Good Evening All,
It's been a while since I've played the game, because I love extreme maps. I got sick of the long turn times once you really got the game going between turn 200-300. I was running an AMD FX 9370 8core/thread cpu w/ 16gb memory Radeon RX 570 Series GPU. Running a standard SSD. Turn time was sitting at 4 minutes 10 seconds. Makes for very slow progress, even if I rush through my turns.
So I upgraded. Current Specs is one of the best out there for processing power. AMD Ryzen 9 3950x 16core/32thread cpu w/ 64gb memory Radeon RX570 Series GPU (just replaced the GPU last fall so couldn't justify purchasing higher end right now). Running an M.2 drive SSD. Same game, only using about 10% of cpu power, GPU is sitting around 95% appears to be my hold up, however. Turn times have reduced some but not a lot. Current turn time now has dropped to 2 minutes 55 seconds. Only a mere 30% increase.
Here are my questions. There has been a lot of talk about Stardock games multi-threading. Why is this game only using about 8 of the available 32 threads, and only utilizing 1/10 of my cpu?
Thanks.
I've made some progress thanks to your saved game.
I can't solve the fundamental issue but when you are talking 200+ seconds per turn, there's a lot of small %'s that add up pretty quickly.
Some of this will need some beta testing because it changes the way the AI deals with fleets a bit. This wouldn't do anything until the SECOND turn of your saved game but after that it should, in theory, shave off quite a few seconds.
The other thing that I do think I can fix is the lousy performance of adding a planetary improvement. I haven't figured out why it's so slow in your saved game but I'm looking into it.
Thank you very much for looking into this, and if you need a beta tester, I'd be happy to help out as I have in the past. Even if it meant starting a new game from scratch, but to get to this point in the game it would take a couple weeks to get an answer on what I'm seeing, as this is 40 hours plus of game time.
Even though it doesn't sound like it would make much of a difference. Eventually I'll be purchasing a new GPU, if you were purchasing a reasonably priced Radeon GPU between $150-$450 give or take, what would you choose and right now or potentially in the near future, don't need to give anything away, would any Stardock game benefit from having a PCIe 4.0 GPU vs. a PCIe 3.0 card. Everything I've seen online points to no significant difference worth the twice the price tag right now, would you agree?
I would be ok with beta testing this. Yeah I would say this is a huge increase from the beginning where I was waiting 16 minutes between turns. I am also curious what happened with Paul.
I'm going to ask that the v4.0 beta go out this week and will include my changes with that.
There really is nothing you can do on your end (other than have fewer ships flying around). I'm running this on a 3990x with 128GB of memory and 3TB of PCI Express 4.0 SSDs and it's really really slow.
So here's where we are:
* I wrote a filter that creates a job to throw out a lot of the AI movement commands . This will slow things down on a theoretical 2 core box but no one is running large maps on that kind of hardware.
* I implemented some additional "dirty" flags so that when you update your planets (like build planetary improvements) that that is faster.
* I added a new AI phase called "MovingToDestination" which splits the AI ships between those that are moving (and thus will need to talk to the GPU at some point in the turn) and those that are still thinking about moving (like other AI players).
* I removed the AI calls to the GPU for FOW. I generally try to avoid anything that looks at whether it's AI or not but here was a case where it is costly (well, costly if you have >1000 ships flying on a massive map).
The underlying problem is really just the number of ships. They're graphical. They have to be kept in memory. They need to exist on the GPU. Consider just loading those ships. Even if it's 1/100th of a second each, there's 1500 or so of the ships. That's 15 seconds just to do basically a for loop of them. And of course, that's not counting all those ship parts which have to be indexed.
It should be...better. Still working on it.
Paul's working on a new GalCiv DLC now.
Thanks for all of this. All much appreciated.
I understand that as part of this post, which I appreciate all of the insight in to this problem. The goal is that by the end of the year I'll be bumping this machine up to 128 GB of memory, however, doesn't seem I have much use for that much at this point. I wanted to get a larger PCI Express 4.0 SSD, but I could only justify a 500GB one right now. The goal for that would be to get another one later this year that is 2TB. No mention above though on your GPU, curious what you're running, and if you see a big impact right now going from a PCIe 3.0 GPU to a PCIe 4.0 say for instance Radeon 380 going to a Radeon 3700, for the estimated $250 difference? I will be replacing my current GPU as my wife would like me to get my old pc back up and working for the kids which would require a new GPU either way... So just looking for your thoughts if you would care to give your insight. If not I understand as well, but others may find that interesting too...
Awesome, I thought we lost him...
Ok so results for this day's work:
First turn on that saved game: 3:26
Second turn (changes applied): 1:23
Third turn (changes applied): 1:16 seconds
Still takes forever to load that saved game. I've got to replay those first few turns a lot today.
