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1

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: March 26, 2021, 10:18:09 AM »

Can I use a story point to persuade Alex to reveal if the update is for today?

Well, I just logged in and saw 'Released' in the thread title, think that answered your question

2

Suggestions / Re: More realistic and uncapped combat speeds

« on: March 02, 2021, 04:12:07 AM »

I'm also not sure how it be more or less "realistic" here, or why that's something to care about when we're in sci-fi with radically different naval technology and design, or why it should change the balance design.

It might have been poorly worded but realism isn't the main point for me, though I think it's a nice added bonus to have a bit more Newtonian physics. I think hard speed caps are a bit frustrating and it's sometimes hard to read whether you're going at full speed or not and in which direction. You keep pressing W (or whichever direction key), your engines light up but nothing happens cause you're already at max speed. Your burn drive expires and your ship miraculously slows down. This is what bothers me the most.

The issue with that idea is that it's a bottomless pit. First you want uncapped speed, then you need a larger battle area to have space to maneuver (because you have to turn backward to slow down more efficiently), then you need unlimited weapon range to deal with the increased distances, then you need 3D space because otherwise you can't really dodge projectiles or other ramming ships, and we are now way past the point where it's just a different game with different rules.

Hmm I disagree. The goal isn't to make drastic gameplay changes and go full Star Citizen. For me it's mostly about changing a hard speed cap to a soft speed cap so that you can still accelerate without going three times as fast as before, thus keeping the gameplay the same. Of course that might require tweaking the numbers. I think the map is already big enough to account for such changes. As for weapons range, I think unlimited range could have a big impact performance wise as there would be a lot more projectiles on and off screen, so I would be fine with keeping things as it is.

I understand if most people are fine with it as it is, it's personnally one of my only pet peeves with the game and thought it was interesting to discuss. Sorry if it's unclear, not a native English speaker so ideas are sometimes a bit hard to convey properly ^^

3

Suggestions / More realistic and uncapped combat speeds

« on: March 01, 2021, 04:18:03 PM »

Hey guys,

So I was thinking about ship speed limits and how it doesn't really make sense in space. I also feel like it makes most ships, even destroyer-sized ones feel very slow. It's especially annoying when trying to get to the other size of the battlefield or trying to chase down remaining ships.
Furthermore, it feels weird when your ship loses speed after maneuvering jets or burn drive expire.

My idea was to remove the speed cap to make combat more dynamic (don't get me wrong it's already a blast ^^) and more realistic, but making going over the previous ship speed cap either generating flux (the faster you go, the more energy you need to accelerate) or having diminishing returns on acceleration to keep it balanced and to prevent ships flying around at crazy speeds. Additionnal speed due to burn drive, maneuvering jets and co should probably be kept as long as you don't accelerate in another direction.

Ship with garbage acceleration/maneuvering will still feel sluggish to fly, but at least they would go faster than 10 km/h 

I'm not sure how much work that would represent, how hard it would be to balance or if it is even feasible or fun at all, I just thought it was an interesting idea to discuss. Maybe I just watched The Expanse too much lately ^^

4

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Tahlan Shipworks 0.3.16

« on: June 18, 2020, 04:10:43 PM »

Hey,

I've come across a hidden variant of the Castigator I believe, which has the "Lostech Engineering" hullmod. It says "Detailed analysis indicates that the ship may possess other, as of yet undocumented, capabilities". Is there specific stuff to do with this ship ?

Thanks

5

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Re: Performance Issue - CPU Bottleneck ?

« on: June 11, 2020, 10:58:00 AM »

What is your modlist?

For the tests I've been running with LazyLib and GraphicsLib only. I've tried disabling enableShaders, then keeping it on and having enableLights, enableBloom, enableNormal, useLargeRipple, enableExplosionTrails, enableWeaponSmoke set as false.

The modlist in my current playthrough (I'm getting roughly the same performances in Last Hurrah as with only GraphicsLib) is:
- Lightshow
- Trailer moments
- Adjusted sector (same sector size, just more cryosleepers/motherships)
- Automatic orders
- Autosave
- Better colonies
- Blackrock
- Combat chatter
- Commissioned crews
- Console commands
- DME
- Disassemble reassemble
- HMI
- Imps weapon sounds
- Industrial evolution
- Interesting portraits pack
- Lazylib
- Leading pip
- Legacy of Arkgneisis
- Luddic enhancement
- Magiclib
- Nex
- Ruthless Sector
- Scy nation
- SWP
- Speedup
- Stop gap measures
- Tahlan shipworks
- Terraforming and station construction (gates disabled)
- Tiandong heavy industries
- Underworld
- Unknown skies
- Vayra's ship pack
- Version checker
- Weapons group controls
- Audio plus
- Graphicslib

Overworld map performance is fine with all these mods, but tanks during battles, even medium sized ones. Closing Chrome definitely helps a bit

6

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Re: Performance Issue - CPU Bottleneck ?

