AP: Slower the more you play?

Ask here if you experience technical problems with X³: Terran Conflict, X³: Albion Prelude or X³: Farnham's Legacy.

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Atkara
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Post by Atkara » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 08:49

Just checked Vicke's save. Framerate indeed doesn't make sense and it's not graphic lag. Something is eating up processing cycles.

At first I thought it would be the old warptunnel bug, just like early X3TC days, but I didn't see it enabled there. OOS combat is also out of the question, as it happens from the first second, whether you're there or not.

Still, my guess is that it has to be script-related -the stock market, maybe?

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Post by CBJ » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 10:45

geldonyetich wrote:It would go far for my faith in Egosoft's willingness to resolve customer complaints if they would start with the save game being analyzed by glenmcd and investigate what the cause of all the latency is.
Well you'll be pleased to know that that's exactly what we plan to do then!

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Post by geldonyetich » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 12:21

CBJ wrote:
geldonyetich wrote:It would go far for my faith in Egosoft's willingness to resolve customer complaints if they would start with the save game being analyzed by glenmcd and investigate what the cause of all the latency is.
Well you'll be pleased to know that that's exactly what we plan to do then!
I am indeed!

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Post by CBJ » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 15:16

OK, using the savegames supplied, we have found a likely cause for the slowdown. The problem is triggered by certain missions, particularly those involving the transportation of passengers, so avoiding those will reduce the rate at which the game slows down. We are confident that we'll be able to fix it, and that people with savegames that have already slowed down will be able to continue playing with those savegames. We are expecting to release a patch during January which will include this fix.

Thanks to everyone involved for your help with tracking this down.

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Post by glenmcd » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 16:20

CBJ wrote:The problem is triggered by certain missions, particularly those involving the transportation of passengers, so avoiding those will reduce the rate at which the game slows down. We are confident that we'll be able to fix it, and that people with savegames that have already slowed down will be able to continue playing with those savegames.
Confirmed. Using @Vicke's X09.sav and a quick hack to remove generic missions, the framerates suddenly were similar to TCs both before and after removal of most everything in universe. With view as at first second of the save I got 65fps, turning towards the Argon M148 sky I got 260 and six hundred odd after removing ships etc.

[ external image ]

EDIT: Looking for a link to a patch? The test patch linked to here has been removed. Egosoft are obviously onto the problem (see CBJs post below).
Last edited by glenmcd on Tue, 20. Dec 11, 19:28, edited 4 times in total.

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Post by Alan Phipps » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 16:49

@ glenmcd: Please state the source, status and impact of your patch. (For example who wrote it and with what authority, what is affected, does it require special installation instructions, does it make the game modified, what is the long term impact if Egosoft releases a separate patch etc.)

I am concerned that your post may be taken to imply an official status to the patch by following so soon after CBJ's post and this thread has been linked in many other threads.
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Post by Alamaurie » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 16:53

CBJ wrote:OK, using the savegames supplied, we have found a likely cause for the slowdown. The problem is triggered by certain missions, particularly those involving the transportation of passengers, so avoiding those will reduce the rate at which the game slows down. We are confident that we'll be able to fix it, and that people with savegames that have already slowed down will be able to continue playing with those savegames. We are expecting to release a patch during January which will include this fix.

Thanks to everyone involved for your help with tracking this down.
Using glenmcd's patch I can confirm that my provided save game is much much smoother now.

Thanks everyone!

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Post by cswiger » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 17:20

The taxi mission removal patch resolves my FPS drop, also. Rock on, glenmcd (or whoever wrote it :-)....

Note that it does mark your game as *modified*, which I'm OK with, but folks might want to give that consideration if you care about X3:AP achievements.
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Post by CBJ » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 17:21

Please be aware that the patch is unofficial, will make your modified, and may or may not conflict with the official solution that will come later. As glenmcd said, it's for test purposes only.

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Post by Kzorsh » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 18:44

Holy ... and i thought i was imagining things O_O
I was doing taxi mission the whole game O____O
And now its insanely painfull to move or fight in some sectors
(In Aldrin my FPS ~ 5 now, i'm lucky i could buy springblossom there, before fps drop)

Need official patch .... NEED it badly

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Post by paulms1980 » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 19:18

so its best to make a copy of the latest savegame before using this patch?
i take it you cannot say how early next year this issue will be patched.
i did a couple of taxi missions and since then ive noticed that the combat gos stupidly slow when i fire weapons at close range, namely the repeater gun armed ones

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Post by paulms1980 » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 19:22

does this remove the xenon invasion and assassination missions?