Frogboy, I can't say how much I appreciate you taking a look into this to see what could be done. Thank you very much.
Thank you for sending me such a fantastic saved game! I think there is still more we can do.
I wish the serialization issue was fixable. You really notice it when loading that saved game. It's just endless loading and creating of meshes and textures and all that.
Thanks again!
I probably won't have time to start new game right now but I have some late game saves from games with about 10 civs on 16gb maps (sorry I never remember their names) If opt in is available I'll try to try them out how things work in less insane environment
Glad to hear Paul's still around.
Frogboy, on my MBA and in the companies I have led, we sometimes discussed an issue called "Founders Syndrome", you may want to refresh your memory on it. https://managementhelp.org/misc/founders.htm
Your interaction with Horemvore may have been done during a time you were a bit off, certainly understandable in these times, but your public reaction to one of the best mod builders and most prolific, if not popular modder, in your community was, to say the least, ill advised. Not the smartest move I have seen a company executive make in my time as a management consultant and senior executive.
Maybe it was not politicly correct reaction but sure as hell deserved and fun to read.
for Frogboy
This has all happened before. This will all happen again.
This is how I responded to the version of you from 2008.
https://forums.galciv2.com/312130/brads-life-philosophy-for-what-its-worth
Hope this helps.
This has all happened before. This will all happen again.This is how I responded to the version of you from 2008.https://forums.galciv2.com/312130/brads-life-philosophy-for-what-its-worthHope this helps.
Time will tell. I too have heard your answer often in my 45 years of work. Unfortunately a significant number of those CEO's are no longer in business, and some, like you were quite brilliant. In this day of hyper-connectivity it sometimes pays to take things offline as opposed to just reacting to emotions. Your game, your company and definitely your call.
I certainly wish you luck, I genuinely love your game.
I understand what you're trying to do, Wotan, however, even though this refers to part of the conversation at the beginning of this post, maybe this conversation would be best on a separate post, or private conversation as well.
With that being said, once again thanks Frogboy for your response to this post, I especially enjoyed the insight on how the game uses different resources and how it works behind the scenes. Sounds like a lot of problem solving, which is what I love to do. Too bad I gave up programming 20 years ago...
Even though it wouldn't make a difference here, or at least not much if any. I still would be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on PCIe 3.0 vs. 4.0 GPU's right now and are they worth it with the current games, or GPU's out there. What you're running and why other than because you design games lol. Thanks.
There is a big difference between the skillset needed to run a company that has to innovate / produce things (manufacturing, technology, etc.) versus the skillset involved in relationship management (legal, financial services, etc.).
We've been around for almost 30 years. My net worth is around 11X what it was in 2008 -- well until February anyway. Our success is built on our ability to innovate and create new things.
It takes a certain temperament to do what I do and if I'm dealing with people who make doing my job miserable, then it reduces my effectiveness at what I do. And my effectiveness is not, for instance, tied to raising capital (which involves a lot of people skills).
None of which implies that I think you're wrong. Like I wrote before, there is a cost associated with it.
The question is whether there's a greater benefit to having me improve the products in question? Because it's an either/or thing. If people are going to crap on my work, then I just won't participate and if I'm not participating, as people can probably attest to, things don't get implemented as quickly because I can both decide and execute.
Thanks and I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint. I enjoy constructive discussions like this a lot.
I like PCIe 4 more in theory. But whether it be NVMe or GPUs, I havne't seen it translate into performance yet.
Where it might help is in transferring textures from disk to GPU memory.
In the saved game you sent me, we benefit from making small % improvements that, when you're talking 4 minute turns, add up.
My biggest regret on GalCiv III is that I wasn't involved in the original coding of it. It's not that I would have done it better but I would have made it easier to access certain things.
For example, this is how I have to check to see if two players are at war:
Whereas, in GalCiv II this would have been: pPlayer->IsAtWarWith(pOtherPlayer).
And I had to do this for this update because I split up the objects (i.e. we want to minimize the number of objects that are connected to the GPU) into smaller pools rather than a single large one (which is normally just fine -- I mean, WHO has 302 colonies, 40+ civilizations and 5,000 starships?) but that means being careful about who goes into what bucket.
Me, lol. Looks like there are several groups of players out there, those like me that like larger more colonies, more ships, really pushing the game limits, and love months of game play to get through one game. Those that hate starting from scratch after they beat one or two factions and want to go on to what's next, or the next best out there.
Then you have those that like the quick short games, small maps few players, limited resources. These people are lucky if the game stretches longer than a few days.
Last you have the middle section, those that like games somewhere in the middle, either many planets resources on smaller maps, or those that like scarce resources on larger maps. These games can stretch out for a few weeks.
