Perf Comparison to stardrive 15b. news

so i have a couple of videos for you. In these i try to demonstrate the lag improvements and challenges in blackbox.

this videos are being done on a z400 workstation. its a crappy firegl video card. OK OK crappy for gaming alright. But its more than enough for SD.

whats a z400 you ask? well its my work computer. you like i7's right? well this is a xeon i7. OK its kinda old. but its 4 cores plus 4 hyperthread running a 3ghz.
The 15b is running on a 4 disk raid 0. i like to live on the edge.

Setup:
same save game of a pre 15b game where i got to a point in the end game where the game was too hard to finish. mostly because of crashes in the pre 15b SD. in 15b solved the crashes and i did finish the game but it was hard. Why? because of the troop management. The troop management. Finishing this game in blackbox was so much easier.

I use this game a lot in my perf testing and you can see why when you watch it. Its horribad. Grinds the game to the ground. BUT the cpu speed makes little difference here i do not think. I mean it does for sure but when that lag is hitting hard the cpu is not working hard. most likely as has been pointed out by another user the speed issue is more about memory. the game is choking the system with stuff. making a bunch of things and destroying them. It has to do this as well for the most part as it doesnt have the memory space to hold all those objects at once. in any event.

so here is 15b with "cannotfinish" save game.
YouTube™ Video: stardrive 15b Views: 6stardrive 15b save game with heavy lag.

as you can see the biggest issue in the game are the pauses. Each time in video where things appear to stop and im moving the mouse around. its stopped. the pauses are really really bad.
the game is functional at 4x with force full sim on though. choppy as all hell but not unplayable.
just painful for an RTS. without force full sim its the pauses that kill it and make it not worth playing at 4x. 3x and lower are doable.

so here is 714 blackbox. with "cannotfinish" save game.
YouTube™ Video: stardrive blackbox 714 with heavy lag Views: 7comparison to 15 b

video with heavy lag. invisible combat mode is much better. visible combat not so much. thats why i want to fix the combat lag so much.

You can see that with forcefull sim off the game is completely playable at 4x in the galaxy view. aweome.
zooming into the ship view the game is smooth at 1 and maybe 2x but starts to lose its cool at 3 and 4. zooming back out gets the game to a smooth state again. in some cases 1x is also extremely choppy in the ship view.
Turning on forcefullsim and the story changes. its basically unplayable at anything but 1x.
This is why this perf stuff is so important to me.
If the forcefull combat was as good as 15b the game would be decently playable at FFS in 3-4x. but its not and i very much want to make that happen.

what causes that lag? well at the top level its the weapons. turn those off and the game will run smooth. deeper into the actual reason i think... its the collision detection and the locks around xna/sunburn as it cant handle threading well.
frost hand was working on single threading the game and optimizing it all to get that smooth unfortunatly he got married and stuff and so... well that is life.

So this is why i want to reduce the weapon use.
This is an extreme case for a normal game.
if you bumpped to an epic map and superpacked systems on brutal you could pretty easily get a game like this.

if i can shave off a little weapon fire and can make it fit into its available resources and the game would be mostly smooth at any level.
This is also the reason i want the game with forcefull sim off to give a near experience to forcefull sim on. Currently it does not.
I added weapon ranges and arcs to ffs off but there are still some work to do with shields and some getting the damage model to honor all weapon characteristics which it currently does not.