000
Device Id: DEV_0000
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Current Version: 1.011
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
loading controls
Video Init:
Accelerated OpenGL display device detected.
Accelerated D3D device detected.

Activating the OpenGL display device...
Activating the OpenGL display device...
Setting screen mode to 640x480x32 (w)...
Creating a new window...
Acquiring a new device context...
Pixel format set:
32 color bits, 24 depth bits, 8 stencil bits
Creating a new rendering context...
Making the new rendering context current...
OpenGL driver information:
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!
Version: 3.3.0
OpenGL Init: Enabled Extensions
ARB_multitexture (Max Texture Units: 4)
EXT_blend_color
EXT_blend_minmax
EXT_compiled_vertex_array
NV_vertex_array_range
EXT_texture_env_combine
EXT_packed_pixels
EXT_fog_coord
ARB_texture_compression
EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
(ARB|EXT)_texture_env_add
EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic (Max anisotropy: 16)
WGL_EXT_swap_control
OpenGL Init: Disabled Extensions
EXT_paletted_texture
3DFX_texture_compression_FXT1

Max Texture Size reported as: 8192
Activating the OpenGL display device...
Activating the OpenGL display device...
Killing the texture manager...
Making the rendering context not current...
Deleting the rendering context ...
Releasing the device context...
Destroying the window...
Setting screen mode to 640x480x32 (w)...
Creating a new window...
Acquiring a new device context...
Pixel format set:
32 color bits, 24 depth bits, 8 stencil bits
Creating a new rendering context...
Making the new rendering context current...
OpenGL driver information:
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!
Version: 3.3.0
Resurrecting the texture manager...
OpenGL Init: Enabled Extensions
ARB_multitexture (Max Texture Units: 4)
EXT_blend_color
EXT_blend_minmax
EXT_compiled_vertex_array
NV_vertex_array_range
EXT_texture_env_combine
EXT_packed_pixels
EXT_fog_coord
ARB_texture_compression
EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
(ARB|EXT)_texture_env_add
EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic (Max anisotropy: 16)
WGL_EXT_swap_control
OpenGL Init: Disabled Extensions
EXT_paletted_texture
3DFX_texture_compression_FXT1

Max Texture Size reported as: 8192
OpenAL Driver Init:
Vendor: Creative Labs Inc.
Version: OpenAL 1.0
Renderer: Software
Extensions: EAX 2.0, EAX 3.0, EAX Unified, and EAX-AC3

Mod Found: Halloween

Torque Game Builder (v1.7.5) initialized...
Setting screen mode to 1680x1050x32 (fs)...
Killing the texture manager...
Making the rendering context not current...
Deleting the rendering context...
Releasing the device context...
Destroying the window...
Changing the display settings to 1680x1050x32...
Creating a new full-screen window...
Acquiring a new device context...
Pixel format set:
32 color bits, 24 depth bits, 8 stencil bits
Creating a new rendering context...
Making the new rendering context current...
Resurrecting the texture manager...
game/gameScripts/droneClass.cs (436): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setVisible'
game/gameScripts/droneClass.cs (436): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setVisible'
game/gameScripts/droneClass.cs (436): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setVisible'
game/gameScripts/droneClass.cs (436): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setVisible' - repeated many times (*edit*)
Activating DirectInput...
EnableControls Error, Invalid Enable object SpazPopupGUI
Loaded Quest: Quest_Ambient_03B
game/gameScripts/escScreen.cs (67): Unable to find object: '137368' attempting to call function 'sceneSchedule'
game/gameScripts/tools.cs (45): Unable to find object: '137368' attempting to call function 'setScenePause'
game/gameScripts/tools.cs (47): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setScenePause'
Shutting down the OpenGL display device...
Making the GL rendering context not current...
Deleting the GL rendering context...
Releasing the device context...
Restoring the desktop display settings (1680x1050x32)...

Hmm. Looking at your specs, your computer is very powerful compared to our dev stations. I think there is something at work here. You mention that you turned off the anti virus. Some anti virus even when "off" does some pretty nasty stuff. We have had quite a few problems there with each file load being scanned and slowing the works way down.

Aside from that, you could try to set the processor affinity to core 1. The Torque engine unfortunately does not multithread, so playing on a core that has minimal load on it will help.

The load will be on your CPU and not your video card as well, so multi tasking can hurt performance.

Aside from that, certain weapons are more cpu hungry than others. Mines and Drones use a lot of CPU power, and cannons use the least.

We continually try to optimize as well and you should play on the 1.011 version as it is the most recent with the biggest optimizations.

Sorry that this is happening, we know it sucks

Please report back and we will see what we can do to figure out the bottleneck

Blorfy, thank you very much for prompt response!

I would like to ask - 1) these messages "game/gameScripts/droneClass.cs (436): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setVisible'" are allright? I get tons of them in console. 2) what about "EnableControls Error, Invalid Enable object SpazPopupGUI"? I ask because I am not sure if you noticed it. Im not so good in these software things
3) to Torque engine - a few times, when alt-tabbing, I noticed long (like 15s) lags, when I tried to get back to the game from windows. And during this, a few times I noticed that "Torque game builder is not responding".
4) I think I did shut Avast down completely, not sure tho. I will try it once again.
5) I will try the processor affinity and tell you the result right away

thank you for your care once again! Btw I would love more and more optional stuff to put on my ships ^^

oh and sorry, my GFX aint GeForce 8600GT as I said, but 9800GT.

Ok, I played in zombie area, with affinity to CPU 1 instead of 0; I also disabled antivirus a few times (disabled shields, didnt shut it down completely, I cant find the shutdown button in Avast, heh), and there were still pretty bad lags (very frequently, 1 second lags easily). Here is my console.log - http://www3.uschovna.cz/download/G1RLVE ... 9LCT34Y4VZ -

as you can see, its FULL of that "game/gameScripts/droneClass.cs (436): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setVisible'",
and at the end there is
"game/gameScripts/escScreen.cs (67): Unable to find object: '271689' attempting to call function 'sceneSchedule'
game/gameScripts/tools.cs (45): Unable to find object: '271689' attempting to call function 'setScenePause'
game/gameScripts/tools.cs (47): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'setScenePause'".

Oh and one another "bug" I noticed - EVERY time I warp into ANY location, I got black screen, the music starts to play, plays for about 5 seconds, then it stops and then I see the game finally, and the music starts to play again, from beginning. But with nosound file from you, I didnt find any lag difference...

Hmm, are you all up to date patch wise? What is your build number?

Ok it looks like you are on 1.011.

Those setvisible echos are the cloaked afterburners on drones complaining that they don't exist and is totally harmless and gone in 1.012 (not released) The other echos are also harmless and always happen on shutdown. So your log is clean.

The game is detecting you at 3.13 GHz so you have more than enough power to play smoothly. Any hitching should be fairly rare. It is quite rare for me at 2.4 Ghz.

I am almost certain some system process is interfering with the loading of your files. That music doubling is what happens to me when I debug the game (which is VERY slow) and the streamer times out.

In the mean time, if you are heavily drone specialized, I would unfortunately get out of that as they eat CPU more than average and perhaps go cannons for some relief. This may help, but I think there is something scanning each file when it loads.