Any way I can assist in debugging that stutter issue? Thread - Enhanced 4X Mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

After being directed to this mod a matter of days ago, I am absolutely in love with it and would love to do anything i can to diagnose the issue.

From what I gather, the consensus seems to be that the ADVENT (the name makes me snicker because I play a lot of Xcom 2) faction's Titan could be the culprit of the issue.

So I figured I'll do a huge-multi 9-AI vs me match and manually set all the other AIs so that they are not ADVENT and report back with the results later this evening. If anyone has something else they want me to test while I'm playing then let me know, because I really want to help make this mod as seamless as possible! (I'll be playing as the TEC Rebels because that's my go-to faction.

(also, can someone tell me where to locate the save files so I can submit them?)

EDIT: Hit a snag in progress as I had to go out for a doctor's appointment I was not told about. Still haven't hit the stutter yet but I'm going to continue work ASAP

Edited by: CaptainTaz

Hello CaptainTaz,

The stutter issue has really been THE issue with the mod. Advent Loyalists/Orthodox seem to be the most likely culprit, but even when I get save games that duplicate the issue, I've been unable to determine the cause. Which is very odd, since I always take the following actions to try and narrow down the issue, and usually one of them works.

1. Disable AI
2. Disable unit autocast
3. Destroy units that might be the issue (Coronata titan etc).

For this particular issue, I've not had any luck with anything I've done. To me this suggests the actual cause of the issue could be well before the stuttering starts, which makes it much harder to diagnose.

Also, while it is important to narrow down the issue to one faction, a lot of saves I've gotten of this issue are on large 10 player maps. It would probably be most helpful to duplicate the issue on a smaller map so it's feasible to review everything in the game.

Yeah, I just had a game that's been run from random-large map with 8 players, all tec and Vasari with no hiccups beyond the normal late-game stutter that comes from sins not being able to handle it as a program.

I assume you've tried playing a game without building titans at all with the faction, right? I'm not too familiar with it seeing as I've just always been a TEC guy, but if you haven't tried that yet, I could toy around with it. Would be a good learning experience for playing other factions.

Edited by: CaptainTaz

CaptainTaz wrote:

Yeah, I just had a game that's been run from random-large map with 8 players, all tec and Vasari with no hiccups beyond the normal late-game stutter that comes from sins not being able to handle it as a program.

I assume you've tried playing a game without building titans at all with the faction, right? I'm not too familiar with it seeing as I've just always been a TEC guy, but if you haven't tried that yet, I could toy around with it. Would be a good learning experience for playing other factions.

Any interesting idea. There's no real way to prevent the AI from building titans outside of modding them out, but that could be a good minimod actually.

An interesting tidbit of info just came up in today's test game. I basically recreated yesterday's game, but replaced one faction with the Advent Ascended (normal - Random AI), and lo and behold, 2 hours 6 minutes in and the game starts doing the heavy stuttering.

Maybe it's not an issue with a titan ability, but moreso one of the regular units you get later in the game that is shared by both Advent factions? A researched cruiser or late-game ability perhaps?

Edit: Another thought that crosses my mind is that it could be an early-game passive ability, one that maybe doesn't clean up its old requests and so as the game progresses it begins to cause slowdown or something. I won't pretend to be an expert though xD

Edit 2: On that stream of thought, maybe it's a unit that gets used commonly and ends up causing the stutter. Once there's enough fleet research and usage it might hit a critical mass and just bog the game down.

Edited by: CaptainTaz