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[Gwyvern]

This was just a thought I had while observing members of the unofficial discord, for what seems like the 1500th time, assist somebody with troubleshooting their game after they started modding, only for it to turn out that they had not gone into their vmparams file and increased their ram allocation from the default 1.5GB.

Now, this in and of itself isn't a problem, we are happy to help, but I can't help but wonder how many people encountered this issue without any community interaction, did not know about the vmparams file, or how to safely edit it, who simply concluded that the game must be poorly optimized and gave up, as many of us have come to expect such things from games now a days, Indie devs often don't have the resources or knowhow, and AAA studios tend not to care.

The problem is that this is not true, SS is wonderfully optimized, but its hiding such a vital piece of configuration in a location which might have been standard fare back in 2010, but this is 2019, not even Bethesda RPGs require any file tinkering to start up a basic mod list, and believe me, those games can get pretty hairy as your list grows.

I only see this becoming a bigger issue for the game as time goes on. So here's what you can do about it.

Step 1: The Bare Minimum

Even if you don't want to put a lot of work into revamping the launcher right now, there is one small change you can make to the installer to make most of this problem go away.

Instead of allocating a single, default value (in this case its like, 1.5 GB or something): have the installer detect the amount of installed ram, and set vmparams to allocate 50% of available ram, but -NEVER- more than 8GB

This is the optimal configuration for 99% of end users and will all but eliminate complaints based on this problem.

Step 2: Extended

This should be mostly fine, anything beyond this could easily fall under the guise of 'troubleshooting', and most people will know it is time to roll up their sleeves from here on out, but, if you wanted maximum future proofing, allow any and all relevant changes to the vmparams file to be done through a plain-english interface in the launcher, this one will require a bit of work, but it will make a large number of troubleshooting problems easier to deal with than most games nowadays provide.

I hope this helps.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Yeah I completely agree that we NEED to do something about the launcher and the VMPRAMS file. As 1.0 rolls closer and closer, we will need to give the launcher key features like this. Otherwise, I suspect that once SS hits steam, it would get review bombed due to lazy players modding the hell out of SS and causing it to crash. Sadly we need to idiot proof it as idiots on steam are many and they are LOUD!

[Hrothgar]

You cant make something idiot proof, as some of them cant even breath properly with their brainpower, not mentioning a modding or something.

[Gothars]

You cant make something idiot proof, as some of them cant even breath properly with their brainpower, not mentioning a modding or something.

Issuing blanket insults does however not help with the issue, nor does it do anything for a positive forum atmosphere. Please refrain from that kind of post in the future.

[outdated]

I for one don't like the fact that the game comes with JVM bundled in.

[RedHellion]

I for one don't like the fact that the game comes with JVM bundled in.

Why not? Posting an opinion without any supporting reasoning makes it hard to figure out what you mean or where you're coming from.

Bundling the JVM makes it a lot easier for Alex to control the runtime environment, rather than having potential Java version issues. There's a lot of pros to bundling like this for an indie dev.

The only downsides I can think of offhand are the slightly increased install size to include the JVM, and the fact that the JVM is probably outdated and may be missing some bells & whistles (which the player will never notice, though modders might) since it had to be bundled with the install.

You cant make something idiot proof, as some of them cant even breath properly with their brainpower, not mentioning a modding or something.

Issuing blanket insults does however not help with the issue, nor does it do anything for a positive forum atmosphere. Please refrain from that kind of post in the future.

Seconded. Purely insulting someone or a group of people doesn't add anything to a discussion, and is probably quite inaccurate to boot. I'm pretty sure most of the people on this forum also have Steam, and most of those have probably tried to mod a game at least once without poring over every single possible config file in the game's directory first - assuming that since there's no easily-accessible built-in options for it that the game should automatically adjust.

[Schwartz]

Why not, and this might be a crazy idea... have the launcher set RAM allocation according to the size of the mods folder? It sounds trivial. Could even give a warning if it is projected that your PC can't handle it.

