AI War Official 8.015-8.016 "Flicker Factor" Released!

[Bud Backer]

If you switch to using the icon grouping again, is it still a problem?

Hey Chris,

I'm not at home to try anything but will tonight.

What is icon grouping and how do I switch it?

[x4000]

Thanks!  Hopefully this is solved for you in general.  But icon grouping is under the Interface tab of settings, and is a dropdown that says Icon Grouping Distance.  You can change that to 12 to be back like it was prior to 8.014.

That grouping basically only draws one copy of any ships that are identical that are within x number of pixels of one another.  That's something that I turned off with 8.015, which I think is better all around in general, but I want to see if your issue was related to that.  But anyhow, I've also put in a couple of fixes in 8.016 that are new, so hopefully that's moot and you won't even need to try the icon grouping.

[RockyBst]

I'm not quite sure what's causing it, but since the update I've been getting some quite significant jitter / framerate drops every second or two. The screen just paused for a split second, then carries on. This happens both with and without icon grouping turned on. Maybe it's just a factor of the number of ships in the galaxy, but I've dropped right back to 1 1/2 hours into this game and I'm still seeing the same thing.

This windows 8 box doesn't seem to respond well to any of the recent performance updates, really.

EDIT: Also, it's now started crashing to desktop whenever I exit back to the main menu for some reason. Crash dump is attached. That might just be because I cleared out my auto-save folder and killed the 'LogicLog_' advanced logging files, but I can't see why.

[x4000]

@RockyBst: Can you upload your savegame?  That's definitely an oddity.  Your error file indicates that you ran out of RAM, which of course isn't something that likely literally happened what with the specs that were listed in the save dump.  However, it may have run out of managed memory inside the game executable process, which is limited to about 900MB.

Do you have any special settings turned on, like the preloading of all image assets?

[RockyBst]

Sure, here's my most recent save. Which just happens to be before nuking the last remaining AI homeworld.

Windows 8/8.1 has always been weird with AI war for me, despite never taking more than ~35% CPU capacity and never getting close to 100%ing a single core. Framerates still drop off a cliff with more than 2,000 active ships, even though technically it's only using 1/5th of my available RAM as well. I suppose this is because it's a 32-bit app, rather than x64.

No special settings this time, and I can replicate both with and without image preloading and icon grouping.

[Bud Backer]

Thanks!  Hopefully this is solved for you in general.  But icon grouping is under the Interface tab of settings, and is a dropdown that says Icon Grouping Distance.  You can change that to 12 to be back like it was prior to 8.014.

That grouping basically only draws one copy of any ships that are identical that are within x number of pixels of one another.  That's something that I turned off with 8.015, which I think is better all around in general, but I want to see if your issue was related to that.  But anyhow, I've also put in a couple of fixes in 8.016 that are new, so hopefully that's moot and you won't even need to try the icon grouping.

Hi Chris,

You were right, I didn't need  to alter the icon grouping setting, I've seen no flickering so far. Things do look subtly different, but I suspect that's the "draw only 1copy" but you mentioned. I'll get used to it! Thanks for the awesome responsiveness to our concerns.

[x4000]

Awesome!  Glad I could help.

Things are subtly different, actually in slightly one more way than I publicly mentioned (I just forgot).  The borders around ships are no longer perfect white with 110/255 transparency.  Instead they are now perfectly opaque with 110/255 RGB.  That leads to the exact same color when we presume a black background, but it prevents multiple icons from stacking on top of one another and becoming progressively more white.  I made that shift because it was really happening a lot with the shift to showing all the icons.

[x4000]

Sure, here's my most recent save. Which just happens to be before nuking the last remaining AI homeworld.

Windows 8/8.1 has always been weird with AI war for me, despite never taking more than ~35% CPU capacity and never getting close to 100%ing a single core. Framerates still drop off a cliff with more than 2,000 active ships, even though technically it's only using 1/5th of my available RAM as well. I suppose this is because it's a 32-bit app, rather than x64.

No special settings this time, and I can replicate both with and without image preloading and icon grouping.

With your save, I can see the same sort of periodic hitching that you do.  It's a very regular sort of hitching, and I'm not sure what the cause is.  This isn't evident in any other savegames that I've tested, however.  I did make a few improvements that smooth things out a tad for other savegames where there was still some slight jerkiness, but it doesn't help your specific savegame at all.  I don't think that this is an OS thing, and it's definitely also not related to your graphics card in terms of it cranking away every two seconds or so with a blip.

I've done some investigation of my own on this for a couple of hours, but came up empty.  I excluded a lot of parts of the code as being the culprit, but I'm not sure what the culprit is.  I have some things I have to take care of with Last Federation, so I've passed this over to Keith, who tends to be more efficient at finding performance bottlenecks than I am.  I'll let him get back to you further.

Thanks!

[x4000]

New one!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,16450.0.html

RockyBst, this gets rid of your periodic jerkiness in that save -- it was a planetary munitions booster, and apparently has been there for years.  Goodness!