« on: June 10, 2020, 12:43:16 PM »

Yeah there seems to be some overshoot in terms of FPS, it's often oscillating between 145-160 in menus etc. I've definitely disabled Vsync in both Nvidia control panel and settings.json. I tried again today on vanilla, there seems to be no issue and I get decent performances.

However I tried turning on GraphicsLib and performance tanks A LOT (30-60 FPS in combat). I've tried tweaking graphic settings a little bit (disabling ripples, lighting, bloom, explosions effects...). I also tried turning enableShaders to false to disable the mod effects and reinstalling mods, closing Chrome and MSI Afterburner, to no avail. Any tips on this side?

7

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Re: Performance Issue - CPU Bottleneck ?

« on: June 09, 2020, 04:50:25 PM »

Ok so I closed Chrome and MSI Afterburner and saw a huge increase in performance (160 FPS, 50% idle at the start of the battle, then averaging 90-100 FPS during the more intense fights, which seems more reasonable). I reopened both to make sure they caused the issue, relaunched the game and I got the same performances. So I still have no idea where it comes from 

Though CPU usage has improved, it still seems a bit high to me (1 core with 100% load, other cores with moderate-high load). I have two screenshots, one taken during the mission, the second one idle with the game closed to compare CPU/GPU usage.
https://imgur.com/a/USzYRYY

Otherwise I don't have any antivirus running besides Windows Defender. I remember having some trouble with other games that were linked to background services like Win Def running analysis and drawing lots of resources but I highly doubt it's the case here as I've been experiencing this for a few days consistently.

I'll see if I can reproduce this behavior or if it stays this way and I'll try to see how it holds up with mods.

8

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Re: Performance Issue - CPU Bottleneck ?

« on: June 09, 2020, 02:46:18 PM »

Hmm - that is pretty strange; the frame rate you're getting in Last Hurrah almost sounds like what you'd get if the game was indeed not running on the right GPU. In the Nvidia control panel, the executable you need to associate with the GPU is java.exe, the one found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Fractal Softworks\Starsector\jre\bin

Yes, that is what I did as I saw it mentioned in several other threads. Since the GPU gets to 20% load while in game, I don't think it is the root of the problem. Also it's the only GPU on my computer so I don't think the game could not use it.

Otherwise I don't have much else running that is resource hungry aside from Chrome, but I'll try monitoring more precisely. Do you know of any way to monitor the resource usage of the game only ? I'm not an expert at all on this subject 

I'll try running the game without MSI Afterburner, we'll see what happens.

Sure, I'm not hoping for 144 FPS in big battles, but 40-60 seems a bit low for my specs indeed.

Anyway, thanks for your quick answer !

9

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Performance Issue - CPU Bottleneck ?

« on: June 09, 2020, 01:28:58 PM »

Hey guys !

After playing with mods for a bit, I noticed I had significant performance issues during combat, especially during big battles. I've used The Last Hurrah as a baseline for my tests. With mods, I often had around 30-40 FPS during this mission with 0% idle, even without much stuff going on on the screen.

I've tried disabling all the mods and then playing on a clean install, no mods. I gained a few FPS (it sits at ~40-60 for most of the fight) but it's still very low compared to what I am expecting (targeting 144 FPS).

After a bit of digging and CPU/GPU usage monitoring with MSI Afterburner, I found out that my GPU sits at ~20% usage at most and 3 of my CPU cores are often at nearly 100% load, which seems weird to me since Starsector is supposed to mostly use a single core. RAM usage seems to be fine.

FIY, on the campaign map with Nex + 5 faction mods + adjusted sector (x1.1 sector size) and a bunch of other mods, I hover around 100-120 FPS with 0% idle, which is more understandable as a lot of stuff is going on. Without any mods, I get a stable 144 FPS with 30-50% idle.



These are my specs:
- i5-2500k OC'd to 4.3 GHz
- MSI 970 GTX OC'd (4 GB VRAM, 1113 MHz core clock, 3953 MHz memory clock)
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10 64 bits

My settings:
- vmparams RAM set to 8192.
- vsync off
- fps 144
- fullscreen

The steps I've taken to solve the problem:
- Making sure the GPU was handling the game through the Nvidia control panel
- Disabling Vsync, setting the openGL stuff on the 970 GTX in the control panel
- Updating the drivers
- Reinstalling the game

I haven't found any solution so far as most performance issues with decent rigs seem to be linked to AMD GPUs, which isn't my case.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, let me know if I can provide more information, or if I can get more precise tools to monitor how the game uses resources.
Thanks a lot !