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Post by glenmcd » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 19:24

As was mentioned before the patch was for testing. It is now removed. ES are obviously onto the problem.

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Post by omik » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 20:37

I noticed that X3AP downloaded something today when I signed onto steam, was that the patch that fixes this issue?

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Post by Alan Phipps » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 20:47

This is the recent Steam update. Waiting for confirmation from Egosoft whether this fixes the fps issue.

EDIT: No sorry apparently not. This particular fps issue will have to wait on a further patch that will require integration and testing to make sure that it doesn't cause other unforeseen errors elsewhere.
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Post by geldonyetich » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 22:14

I've never run a passenger mission and am suffering low FPS. I'm not sure if that is necessary for the bug to manifest or not.

If anyone would like to investigate if the issue is related, I would appreciate it. Here is my save game.

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Post by Vayde » Tue, 20. Dec 11, 22:31

CBJ wrote:Please be aware that the patch is unofficial, will make your modified, and may or may not conflict with the official solution that will come later. As glenmcd said, it's for test purposes only.
You forgot to add and could make your whole gaming experience much less frustrating :)

When you say official solution do you mean Glen's but with an Egosoft tag :p
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Post by CBJ » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 00:34

No, I mean a fix to the code which causes the underlying problem. Note that it affects a few other missions as well as those mentioned.

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Post by glenmcd » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 03:10

The test patch I did on page 2 of this thread disabled all generic missions even though only the taxi missions were the targets (nested comment problem). I later went back and took out specific missions only, with result that only removing virtually all of them got the fps close to TC standards.

There's a possibly related issue in TC with the convoy generic missions (escort- and destroy-). The longer you play, the lower the fps. In fact it wasn't just the time you played, not how many missions you accepted, but how many different missions were offered. To trigger a generic mission offer, fly into a sector with at least one station whom you are not an enemy of. At least one of the convoy missions can also be offered from a ship. Back then I experimented with flying in and out of a gate quickly in a Jaguar, and was able to bring fps down to single digits after a few minutes of "gate punching". The patch I did then was simply to stop these two missions from being offered. This has worked well in TC for me the last 6 months or so. I experimented with removing more generic mission types on TC, and while I did find that some fps increase was possible, that it was nowhere near the scale of the convoy missions issue, and definately nowhere near the scale of the issue we're now experiencing in Albion Prelude. Even the generic mission types that I never accepted, I left in for my own game.

The fact that the AP issue seems to effect some people but not others I find intruiging. Why is this so? It mattered not for TC, whether you accepted any particular mission type or not. I believe now that the thing that differed between players which resulted in some having a major issue or a hardly noticable one, is how many times the player flies into a sector with stations that get to offer generic missions.

While it looks doubtful that the AP fps issue is the old TC generic mission issue amplified, it would be nice if they actually were, and that an official fix for AP will also remove the convoy mission issue which I assume was passed on from TC (difficult/impossible to test as it's no longer the dominant fps issue). I'm still disappointed that TC wasn't patched for the convoy mission issue now, but having the fps issues fixed in AP will be welcome.

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Post by Kvalyr » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 03:33

Is there any way to verify that this exact issue is the cause of slowdown by using the script editor debugger or something?

My game was silky smooth at maximum settings when I started out, but after about 53 hours of play (real-time) it's really starting to chug even in quiet sectors or while staring into space.
It's most noticable in the laggy response to input in the menus and so on.

Combined with the slowdown caused by weapon collisions (and their visual effects, such as with the PAC) that hasn't been fixed since X3R the game is gradually becoming unplayable in combat situations, even on a powerful machine.

Specs:
i7 920 @ 4GHz
6GB RAM
GTX 580

Is there anything that we the afflicted players can do to alleviate this problem in the meantime, short of starting a new game?
'January' is a vague date for a fix to an issue that makes the game unplayable; And waiting for the guts of a month to come back to the game is likely to just put me off bothering with AP altogether.

(I understand that we're just a few days from Christmas and that the devs have their own lives to lead and families to be with over the next couple of weeks - But if there's any kind of solution available to this issue it'd be greatly appreciated.)

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