PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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faatal said:
Not a win for a lot of people, since a primary complaint is performance.

I actually enjoy optimizing code. One of my favorite things to do, because sometimes you do find that big win and multiple small gains together do lead to moderate gains.
Updating our terrain shader got me 15 to 20 more FPS at 4k. That is a big gain and definitely worth it.

You often don't know how it will turn out until you do it. That is life.
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I forgot to show you this beauty on my performance post. Take a look at those gorgeous bumps of "606 ms saving the chunks" ((EDIT: last line of code in the console)) while that amount (135) should take on average no more than 80ms. It's a common freeze when walking through the world and quite intense.

20200923184019_1.jpg

 
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Blake_ said:
Hi again @faatal  Check this out !

19.1 is still going poorly for me. The highest problem is chunk writing and DECO writing followed by music and then some other minor stuff that I talk about briefly at the end of this post. After analyzing it a bit more, the main causes of freezes for me are:

BIGGEST PROBLEMS (point 2 every few seconds):

1-Chunk writing took X milliseconds (for me, it takes 80 -120 milliseconds). This issue generates a "freeze" equivalent roughly to 10 times more than the average input lag of a mouse PLUS some other factors that I assume  are combined with the point 2 issue , so I get a freeze of around 3 seconds every time Chunk writing happens just alone (5+ seconds if combined with others).

2-DECO written. The handling of the loading and unloading of assets generates mostly a sustained overhead, but nothing like this word. Whenever DECO writes , my computer freezes for 3-5 seconds. Sadly, that happens every few seconds.

LESSER PROBLEMS:

3- Music handling generates little freezes whenever it transitions, pauses or notifies something. It could use some optimizations. The music-related freezes generate a 2 freeze if alone, but it rarely happens alone, as the DECO problem is everywhere, so up to 5 seconds freeze generally.

4-Sleeper spawning on a multibuilding area. When simultaneously spawning more than one area full of sleepers belonging to different POIs, bumps can get real. If combined with the DECO problem, the freeze is also 3-5 seconds.

You can clearly see a pattern here. This are my specs.

Playing the game in LOWEST SETTINGS 800x600 resolution. But resolution is actually not the problem here, as I can set it to 1920x1080 no problem, with the exact same bumps and general performance . So GPU is not the problem here.

GPU: GTX 780M 4GB VRAM

CPU: Intel Core i7 4800MQ // 2.70GHz

8GB RAM DDR 3 (800MHZ//800MHZ ----> 1,6GHZ)

HDD It's a 7200rpm 750gb   :  https://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinfo_details.php?lang=en&model=HITACHI%20HTS727575A9E364 

I assume that, while my specs are above minimum, the game is actually struggling with writing speeds.

Not a great HDD, not an awful one either.

My GPU does not struggle in the slightest in open landscape. When DECO /chunks write, my game freezes. 100% of the time.

RAM does not give me a problem either.

CPU is ok. I mean I suffer a substantial drop when  Structural Integrity calculations happen after collapsing stuff, but it's actually limited in the amount of calculated blocks at a given time, so I don't really freeze completely. 

Now, I post it here because this is not a bug, but a performance issue. A video would not properly show the general performance either. Do you need me to make a ticket about this, or are you already aware of all of the above ? I can test performance whenever you need me to. I just want to play alpha 19, and I can't.
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I played the game on a HD up until maybe a year ago. I did not have write issues as you describe. I would suspect your hardware/software.

Do you have a good amount of free drive space? Free up space and defrag the drive.

Is your antivirus software aggressively scanning written data? Try excluding the save folders.

Is your free RAM low when playing? Shut down other programs and/or background tasks.

 
faatal said:
I played the game on a HD up until maybe a year ago. I did not have write issues as you describe. I would suspect your hardware/software.

Do you have a good amount of free drive space? Free up space and defrag the drive.

Is your antivirus software aggressively scanning written data? Try excluding the save folders.

