horrendous electronic grinding sound and freeze up..

[tkobo]

I landed 2 stacks of 7 transports about half filled with infantry units on a neutral planet.This opened communication with them as you suggested, but as my main goal was invasion ,i invaded. The instant i landed the transports where swarmed with neutral aircraft. This is good. The instant i gave the unload order to the 2 stacks of transports the neutral declared war and attacked, the instant after they started to attack the game froze and that horrendous electronic "grinding" sound started.

I havent heard that sound in years,if i remember it correctly, its a hard drive is being crushed sound.Again,if i remember the sound correctly ,and its been many years, its a sound that in the past was accompanied by a killed hard drive.Again if i remember the sound correctly ,its the head damaging the disk due to great stress....usually a program pounding the hard drive.

This is not something im going to "test" further, as i like my hard drive:P

My first suggestion, remove the explosions.I would really like to see how much smoother combat works without them.I have no doubt the explosions are still causing huge performance hits.

Oh, and since i dont think ive said it enough "if i remember it correctly" (there,one more time).

[George Geczy]

Hiya! Chris asked me to pop in and read this thread, because anything involving "horrendous grinding" is considered worthy of investigation ...

The engine doesn't do anything fancy with disk access, some assets are "late loaded" (meaning that they only load in off disk when they are first used/shown) but thrashing or heavy disk access should never be a result. Though if you have a save game right before this point I would be very interested in testing to see if there is anything that could possibly be a cause. If the game actually froze and it's not a coincidental Windows or system issue, then maybe something got stuck in some weird loop or some such.

I haven't taken a close look at the performance of the planet-level effects, that may be a good thing to look at early next week and as you suggest maybe even some game options might be a good idea if there is a real performance hit on effects like explosions. I will give this some priority for next week.

[tkobo]

I do have a save . I just need to remember what save send system was working well, and be back at the location... so maybe monday.

Id bet a taco its combat related, having to do with a massive amount of attacks on a massive amount of units,and the explosions.
'
(note for self, biggly ? )

[George Geczy]

I'm not sure we're allowed to send taco's over the border.

If you can get us a save I will taco the time to look at it.

[tkobo]

K, after reading that, i sent the save anyway....
Sent to chris email, all you should have to do ,is pause the game,go to Battlegroup 2 and or 3, issue the unload order to both, and unpause the game.

[George Geczy]

Took a look at the save - thanks again for sending it!

I testing using version 755, which is the current latest "fasttrack" beta version on steam.

First, no hard drive knashing was noticed. While I have an SSD, the disk activity monitoring didn't indicate any any unusual activity.

I do have to say I have not seen 600 units die so quickly before. Definitely put a load onto the sound and graphics effects code. Though I didn't notice much in the way of any sort of "freezing" either, game time progressed pretty smoothly, although the memory footprint of the game shot way up, from under 3 to over 6 GB RAM. I think this is due to some inefficiencies in the graphics effects code, so we'll be looking at that.

I do think that on older video cards this may cause a much bigger bottleneck, I could even see it causing a possible temperature spike on some video cards that could cause graphic card fan speeds to ramp up and maybe even cause a video card freeze. Systems with less than 12GB of RAM may also be subject to thrashing because of the sudden memory spike.

The death of the units also presented a few unusual game results, although it's hard to really sort out things when you have such massive overstacks (300 units in a hex is a bit beyond the 7-stack rule!) For some reason one single helicopter accounted for 1/6th of all kills, which is weird, although again hard to look at closely with so many units in the fray.

Sadly the next fasttrack version will change the save game file format (hopefully for the last time for a while), so we'll have to get all we can out of this save for now and see what we can do.

Definitely allows us to focus on a few things to clean up for such large battles.

-- George.

[tkobo]

Ill have to look at that systems ram...im pretty sure its 6gb or under , might even be 4...