[Alex]

(That's eventually the plan, yeah. Changing memory allocation requires a game restart, which is a bit tricky and would need to work on all the supported operating systems, though it's looking fairly promising.)

[xenoargh]

I'd certainly appreciate an automated memory-tweaking version, but I'd also like to be able to manually change it.  One of the big problems here is that it's not the "size of  your mods folder" that actually matters; it's largely about holding the game-state. 

That, and some of us have enough RAM that we literally don't care about throwing the JVM more than it can possibly use, lol.

[Avanitia]

I do agree with Gwyvern, explaining same thing for I don't know how many times already does get tiring. I'd personally prefer for launcher to automatically detect the amount of RAM user's PC has, assign 50% of it, but still allow the user to change RAM allocation in the launcher.

(That's eventually the plan, yeah. Changing memory allocation requires a game restart, which is a bit tricky and would need to work on all the supported operating systems, though it's looking fairly promising.)

As for "requiring restart" - why not just make launcher display a message if user tinkers with the RAM allocation? Or tell the user that they have to restart the launcher for changes to apply properly?

Why not, and this might be a crazy idea... have the launcher set RAM allocation according to the size of the mods folder? It sounds trivial. Could even give a warning if it is projected that your PC can't handle it.

It's not a good idea IMO - not all mods are the same, I am using a few of private small mods which are a portrait pack, my WIP mod, changes in settings.json, etc.

I for one don't like the fact that the game comes with JVM bundled in.

Starsector has issues if you use any Java version other than 7, if I'm correct here.

[TJJ]

The launcher need not run inside the same VM as the game.

Besides gaining better control of launch parameters, partitioning game from launcher could accelerate launcher load speed & marginally reduce the game's peak memory usage.

[MesoTroniK]

Another large problem is VRAM, players running massive mod lists with potato rigs with 2gb or god forbid 1gb VRAM video cards and then have no idea why it is puking blood. So often a common misconception on the Discord is how they think because SS is 2d that it should not be system intensive blah blah, or them also not understanding that SS pre-loads all assets (but starsystem backgrounds). But but, I can run 200 mods on Skyrim, why can't I run 30+ in SS with X potato computer?!

I have explained this and helped dozens of players with this problem and similar ones and it is frankly tiring, and a rule of thumb when it comes to things like this that for every player who complains about something? There are 100 more than had the same issue and never said a thing!

So regardless of launcher upgrades (which do indeed *need* to happen), there needs to be safeguards against VRAM issues as well... Which is a much more complex subject. Detecting the VRAM of a system and how much is being used I believe is simple enough. Until you are dealing with computers that have IGPUs, or god forbid an IGPU *and* a discrete video card. I am not sure it is possible to detect which one is being used, but if it can be done then it should print a warning in game if running dangerously close to their capacity!

Anyways, due to the unique nature of SS's engine... Excuse my crassness, yes VRAM also needs to be idiot-proofed not just RAM

[Tartiflette]

Why not have an in-game warning for both those issues? When V-ram stuff starts to get offloaded to the ram, and when the allocated ram gets full too.

[Serenitis]

Even something as basic as a dropdown box containing a variety of common settings on the splash panel would be p. nice.

potato rigs

or god forbid 1gb VRAM video cards

or god forbid an IGPU *and* a discrete video card

Stop spying on me.

[xenoargh]

On the subject of VRAM...

This game shouldn't be using much VRAM for textures, unless people are behaving insanely in mods.  Seriously, the graphics folder is 68MB; even if we presume that every single image is using 3X that much VRAM when it's decompressed... there should be lots and lots of room.  I'm having a lot of trouble understanding why VRAM might be a real issue here.

If somehow textures are actually the issue (which doesn't make any sense unless, again, people are doing insane things) then fine, the game's specs need to be higher or the graphics need to be in DDS to use texture compression properly on modern GPUs.

I think that VRAM usage, if it's a real problem for 1GB cards, must have roots somewhere else (storage of geometry, etc.) that mods can't control very easily.  I'd think that most end-users on a potato like that are hitting walls with general RAM use and CPUs that can't take the hit well before that is a real problem, however.