Is your free RAM low when playing? Shut down other programs and/or background tasks.
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Sadly none of the above. Maybe fragmentation ? . My hard drive is 200 gigs free. I absolutely manage every startup programs to only 1 (ccleaner) which I always close (from the task manager). I only use the antivirus once every 3 days and then uninstall it completely. Defender is naked and all allowed when playing. 5 gigs of RAM free when playing. It goes up as time passes though. The game only bumbs hard when writting chunks. Bumbs soft when (insert the common issues that I've already mentioned).

 
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Blake_ said:
Sadly none of the above. Maybe fragmentation ? . My hard drive is 200 gigs free. I absolutely manage every startup programs to only 1 (ccleaner) which I always close (from the task manager). I only use the antivirus once every 3 days and then uninstall it completely. Defender is naked and all allowed when playing. 
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See if you can free up more of that hard drive, if it's less than 50% free on that style, you can get degraded performance, also, look into increasing your ram if you can. Most of the folks I know running 8 gigs of ram have issues the longer the play session is. If you're using a NitroGen map, don't. That really eats ram space and causing frequent lag/crashes

Edit: can someone clarify if virtual memory can affect this?

 
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Blake_ said:
I forgot to show you this beauty on my performance post. Take a look at those gorgeous bumps of "606 ms saving the chunks" ((EDIT: last line of code in the console)) while that amount (135) should take on average no more than 80ms. It's a common freeze when walking through the world and quite intense.

View attachment 15016
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Except that save message only happens on a full save, like when you Exit the world, do a save in the prefab editor or generate a world.

I am flying around the world and blowing the ground up with dynamite and that code is never called.

Are you using any mods?

 
On the topic of performance, i posted some benchmark results in #general support if anyone is interested. The tests where done on 2 systems, amd and intel both tests with 2 graphics option configs. One system was also tested in SLI and many cores vs fewer cores, smt on/off. Some interesting results, but best viewed on desktop the tables get a bit wide XD

 
faatal said:
Except that save message only happens on a full save, like when you Exit the world, do a save in the prefab editor or generate a world.

I am flying around the world and blowing the ground up with dynamite and that code is never called.

Are you using any mods?
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EDIT: This post is cool, but read my next one which has "lotz" of screenshots and hopefully me and all the potato guys can get help (performance help). Also, whenever I said chunk saving I really meant (and expressed myself poorly) a "PAUSED game" telltale of an inmediate previous bump directly proportional to DECO handling/writing, which does happen without pausing.

No mods, Never mods. Always Vanilla. Full wipe. The game is paused AFTER the fact, so that 606 is a saving and the bump did come just before (DECO handling). I have a lot of screenshots with 100-120 ms console entries of chunks saved in pauses after the bumps so  that one was one of a kind. Edit:I did not leave the world nor did I just got in the game. Three things are for sure:

1. Anything more than a paused chunk saving time of 80ms is a tip for the previously handled loading/unloading of assets causing big momentary freezes in real time.

2. The biggest freezes usually happen when the yellow "no child for position" warnings are involved PLUS the DECO writing notification (always together),resulting in said paused chunk notification surpassing the 70-80ms mark. When there's no warnings, it can still happen, but beefy writes are rare when there's little to handle.

3. When digging looking down, there are no bumps and after pausing the writing times are just around 60ms from 40-60 chunks. 

Other stuff

Textures are too high res in lower sizes. They should be sluggish BUT not the readable stuff. Readable stuff shouldn't downscale more than half. After that it should stay the same to not affect experience and, ya know, be readable.

When I say we need washed out low textures I am talking about the main texture map with the details and colours.

The issue affects Zd texture scaling too. Lowest is lowest and lower end texture streaming too . Cardboard washed until in my face.
I hope this helps. I have many more screenshots, but all similar to the above except 100-120 paused notifications  just after the bumps instead of that one entry of 606 (more time without pausing) . I need to point out though, I paused AFTER the fact, so each chunk saving is a pause. The saving time directly tells how big of a bump the DECO assets caused. Neat trick, if not very helpful.

