Prerelease 3.093 (Huge golem rebalance, MRS buff, planetary summary fixes)

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we need to make it so FRD + Devourer = "Free Running for Dear life"

[Kryzite]

Agreed lol

[ShadowOTE]

Yeah, that was a few games ago though, and I tend to keep a closer eye on my ships these days (if only because otherwise they stop following the AI once the ship you initially targeted died or something along similar lines)

[Doddler]

Or at least a warning 'Warning, the devourerer is eating all of your ships'.

I think the devourer behavior would be ok if you were properly notified of it's arrival and if there was a way to actually un-FDR your ships while the auto-FDR node is up.  Since you are notified every time the golem is near one of your systems, its easy to overlook the notification when it is actually pertinant (it doesn't help that the default system names are pretty hard to remember so often you won't realize it has entered one of your systems).

[ShadowOTE]

actually, a system by system FDR system would be nice, perhaps with the master setting specified as part of the constructor template? and i believe there is a warning at present... its just easy to overlook

[Trezamere]

Or at least a warning 'Warning, the devourerer is eating all of your ships'.

I think the devourer behavior would be ok if you were properly notified of it's arrival and if there was a way to actually un-FDR your ships while the auto-FDR node is up.  Since you are notified every time the golem is near one of your systems, its easy to overlook the notification when it is actually pertinant (it doesn't help that the default system names are pretty hard to remember so often you won't realize it has entered one of your systems).

Yea I don't like how the Auto FRD node works; which fixing/adjusting that would fix the golem issue.  I assumed that you could could hold down 'v' to toggle FRD off when you had the node built like you can hold G to toggle group mode off when you have group mode on (the button on the bottom left), but unfortunately it doesn't do anything, would be nice if it did.

[Doddler]

Thinking about it, you might be able to give an attack move order (alt click) to keep ships from chasing the golem, since the command isn't removed after they reach their destination.

[eRe4s3r]

I want to report massive performance issues since the .93 patch, but i went from 60 to 93 so just FYI.

Opening the save you should see a MASSIVE slowdown (500ms turn times) with no source or reason. I only "move" 1700 ships - they shoot at about 10 or 20 ships, besides that i can not discern why the game would slowdown this much. Performance took a massive dive ever since i ordered to enter this sector while running from a devourer golem (fleet is hotkey 1 on mignet). Theres only 40k ships in the game, AI ship counts are low. Mine are equally low.

It certainly didn't do that before. I think, anyhow.

Edit: By the way, when it first happened i was playing for about 10 minutes so, not sure if thats still within the timeframe the game loads/calculates stuff after reload.  I reloaded the game a lot on a "branch" save before moving this fleet anywhere and i guess this can be related to other things, and not a bug. So thats why i didn't report it in bug.

If its just game calculating something due to reload of a save i excuse myself for this pointless post!

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks for the report and save.  In my working build (which has tons of performance changes from 3.093) I'm not seeing a massive slowdown though it does seem to be running slower than it should, so I'll look into it.

[eRe4s3r]

Neither do i see it when reloading, when i saved the game was running noticeable slower than on reload, ie all elements, interface, buttons, game slowed down. What i see after reload is , just like you say, just oddly low performance.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, a tricky-to-reproduce one, eh... and 10 minutes in the game should be pretty well done with recalcs, most image loads, etc.

Doing my normal "pin the tail on the donkey" method (run it in the debugger, periodically pause it, and see what line it's on, and do that several times to see if it happens a lot in the same place) I wasn't able to find anything particularly notable performance wise.  Lots of time in the move function, lots of time in the collision-check function, nothing much new.

However, I looked around a bit and found that on the Icul planet (the devourer one) there's also, oh, 7000+ minor-faction resistance ships.  A bit further in it jumped to 14k+.  Given the O(n^2) cost of collision checking all ships on a planet (among other things), I've got my suspicions about the cause of the slowdown.

Apparently they're launching a raid on your framerate.

Is anyone else seeing an improbably large number of resistance fighters showing up?

[eRe4s3r]

I hadn't seen that there are resistance fighters existing at all. I was too busy running and then too busy lagging 

But yes, 14000 moving ships would definitely grind my computer to a halt when they all start moving at once. But worse if they'd start going into FRD.

That doesn't sound like its something that can be fixed retroactively i take it...

[x4000]

On load, we could have it remove any excess resistance fighters over, say, 3000.  There should never be that many on a given planet at once.  It sounds like they have been collecting there erroneously (they should only be on planets where a human player has ships, not just other minor factions), and they should also be so busy fighting they don't last long enough to collect in that volume.  (Notes for Keith)

[keith.lamothe]

I'll be happy to strip the swarm out for you and repost the save, but first I need to figure out why it's going coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs with the resistance fighters.  I kept it running a couple more minutes and it doubled again to 28k+.

I guess it would be appropriate, rather than a bug, if it was accompanied by the chat line "Sit tight, we got it."

My guess is that the devourer is really skewing the strength estimate numbers.

Edit: Chris; yes, an onload pruning-over-3000-per-planet sounds good.  As for the generation, I think it's a combination of bugs; eRe4s3r did have ships on the planet, but only like 18 scouts, iirc, and something really made the numbers go frequently and enthusiastically nuts.

[eRe4s3r]

I can post a save 10 minutes earlier if you want ;p

Yes, that game was started with 2.202 - upconverted to Zenith via chat command - and has since then converted to many more up-to-date versions. So maybe source lies there somewhere.

The only thing you need to do is move to mignet over via Icul (Also i engaged the devourer a bit because i was impatient), should trigger the issue pretty much guaranteed (don't forget to move the scouts there first ;p)

Engineers are on key 0 if you need them.

Don't worry about the save, i don't intend to keep it. I lost half my fleet because of impatience ;p