I hate the idea of small maps linked together by hyper lanes, but I can understand the reasoning behind it. With that being said though it sounds like DX12 is better at sending this info to the GPU so, if that was in GalCiv3 then maybe we wouldn't even have to look at small maps linked together.
I remember when SimCity 2013 was released. EA, and Maxis was caught looking too one dimensional and that players will only play our game for 30 minutes at a time and won't push the limits. Even with some problems in beta testing they pushed the game out on their target release date with huge disappointment and backlash. They thought they could release and patch later and be just fine. Little that they knew the game was very addicting at earlier stages of the game. Players loved to play the game for hours on end, making the online requirement and limited server space being a huge hurdle. Only to find out that their later game strategies weren't fully worked out, and caused additional problems with bottle-necking the city connections. This ultimately caused EA to put their tale between their legs, hand out free games to many of their customers, which they never recovered. Their expansion was just about DOA. Ultimately killing Maxis.
I personally love that you and your team have big visions for games that really push the limits of what can be done. This is the main reason that brought me to Galactic Civilizations II, when I purchased it at Best Buy back in 2006, and what continued to have me support your companies games throughout the years. I currently purchase 80-90% of your games, not because I love the concepts, but because I love you personally taking time to communicate with your customers, and support your products yourself. Those games that you're not directly working on, you have developed an atmosphere that those people in charge of the game do the same, such as Paul when he was the main person in charge of Galactic Civilizations III. There are several of your companies games I rarely go into, even though I own them. Not because they're not good, but because just don't peak my interest.
In case you're interested, here is a list of the games from Stardock ranked in order from favorite to least favorite. Some of which were co-produced with other companies or the game was supported by Stardock.
1. Galactic Civilizations II - even though I don't play it at all since III came out, I enjoyed it overall slightly better than III.
2. Galactic Civilizations III
3. Sins of a Solar Empire
4. Offworld Trading Company - have lost touch was hoping it was a little different than what it ended up being.
5. Siege of Centauri - Played this a lot in beta testing, but truthfully not much since launch.
6. Sorcerer King - Played this a lot in beta testing, haven't played since. (Really enjoyed being personally asked to be part of the beta testing of this game, and even though it wasn't a game I had interest in playing much I enjoyed working with the team to give them direct feedback.)
7. Ashes of the Singularity - I used to love RTS games, and I do enjoy Sins, this just seems too fast paced. I enjoy taking my time building things up, then picking my attack strategy. This seems more like I need to build as fast as possible. If I don't I'm dead.
8. Star Control Origins - As someone from outside the Star Control universe I guess I was hoping this game was something it's not. This is no fault of the game, mainly in what I thought the game was. When I played it in beta, it felt very repetitive.
I think that covers it for the games that I own, that have been produced in part by your company. I look forward to future games from you and your company.
Thanks
Deserved? For saying the game was not optimized? Really?
That is totally ironic since Mr Bossman then proceeded to optimize the game and shave Seliores turn times by nearly 100 seconds.
So I finished your game. Well, I had it play itself. We lost.
In a hundred turns or so someone is going to ascend.
I don't know about "deserved". I *like* what you do on the modding side. I don't like the seemingly continuous sniping and frequent snipings that I don't play the game (I recall recently you telling me how diplomacy works -- just because you know the XML doesn't mean you know the how the AI uses the diplomacy data under the covers -- I wrote it).
If you want to participate in the community, try not constantly insulting us.
Not if I have anything to say about that lol.
And please don't act like arrogant and ultimate modding authority. You know a lot more than I do in this subject but still you get things wrong or not find them at all. I even know about bug in your mod but you annoyed me so I decided to keep that info to myself.
Honestly I don't care any more and I am happy to ignore whatever post you make.
PS. That does not mean I think GC3 is perfect and has no problems. And ultimately it's devs job to chose patch for their game, not to make life easier for modders. I don't even think a lot ppl use mods anyway.
It's not possible to make everyone happy anyway.
I don't know about "deserved". I *like* what you do on the modding side. I don't like the seemingly continuous sniping and frequent snipings that I don't play the game (I recall recently you telling me how diplomacy works -- just because you know the XML doesn't mean you know the how the AI uses the diplomacy data under the covers -- I wrote it). If you want to participate in the community, try not constantly insulting us.
I apologise you feel that way, it was not my intention to come accross that way. I know I let my frustrations get the better of me at times, but that is all they are frustrations, no insults were intended. I can not remember that Diplomacy conversation, if I did however try to tell you how it works, well, that is my idiocy tbh.
Yeah totally confused now.
I know there are bugs in my mod, I have just not fixed that mod in while due to 4.0, was waiting for that.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