 
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MechanicalLens said:
The new door physics prototype look awesome. Any chance we'll be able to shoot through the holes that are created when the door is damaged?
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Any physics-based asset maintains the collisions of each door piece both intact and in shambles, resulting in YES, you can shoot across any hole in the door. That's one of the benefits of the technology actually. Also, It's lots of fun.  In other words, no more swapping door models, but rather "simulating" a broken one by doing a "smarter localized swapping/breaking" also called " "physics simulation" as is very close to the real thing. Yes, it affects performance and no, not much.

 
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Annihilatorza said:
Most likely MechanicalLens is a tester for TFP :)
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Yes, I am indeed a tester for TFP. I'm currently testing a new mechanic where one in every five shots, your gun jams and explodes in your hands, dealing of -50 HP of damage. It's a really fun new mechanic and one that I'm certain all of you are going to enjoy. ;)

(jk on both of these, nope, just a regular dude, and the Twitter link is above, thanks beerfly)

 
Hi again @faatal .First of all Thx for reading and interacting on this subject. Your help is very welcome. I'm decided to keep on the feedback while I try to painfully test and, after going through the screenshots I noticed something that might help. The time between DECO writes seems to be a minute. If you bring it down to 10 or 15 seconds it should have a bigger overall overhead but WAAAY more stable framerate as there's  four to six times less to write. As the problem is worse when the load is higher (when there are chunks with buildings) the way to go might be to  just increase the writing frequency in smaller batches.

In theory, what I'm suggesting should work and reduce almost any writing-related bumps except the theoretical high time of the worse case scenario (606ms worth of stuff in real time when paused).

In my later test I encountered several 189ms bumbs, so I could say that the 606ms one is a 1% case (it did happen, is just that I paused after, more of that below) I also defragmented as you suggested and it did not do much, but yes, a little bit better, I would say a 5ms improvement on average tops (It's only been 2 weeks since my last one).

As you can see, the 606ms saving one was a big bumb, and it really makes reference to all the DECO handling and stuff happening before the fact,  but because I paused it after due to that pesky Zombie in order to take the screenshot then the feedback might be contaminated. I have more screenshots, no threats and in real time. Each chunk saving is from pausing I guess, but there's a relation between the size, the bumps and the DECO handling.

 20200923184019_1.jpg20200923183704_1.jpg20200923172932_1.jpg20200923170309_1.jpg


As you can see in the 3rd screenshot, there's no chunk writing because I didn't pause, but the Warnings hint at the problem and in every screenshot I did get a bumb.

The lightest one being 120ms (last screenshot)  but anything over 70ms after the paused fact is a direct tell of an incremental bump of proportional intensity just before  (lots of DECO being handled at once).

CONCLUSION: Plz, it sounds counterintuitive, but increase the DECO writing (saving?) frequency while spreading the load/unload. There's got to be a point in which if the frequency is too high the performance takes too big of a hit, but if you save DECO, say, each 10-15 seconds, the average fps could get just a small drop in exchange for a smoother experience. That,  plus your recent 19.2 fixes, should do it for a19 performance and beyond.

If it works, the huge 606ms rare drop "tip paused result" should still give away the  big freeze moment, but at 10 seconds DECO handling there would be 6 times less stuff to write so the DECO impact could theoretically be reduced. From there, you can try 5 second DECO saving/ writing and see what happens. 5-second writing could be taxing OR sustainably bearable. I would take the last one any day.

Again, thx and I hope this helps. Edit: Gamesparks and EAC is off in all the tests. The issue happens in ALL game modes.

Edit: I suspect that the DECO handling is heavily microhandled and I do still tend to mistake console notifications for the real thing. The core is right though. You need to micromanage it so it loads/unloads more often and in THE LEAST cuantities possible, resulting in a a more stable experience with not so big of a fps average hit.

 
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Does this new door tech include one way doors and keyed locking with lock picking or is it just nicer looking/breaking doors?

 
i am kinda enjoying that new door breaking animation, still looks a bit clunky but im not much for graphics over fun gameplay, would we soon have this same kinda breaking effect for walls and other types on blocks down the road or strictly doors?  I imagine it would work well with windows too

 
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