[Solved] Slowdown on random planets

[quickstix]

After updating to the latest version 1.301 using the 'Check for updates' tool, I started a new game on an 80 planet map, simple, with 2 random easier AIs on 5. Went to take my first planet and upon warping in my game became quite chuggy on that planet, for example, scrolling was very sluggish. This was odd, as that planet had less ships on it in total than my home planet, which was fine (scrolling fine, no slowdown). What made it wierd, was that other hostile planets with more ships on them were were not slowing down, which I tested by sending a raiding party to a warpgate, and that planet was fine and also sent a few scouts around to other planets. So this one planet I have ships on is really sluggish. I first noticed it on this planet when I warped 2 scouts in, and it was quite sluggish then. Tried restarting both the game and my compy.

Also, I started building a colony ship on this planet to see if taking the planet would stop it, and what I noticed was that the seconds ticking down for the time remaining to build the colony ship were decreasing by about 1 every 2-3 seconds.

This planet with the slowdown in the included save game is the one to the upper left of my planet and has a few of my ships on it.

[x4000]

What are your system specs?  This sounds like a graphics slowdown, which you can verify by hitting F3 and then looking at the lines "Last Turn Avg Process/Render MS" and "Max Process/Render MS."  If the process is really high, then something is up with the CPU usage, if the render is really high, then your GPU isn't holding up.  I suspect the latter.

You should be seeing a Last Turn Part/Full MS of somewhere around 160/200, or 200/200 (this is the compound number of the process/render numbers above).  If that is significantly higher than 200, then that's basically telling you your simulation is running at a reduced rate because your CPU or GPU isn't keeping up.  That would probably be at 400 to 600 for the slowdown you are mentioning.

I do note that the planet you are indicating in your savegame (which runs fine on my machine), is a ringed planet, which has a lot of alpha blending.  Some players with onboard graphics cards have reported slowdowns with such planets, although this is not something I have heard much, or at all aside from those with integrated/onboard graphics cards.  If you want to avoid that, you can simply turn the planet graphics off under Settings, Graphics, Backgrounds, Disable Planet Display.  If your GPU is struggling, that would be the solution for it.

Sorry to hear of your troubles, hopefully that helps!  This slowdown would not have been new with 1.301, it would just be chance that you happen to be encountering it now -- the planet graphic in question has been around since 1.201.

[quickstix]

My specs (laptop):

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6Ghz
1GB Memory
Nvidia GeForce Go 7300
Windows Vista SP 2

When you mentioned the rings, I had another look at that planet, and I do believe I've never seen a planet like that before with rings like that. I may simply have not been playing long enough to have come across a planet like it as I've only had a little time to put into AI War. I've had the game since 1.013, but haven't had much time to play because of uni. By the looks of it, I think my lappy may be struggling to keep up with it. I've posted screenshots of that planet and my home planet with the debug info. Perhaps I need to further my quest to save up for an actual desktop PC.

[x4000]

Yep, your GPU is really struggling to keep up with the full graphics on that particular planet -- about 6-10ms per graphics cycle is normal for that sort of view, and up to around 20ms is allowable without causing lag.  Your computer is taking 66ms to render it, which is causing the rest of the game to run at about 75% speed even when nothing else is going on.  Most likely the blending is not supported completely by your GPU, and so is being offloaded to your CPU by the DirectX pipeline, which is functional but way slower.

But!  You're in luck.  The Graphics tab of the Settings menu has a ton of things you can tweak in order to get your visuals-to-performance ratio to a level that is playable but as pretty as possible.  I notice that not only does this planet have the rings, but it also has an awful lot of background nebula coverage, which might be part of the problem.  I'd recommend toggling some of the options until you get it to a level you like.  The two big ones to try out are possibly turning the planets off, and also possibly turning the amount of nebula detail (the slider) way down.  One or both of those will provide a solution where you can run the game just fine on your existing laptop, it's just a matter of what works best with your specific hardware and with the sort of visuals you want to see. 

You can definitely run the game with those specs, but I'd stay away from maps larger than 80 planets (because of your CPU), and I'd tweak the background graphics settings down a bit to really keep things moving at a good pace (because of the GPU).

Hope that helps!

[quickstix]

Sounds good to me. Usually I don't take much notice of the fancy graphics in the middle of a game because I'm so pre-occupied with playing, so I didn't notice how much nebulae and planet detail was present (it is really pretty though). Also the fact it was only happening on one planet lead to a bit of confusion on my part, I didn't even think of a GPU issue. So I'll definitely tweak around with those settings to get it working nice and smooth, and turn it all up again for screenies and videos  Thanks for pointing out the debug info too, really useful that.

I find 80 planets to be pretty much my favourite size, with 60 and 40 being good for shorter games, so I won't be heading to sizes above that because of my CPU, and buying a laptop cooler recently really gives my CPU some help when everything goes a little crazy.

Thanks for the help mate.

[x4000]

Glad I could help!  And, glad to hear that will work out well for you.  My favorite way to play is definitely 80 planets, too.

[quickstix]

Moving the nebula detail slider to at least half way down produced the best results. Half way still has good visual quality for a reasonable performance hit, from 66ms to 45ms, and going all the way down will most likely improve on that (didn't test it, but the results are fairly obvious no doubt). So it'll all depend on whether I want to look at all the nice nebulas, or really sink into the gameplay. I did try turning the planets off, but the performance gain from that was pretty small and the difference in lag wasn't noticeably different to having planets turned on.

Just having another look at that planet with full settings, it is absolutely COVERED in nebula. Layers and layers of it. So it explains why I'd never experienced this before, as I've never seen a planet with that much nebula. Looks absolutely fantastic though, the nebulas at any amount in this game all look great.

All fixed now, thanks again.

[x4000]

Glad to help!  Happy to hear it is working now.

[x4000]

The new 1.999B version, which will be out in about an hour, has a revamped nebula algorithm that should prevent them from clustering too heavily (to the point where it slows down your computer that much, anyway).  I'll be interested in hearing how it affects the render MS stats on your machine, if you have a chance to check it out at some point; hopefully it will let you have the nice looking nebulas without too much GPU overhead, we shall see.