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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Rant: Battery Eater  (Read 2588 times)

havocdrake

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Rant: Battery Eater
« on: September 30, 2017, 04:21:18 AM »

With this game, I can barely made the game run for an hour on a MacBook Pro late 2016. Sad, I hope the developer/s would recognize that there are mobile laptop players and how much power hungry the game is.  


--edited, changed the title
--edited2, change the message icon from sad to standard
« Last Edit: September 30, 2017, 08:51:21 PM by havocdrake »
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Rant: Battery Eater
« Reply #1 on: September 30, 2017, 12:10:07 PM »

That is most likely because it is a CPU hog and I doubt that there are ways for him to extend the battery life
Also, why not plug in?
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Az the Squishy

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Re: Rant: Battery Eater
« Reply #2 on: September 30, 2017, 08:09:24 PM »

With this game, I can barely made the game run for an hour on a MacBook Pro late 2016. Sad, I hope the developer/s would recognize that there are mobile laptop players and how much power hungry the game is. 

There are things you can do to try and help... No or less mods. Lower graphical settings (mainly the resolution at this point though I'm sure if someone was clever enough other settings could be discovered) or simply smaller games. Otherwise, the only thing I can say is, wait for optimization or plug it in. A game dev can only do so much to help with what largely may be a hardware rather than a software problem.

So, try toning settings down and messing with the hardward profiles to work towards Battery life rather than graphics.

This is more my opinion so, take it worth a grain of salt. But don't think the developer isn't unaware of things. He's got an ear closer to the ground then most considering how mnay times he's answered bug reports and more.

havocdrake

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Re: Rant: Battery Eater
« Reply #3 on: September 30, 2017, 08:54:57 PM »

Just a little bit salty because, though there are too many 2d-games( Rimworld),  3d games( Medieval 2 total war), this game eats it. Mind you Medieval 2 is a 3d game, and this game siphons it more than that. Just a ranting  :'(
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xenoargh

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Re: Rant: Battery Eater
« Reply #4 on: October 01, 2017, 09:55:20 AM »

Lower the Battle Size in the options; that's the biggest-single optimization you can make to save CPU.

Secondly, play Vanilla, or with very light mods enabled; Nexerelin in particular is a giant CPU hog, largely due to having too many fleets and too many Markets in the sim.  Please bear in mind that, to be frank, the modders have largely been working with the game's current framework and issues and not a lot of effort's been spent on making them optimized; the last time we had something like an optimized large-scale mod was about two years ago, and it's been abandoned because the game's fundamentals have been a moving target :)

Thirdly, consider using the FX Mod; that helps quite a bit, in terms of toning down CPU use due to certain types of special effects, especially ship engines and trails.

Fourthly, the AI Overhaul mod, while imperfect, can reduce the CPU hit from ship and weapon AIs (weapons on Autofire are actually a substantial hit, and it improves that load a lot).  But it's definitely not playing quite as well as the Vanilla AI, as I have limited time-budgets to work on it, so you'll have to bear with some imperfections :)

Fifthly, please bear in mind that this is basically the work of one guy and that he's largely concentrating on reaching the final sets of features.  There are a bunch of optimization areas that can and will get looked at as the game reaches its final form, I suspect :)
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Rant: Battery Eater
« Reply #5 on: October 01, 2017, 12:01:07 PM »

I would not suggest using the FX nor the AI Overhaul mods that Xeno suggested. Mainly because even veteran players of SS have issues telling missiles apart with it while the AI Overhaul is unstable and tends to crash quite often, especially with other popular mods. Also, if you are on a metered connection/ data limit or slow connection, he bundles ALL of his mods together, so you will end up downloading mods that you don't want to waste data on.
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Sy

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Re: Rant: Battery Eater
« Reply #6 on: October 01, 2017, 06:02:27 PM »

Just a little bit salty because, though there are too many 2d-games( Rimworld),  3d games( Medieval 2 total war), this game eats it. Mind you Medieval 2 is a 3d game, and this game siphons it more than that. Just a ranting  :'(
i understand your frustration, but i wanna point out that a game being 2d and/or graphically unimpressive doesn't equal it having low hardware requirements, particularly in regards to the CPU, despite it actually being well optimized. the game needs to calculate a lot of stuff in the background, especially in large battles.

so, as xeno said, lowering the battle size should be your best option for making the game less power hungry.

i also have to agree with Kitsune though, at least on xeno's AI Overhaul. FX should help a bit, and afaik doesn't have any stability issues, so you could just try how it looks in-game and decide whether you want to keep using it. but AI Overhaul, despite providing some improvements, can cause problems -- both mechanically and in stability.
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