Bruce Hake Bruce Hake

Clogged Furball

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Clogged Furball

from Sins Forums
Ran into a situation last night I hadn't seen before: a battle so big the game got clogged up and could not resolve damage, although it did not lock up or stop.

I was playing on a custom map with three stars, each of which had just five planets. One star was me (TEC). One was Advent. The last was Vasari. Both AIs set as Hard Random.

I had wiped out Advent and colonized all of their planets. I was ranked #1 in everything except Fleet, even though I was maxed out on fleet size. Vasari (haven't played them yet) must have some way to boost their max fleet size.

My main invasion fleet tried to attack the Vasari homeworld but got cut to shreds because they had so many strikecraft and I was short on flak frigates. So I made a second fleet with about 40 flak frigates. Then both of my fleets attacked their homeworld again at the same time. I had 9 cap ships, 7 of them at Level 10. I had 55 air wings and a total of about 200 ships. The Vasari had 50 cruiser carriers, lots of defenses, and a total of about 200 ships.  I'd say each fleet represented about 1100 fleet supply.

And the game couldn't handle it at all. For a solid 10 minutes I watched to see what would happen. Battle appeared to be taking place, but I did not lose a single ship. I kept monitoring the enemy fleet summary on the side of the planet icon when you zoom out, and it kept showing the numbers of fighters and bombers fluctuating--but never dropping below 20 each, and I never killed a single ship! When I would zoom in, things looked weird--only about five percent of the craft were in the grav well--the rest were all smeared out, green (me) and red (them) interspersed, in a long line outside the grav well (but from a zoomed out perspective, they were not in space or in phase lanes but just in orbit at the planet). At this point the game was also running painfully slow, despite a cold reboot, and was painfully slow at zooming.

Eventually I tired of this logjam and moved my main invasion fleet away. Then the game was able to resolve things, and the Vasari destroyed my fleet of flak frigates in about 30 seconds, before I had time to warp them out.

So then I ran my main invasion fleet around and wiped out the remaining Vasari planets, playing cat and mouse with their very huge defense fleet, which kept chasing me, and I won the game in just another 15 minutes or so.

But it was kind of frustrating. I had the power--I should have been able to smash their main fleet in the battle I had chosen.

I've been playing like crazy since the day this was released, and this is the first time I've had the game just plain clearly get overwhelmed by fleet size. So far I haven't had a single "minidump" or other lockup. I have noticed that the game gets a bit sluggish after a few hours sometimes, but a boot cures that.

Comments?

P.S. Another question: I noticed in that game last night that when zoomed in to see a grav well, the camera would always keep moving around, often apparently in a 360 degree motion, even when I did not even have my hand on the mouse.  I turned off "shake camera" in the options, but that didn't seem to make a difference.  Is the camera supposed to move, at all, ever, if you're not actively moving it yourself?
60,799 views 64 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
Napalmenema, on an issue like this it's not a matter of machine specs, even if some have fewer problems with bigger machines.My machine has 2 GB of RAM, a 3 GHz Pentium D Dual Core processor, and an nVidia 7800 GTX with 256 MB of video RAM. That is beyond the recommended specs for this game and far beyond the minimum specs. I'm running WinXP, Svc Pack 2.I've also got my machine set up intelligently with a bare minimum of services running in the background, etc.This machine is about two years old. When I bought it, it was fairly awesomely beyond the average at the time. It's still solid and should be good for another year or two.Don't tell me it's a machine problem if I'm beyond the recommended specs. The recommended specs are: 2.2 GHz dual core CPU (I'm way above that); 1 GB RAM (I've got double that); and 256 MB GEForce 7800 or higher (I meet this requirement).I don't have any way to test it, but I'll bet people with much more uber rigs are still having the problem. You might want to check out the parallel thread in the Technical forum.
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ok, first off your machine is NOT "Far beyond" the recommended specs. a 2.2ghz dual core is definetly > than a 3ghz pentium d. and this problem is clearly not a graphics problem. i know that you don't believe that your machine is incredible, but its just the way you worded it.  ;p 

and that said, my 2cents on this issue:

I have a gaming rig, 3.0ghz quad core OC, 8800gtx, 8gb ram, 1TB hard drives, all nicely cooled in an antec 900 with a 200mm fan, and 4 120mm fans. and i've been having game lag in the end game as well. with fleets greater than 2,000 fleet cap, and hundreads of frigates, my game will slow down as well. At times it will make the zooming a pain, and its been around for a while. This is true with all games, because you can never have a perfect game. With thousands of calculations, there's bound to be some lag. I haven't played much yet with the 1.04 patch, when i do, and if i get any lag, i'll update my post. But in short, there has been, and will be lag in late games, and its due to the sheer number of calculations. The ships not dieing part, that's a bug...
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top
UEF, yours may be bigger than mine, but you have a reading comprehension problem.