Its also got an older video card 750ti , i think...

if you guys take my suggestion about a new disembark system for space transports ,the huge overstacking from transports could be greatly reduced if not eliminated.

i gots a few questions ifn ya dont mind...
*How much art was in the area, because there was a huge freaking ton of bombard attacks?
*In your play thru, did neutral ground units also stack up on the space transports in addition to all the neutral air units before you gave the unload order ?

[George Geczy]

Ill have to look at that systems ram...im pretty sure its 6gb or under , might even be 4...

Ouch, that would definitely cause some memory thrashing. And that could mean that Windows, desperately trying not to run out of memory or blue screen the system, will move RAM to hard drive and back through virtual memory. So yes in that case it could cause a lot of HDD activity.

Right now memory optimization has only been receiving occasional attention. Going 64 bit has not been kind to the memory footprint either. And when we hit a features vs memory use decision, we usually lean towards the feature side, so the footprint has grown. I notice on the steam page we still say 4GB minimum requirement/8GB recommended, what we'll probably need to do to keep that at 4 is to force cutting back on graphics effects when low memory machines are involved. Right now we're not doing that triage, but I will look shortly to see if we can help to minimize the memory spike on the battle effects.

Its also got an older video card 750ti , i think...

That should work relatively well.

if you guys take my suggestion about a new disembark system for space transports ,the huge overstacking from transports could be greatly reduced if not eliminated.

So far we've been making a big push to finishing all the space based features (which is why the next fasttrack version gets a bunch of nifty new space features including the Merchant AI and Space Pirate updates). We'll be tackling the colonization and planet transport/invasions soon so we'll definitely take a look at all those mechanisms soon.

i gots a few questions ifn ya dont mind...
*How much art was in the area, because there was a huge freaking ton of bombard attacks?

Taking a closer look again, it looks like what got the landing force was the C-Stryker V helicopter - it seems to have an indirect/strategic bombing attack. So a couple dozen of those were carpet-bombing the 300-unit hexes and taking the stacks down. I don't think they're supposed to have that feature (strategic bombing helicopters? I don't think that's a thing).

*In your play thru, did neutral ground units also stack up on the space transports in addition to all the neutral air units before you gave the unload order ?

There were some ground units around, but not that many. One thing that is also still on the "pending" list is how we'll deal with land unit vs landed space transports. Right now, as you noticed, they don't really get engaged, but that will change. However we don't want to make them fragile either, so maybe we'll say that they use their "shields" until they unload? Not sure of our desired game mechanic here.[/quote]

-- George.

[George Geczy]

Taking a closer look again, it looks like what got the landing force was the C-Stryker V helicopter - it seems to have an indirect/strategic bombing attack. So a couple dozen of those were carpet-bombing the 300-unit hexes and taking the stacks down. I don't think they're supposed to have that feature (strategic bombing helicopters? I don't think that's a thing).

Taking another closer-closer look, there were about 70 to 90 of those helicopters attacking, since they come in from other air bases around the planet after the unload order is done.
Also, the carpet-bombing feature seems to be unique to the C-Strykers that they build (not the Earther ones). Need to do some research on why that happened, but definitely seems to be an equipment list error.

[tkobo]

K, thanks.

I like the shield idea for space transports , i think most people would expect to lose some transports landing the troops ,but it also has to feel balanced.

...the helicopter carpet bombing would explain a lot. Mainly why i can never seem to spot all that art i think is crushing my units.

[George Geczy]

So the murder helicopters will be fixed in the next update. It also looks like, for whatever random reason, nearly every "W" region unit in the equipment list had indirect fire ability accidentally. A particularly nasty feature when going against a 300-unit overstack-penalty hex.

Of course it means starting a new game to load the updated equipment list (plus the next version will have a new save game format as well), so that particular invasion force is forever doomed.

Still need to further investigate the memory spike, not sure if we can resolve that before the next update.

-- George.

[Rosalis]

7 stack rule.. right, what was the 7 stack rule in sr2020 called?
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