I’ve noticed that 0.5 uses less RAM (19~20 kb) than older versions (27~30 kb). Which is good, I suppose?
The problem is that is laggier. Well, its laggier when Im doing certain things. Like watching a video while playing.
Reading is slow (3~5 seconds to simulate 9 in-game mins, multiply that for how many times the char needs to read the book to get a skill level) and I dont even want to talk about sleeping.
I already found a fix.
What happened to the game? Why is it laggier than older versions? Just curious questions.
[size=4pt]Im the only one having that lag problem? I hope not.[/size]
Memory usage is determined of just how much consistent (that is - correlated to the app) data you store onto a stack.
A lag is generally a boring substance found on wandering squirrels. Jes’ kidding. It’s a term to explain latency, a bit-dependent offset to real-time response in general.
Since persistent data in general is commit in bytes, you can judge by its size only once per moment, timewise. To get it wrapped up before it’s too late, an application will use allocated memory regarding its activity, and if you were an early DOS programmer - you’d curse Gates and Bill as much as… well, you know.
As is, this time (0.5) we’ve got, just to say, an optimization for those dynamics of the game, so the memory stack will get written every time possible - thus the slowdowns you’re encountering.
I feel it’s getting smoother and smoother every time I yank the new version, so be it.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess Ill have to deal with it…
Or stop using other programs in the background. Such as Flash, which REALLY slows down Cata (and its what I actually think that gives me the “lag” and the action delays) and I dont know what Cata has to do with Flash (Ram related, processor related, something else related?)
General stuff (Movement, attacks, craft…) gets a delay (0.2~0.4 secs) when Flash or any other RAM-eater program is running in the background
I’ve been experiencing this unusual pauses as well, even when just moving around it takes an odd amount of time for the load between turns. I’ve been playing since Whales and its never had this sort of “lagging.” …past windows builds have not had this same problem. I do appreciate the work of the developers and am amazed at the amount of player feedback that is put into the game.
Edit: And while playing I’ve not got above 67% pc usage which of course shouldn’t add to performance issues.
Also Edit: Took out the hateful part. I like hanging out here and don’t want to be mean to you guys.
[quote=“deadmerits, post:5, topic:1214”]I’ve been experiencing this unusual pauses as well, even when just moving around it takes an odd amount of time for the load between turns. I’ve been playing since Whales and its never had this sort of “lagging.” And Vultures has been around for like a week which means hes either a major lurker or just a pedantic asshole, either way his post didn’t help at all and past windows builds have not had this same problem. I do appreciate the work of the developers and am amazed at the amount of player feedback that is put into the game.
Edit: And while playing I’ve not got above 67% pc usage which of course shouldn’t add to performance issues.[/quote]
no need to be hateful. his post might not have been particularly helpful but that’s no need to be rude.
Seems there’s a resource that’s hogging quite a bit of CPU usage, maybe a dev could identify this?
Such as Flash, which REALLY slows down Cata (and its what I actually think that gives me the "lag" and the action delays) and I dont know what Cata has to do with Flash (Ram related, processor related, something else related?)
Everything will tend to slow down a real-time app. Everything you do that is, much less stand-alone apps that are resident in memory. Think of the CPU as the bottle, whilst RAM is the bottleneck (in this case).
For example, winamp will load into some 20 Mbytes of your physical memory and use additional resources for its plugins. And that is pre-3.0 winamp. Meanwhile, my player app is less than 2000 Kb in size and prefers system (filetable) paths rather than playlists (thus the lag when loading a 5000+ song list onto a <1 GHz CPU)
I am strong in belief Cataclysm_DDA does not use video memory as much as it should. There, I said it.
And I don’t mind the map saving system - twice as nice!
Odd, when I’ve done profiling runs of reading/sleeping the primary bottleneck has been updating the scentmap (it’s quite complex and not well optimised). What’s odd about that is it hasn’t changed at all recently, so I wouldn’t expect a slowdown compared to 0.4.
It’s been on the backburner for a long time now, but I can bump up its priority if people are really seeing issues with it. Also I’ll do some more profiling and see what I can find out about where bottlenecks are. Can you be more specific about exactly when you’re seeing lag spikes?
There’s some pretty bad ones every 12 steps when walking around near an overmap border, we’re still trying to track down the cause of that one.
There’s some part of the vehicle collision code that takes a noticeable amount of time every time you hit something, particularly when you hit zombies at very high speed.
The scentmap calculations are pretty bad, but only become the main bottleneck when you aren’t doing anything else.
RE: memory usage, it’s highly dominated by how much of the map you’ve explored, so a new game will have much lower usage, that might be it. I’m not totally sure as memory usage hasn’t generally been out-of-control enough to worry about.
I’m wondering if these aren’t all Windows users, Kevin. There WAS a major change to the windows version rendering recently, after all, with animations, and I suspect your benchmarking has been linux-specific, right?
Right, so… until someone decides to actually do Windows rendering right… do we care more about animations under Windows, or the ability to have stuff open in the background? Because the animation-enabling fix apparently still has some lag, albeit less than when it was first proposed :-/.
Depends. How many people play at work? Most I’ll have in the background is an offline Firefox window, two Notepad windows, Winamp, and Windows Explorer. Those don’t seem too laggy IMO.
After some testing related to a different issue: wow, the Windows version is slow. I can only assume that it’s due to inefficient rendering, because rendering is presumably the main difference between the two versions. So… anyone know anything about efficient rendering under Windows? Or do we need to rewrite all this for SDL or something?
no matter the map size after 2-3 sessions of book reading the game slows from 4-5 sec a tick to almost 10+. it gets worse the longer you read the book.
After sleeping in the same spot twice (consecutively, did not move for an entire day to test a theory) the lag hits a peak of almost 2 minutes to load.
so based on some info, scent map is the culprit?
Also, FIRE. holy lord. I could burn a house in .4 pretty easily, but in .5 even a small fire turns the game on its head!
Kevin’s done some work to make the scent map more efficient, so if someone wants to grab the code from the relevant pull request (#1038) and test it under Windows, that would be useful.
I’m still inclined to merge the optimization in, after I test it, but having someone say that it alleviates some of the Windows lag would boost the priority a fair bit.
[quote=“Soron, post:19, topic:1214”]Kevin’s done some work to make the scent map more efficient, so if someone wants to grab the code from the relevant pull request (#1038) and test it under Windows, that would be useful.
I’m still inclined to merge the optimization in, after I test it, but having someone say that it alleviates some of the Windows lag would boost the priority a fair bit.[/quote]
alright, i’m at work till 7am CST so it’ll be some hours before I can test it. if anyone beats me to it that’s fine by me
It’s a term to explain latency, a bit-dependent offset to real-time response in general.