As I said, the game's RECOMMENDED (that is, higher-level) spec is for a 2.2 dual core processor. I have a 3.0 dual core processor. The Pentium D is a dual core processor. So my processer is above the recommended specs. You don't know what you're talking about. I also showed that I have fully double the recommended RAM and the exact same recommended video card. So maybe my machine is not as "far beyond" the specs as yours, but it's darn sure "well beyond" them. Geez.

And as to your reading comprehension, as I and others pointed out above, I'm not talking about a "slowdown" problem. I'm not talking about "lag." Try again.

Don't you understand the problem? At least occasionally the game actually does not work at all on a machine that is ABOVE the recommended specs.

I must say I chuckled a bit at your computer description. Heh heh. Does it have flashing lights on the front panel as well?
WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top

I have more or less the same issue goin on with a big advent vs advent fight. Got a thread over in the technical forums with a save game link if anyone wants to check it out.

there is definatly some sort of computation going on that is breaking the bank. From what I have seen from the Advent it is the AoE damage from Malice. The entire issue may be that the AI is now smart enough to use its AoE abilities correctly.

KP
Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah, kjpwv, I linked to your thread earlier on in this one, and Bruce posted there as well.

I know previously Blair said the AI routines take up most of the processing power, and it could be that adding even more calculations stall the CPU. The odd thing is that Malice or its usage shouldn't have been changed between 1.03 and 1.04, so who knows..
Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top
It's not a graphics issue, because it runs like butter if you pause the game :)

But yes, if the AI is going to be better, it needs to be multithreaded. As I said, there's pretty much not a CPU core in existence for the home market that can run 10 AIs without melting.
Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
It's not CPU related (ctrl-alt-del while one of these furballs is going on shows only 70% of one core ; 50% of the other). I have noticed that the RAM utilization goes through the roof on these fights. I've seen it go up to over 1.8GB of RAM used.

It's not graphics related as you can save the game, turn the settings down and come back in and it will still be locked up.

I've noticed it a lot when the AI is having to do a lot of fleet movement during a fight (if I have a large fleet and AI retreats it locks for a few mins, then releases until an enemy reinforcement comes in; it could be a single cap ship but it's enough for the AI to rethink fleeing and that stops the game.
Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top
kaashar has an interesting theory. In my furball, the enemy was strewn in a long line to the SE, far away from the grav well, similar to the tail of a comet. It makes sense that it might have been trying to retreat, or undecided about that. Of course, that doesn't explain why a battle appeared to be raging, the display showed enemy strikecraft being killed and then replaced, but not a single ship on either side was killed despite enough firepower for World War 10,000.

I think it's a database problem, not CPU or graphics.
Reply #34 from Sins Forums Top
As I said, there's pretty much not a CPU core in existence for the home market that can run 10 AIs without melting.
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GalCiv II manages it, but it's turn-based.  :LOL:

I think it's a database problem, not CPU or graphics.
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I can't imagine it being a database problem, because I can't imagine Sins doing anything with a database. And by database I'm thinking about SQL-like databases; you might have something else on your mind.

I've never experienced this problem (yet), but it sounds like a memory leak. But this is of course pure speculation and nothing more than guesswork.
Reply #35 from Sins Forums Top
Memory leak is exactly what I thought while reading through this and other threads. Not that I'm an expert, but I've seen this type of behavior reported before in other games and it turned out to be a memory leak causing the problems.
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
Listen, it doesn't necessarily matter if your machine is far above specs. The "recommended" is pretty much a limit to average 2 or 4 player play. I'm not saying that nothing is wrong with the code, but more stars and players begin to stress the machine. I read that you can have as many stars as your PC can handle. This means that any issues for this are to be blamed more on RAM and Graphics than any form of code issues. This thing about "recommended" is a guideline for the average map, not 10-player, 5-star frays. Don't worry too much about it. Find out what your CPU can handle and stay with it. That will minimize these problems, though you may not be as free as you would like.
Reply #37 from Sins Forums Top
Just a comment on the 'recommended' and 'minimal' requirements: I think it does a disservice to simply state it as something like '2.0 GHz dual core processor', since it leads to many situations like this. The architecture of the chip has far more to do with its performance than its GHz rating. A dual core Pentium D chip isn't nearly as powerful or efficient as a 'slower' clocked C2D, for example. This leads many people to just look at their chip and say "Well, mine has more GHz, so it's definitely above specs", but that may not actually be the case.

NOTE: I'm not saying this is the case with the OP. Just pointing it out, as I've seen this type of hardware argument in many other forums as well.
Reply #38 from Sins Forums Top
Just a comment on the 'recommended' and 'minimal' requirements: I think it does a disservice to simply state it as something like '2.0 GHz dual core processor', since it leads to many situations like this. The architecture of the chip has far more to do with its performance than its GHz rating. A dual core Pentium D chip isn't nearly as powerful or efficient as a 'slower' clocked C2D, for example. This leads many people to just look at their chip and say "Well, mine has more GHz, so it's definitely above specs", but that may not actually be the case.NOTE: I'm not saying this is the case with the OP. Just pointing it out, as I've seen this type of hardware argument in many other forums as well.
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EXACTLY my point!!!

and yes, it has flashing lights, all the fans have blue leds, my keyboard has an lcd screen with backlit blue led keys, and my mouse is blue with a small led screen. my mobo even has a little screen that shows what bios code its on.  :HOT: 
Reply #39 from Sins Forums Top
Group hug!
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i LOL'ed

*huggles*

It's not a graphics issue, because it runs like butter if you pause the game
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I LOL'ed again, but true :)

---

I do agree with OP on this one, something have changed, as it didn't happen when i did the 20,368 ships test in the beta 3 where it didn't have the dual core support and ships were fighting as normal.

So what OP is experiencing is code related, not hardware related :)

oh and the devs know about the issue by now, so dont worry, they will fix it :D
Reply #40 from Sins Forums Top
just for that, you get a hug! :D 
Reply #41 from Sins Forums Top
In response to some of the latest comments, let me emphasize again, as I indicated in my posts above:

in my game, there was no 10-AI struggle. It was a very simple map, 3 stars with 5 planets apiece, for a total of only 15 planets. And I had completely wiped out one AI, so it was just a 1 on 1 with a single Hard AI.

It's been about 10 years since I did any C++ programming, so my memory is beyond rusty. What I meant by "database" was that I think the program may have some kind of overrun in the internal datastructures it builds up to represent battles. Just speculation.
Reply #42 from Sins Forums Top
Ah pfui! I'm going to leave work two hours early so I can play around with this some more.

Incidentally, of course I realize that all CPUs aren't equal. But if the box recommends 2.2 dual core, and you have 3.0 Intel dual core, it would be pretty tricky if that didn't work, eh? I certainly agree that the Hz rating of CPUs is about 99 percent crap. It's just a way they sell new computers. It's like "horsepower" on tractors (what is really important is the torque, not the nominal hp). For game computers RAM and video RAM is a LOT more important than the nominal speed of the CPU, which is one reason I think most overclocking is silly.

But I stick to my guns here. A brand new game, especially one with such extravagant reviews and from such an excellent company, ought to be able to run with no such errors on a box well beyond the recommended specs.

Happy to see several people, who sound much more knowledgeable than me, who think it's obviously a code problem.
Reply #43 from Sins Forums Top
I wonder if ICO would consider an option for dedicated host PCs? Some of the load of the NPC AI calculations could be done on it instead of the shared model we current use.

Plus you could run the game in a headless mode for hosting eliminating more of the overhead to allow the AI more room to grow. FPS games have been doing this for over a decade now.
Reply #44 from Sins Forums Top
yeah, i and some others would gladly offer up our pcs as servers!
Reply #45 from Sins Forums Top
just for that, you get a hug!  
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Reply #46 from Sins Forums Top
LOL nice pic. anyway this thread intreged me so i loaded up the save file and tried it myself as kinda a benchmark test. So i fliped my Laptop on high proformence and i loaded up the file.

2.0 dual core
7950 GTX
2gigs Ram
o and good old Windows vista 64

I did notice some slow down. however i turned of the tactical grid and it was much better i dont know why my comp does not like it. I was running 1900x1200 res with everything on max besieds AA which was on 2x. i looked at the large battle and it didnt lag at all untile 10 seconds and it just crashed i found this rather funny but there is my system test.
Reply #47 from Sins Forums Top
Just had a massive battle, large star system, three way battle with Pink and Dark blue - complete mayhem.

Not a single blip or slowdown.

Reply #48 from Sins Forums Top
I should mention that my 9-AI 9-star Large Fleets game now minidumps whenever I try to load saves I made an hour prior to the last save I crashed at. At the crashing point the game was running like complete crap.

I think I'll put Sins on my Vista drive and see what difference it makes, using all of my RAM and not just 55% of it...

For what it's worth, even when I put speed on 8X, which makes the choppiness 8X worse, CPU load doesn't seem to increase. I really wonder where this bottleneck is...
Reply #49 from Sins Forums Top
Are you running Vista or Xp?

I have a dual boot Vista Ultimate 64 and XP 64 Professional. I seem to get minidumps under Vista but not under XP.

Dunno if that's what you are encountering...
Reply #50 from Sins Forums Top
XP right now, might try on Vista to use all my RAM.

I'd posit that using Sins+ could be part of my problem, but Sins+ doesn't really do anything to the game in any way that'd affect performance, except eating up a bit more VRAM.

Actually I just noticed that CPU usage drops to around 10% on all cores when I go to 8X speed, but performance completely sucks.