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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glenmcd
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Post by glenmcd » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 08:22

Zurechial wrote: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.
Yours looks like same issue, just brought on slower because you took 5 play days to pass 300 gates instead of 20 hours.

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geldonyetich
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Post by geldonyetich » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 10:08

From the sounds of it, this is an issue with scripts not terminating properly and building up over time. The mission-offer-on-entering-system script is just one of those scripts. Probably not every script is affected, but some are, and even one script is enough to cause a buildup.

The issue is more pronounced in X3:AP because of all the additional scripts involved in the war scenario, the stock market, and whatever else. More faulty scripts running means faster buildup and intolerable frame rate quicker. Apparently the script stack is saved to the save file, because it comes back immediately upon reload of an affected saved game. Evaluating those save files should provide some insight into which scripts are affected.

I suspect the only reason why not everyone is reporting having this problem is the "boiled frog" scenario: the frame rate drops so gradually that many players simply get used to it without noticing, probably mentally attributing it to their growing empire size. In other cases, players will have restarted new X3 games (or went to play some other game) before the FPS became uncomfortable. However, in Albion Prelude, the rate of accumulation is fast enough that the FPS drop becomes significant too quickly.

It will be a great day for Albion Prelude and Terran Conflict when this bug is quashed. I imagine that we will suddenly discover that those large fleet battles later into the game are a lot faster because they had been slowed down by all the scripts built up while we were earning our fortunes to get those big ships.
Last edited by geldonyetich on Wed, 21. Dec 11, 10:24, edited 5 times in total.

aquatica
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Post by aquatica » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 10:15

I seem to be having the exact same issue. I'm used to X-series to slowdown a notch or two when you get into the game a bit... But it's starting to be so slow that going to a gate on SETA x10 makes me pass through without jumping :) Even on empty sectors!

I will post my dxdiag *if* I happen to find this issue even after doing the regular codec-cleanup I'm so used to already... However, a new gamestart and all's quite smooth 'n nice. PS. I haven't done a single Taxi mission, but I have done a lot of Roid scanning missions (easy rep and money while flying fast M5 :D) and have put a ton of satellites. Have few UT's running about and few factories/mines as well, nothing huge. iirc about 15 hours in the game and pretty largely explored universe, except for the north-eastern parts.

I didn't notice about the save game size, but I wasn't really looking into it either...

Setup, for reference. Shouldn't be because of not enough hardware now should it? ;) CPU load is below 70% at peaks (for one core, that's utilized) so there's plenty to go on. GFX load is apparently lower, since the automatic cooler RPM goes to near-zero while in X3AP, but the same can't be said from X3TC in which GFX is definately under higher load, even if I maxed both out?.

Core i5 2500k
8GB Kingston HyperX 1600
Asrock Fatal1ty P67 Performance mobo
Palit GTX560 Ti 1GB

I can post the save game as well, if this slowdown is not part of the codecs (I have Haali & stuff around)

CBJ
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Post by CBJ » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 11:11

geldonyetich wrote:a not unreasonable analysis
As it happens we already know which missions are involved and have a good idea which ones are likely to cause the most problems, hence the advice that the Taxi missions are the worst affected. The problem is specific to X3AP and cannot happen (or at least not for the same reason) in X3TC.

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Post by glenmcd » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 18:39

CBJ wrote:As it happens we already know which missions are involved and have a good idea which ones are likely to cause the most problems, hence the advice that the Taxi missions are the worst affected. The problem is specific to X3AP and cannot happen (or at least not for the same reason) in X3TC.
The real problem to date for myself as a player has been in getting Egosoft to accept that the issue is real. I do understand that for every complaint acted on, there must be many more where the issue is assumed already known, or that there is no issue in Egosofts opinion. Back in April you (CBJ) and Xenonslayer responded to my post in tech support regarding TC lag which got worse purely from moving sector to sector. I sent in a TC save in which even the fastest PC available could not achieve any more than 1 to 4 fps. In the save, the only thing that the player had done was to fly through a gate many times. I made a patch available for download which got around most of this, albeit at the cost of disabling certain generic mission types. ES hasn't patched TC for this.

Albion Prelude got into players hands six days ago, and during this time we've seen this:
[AP] Slow performance during battles, as well as ludicrous CPU temperature.
[TC] Massive FPS drops and generally poor FPS/Stuttering as the game goes on
[AP] Generally Low FPS considering setup.
[AP] Massive slowdown when projectiles impact
X3TC game becoming unplayable.
[AP] Huge FPS drop / scripting issue, maybe?
[AP] Lag During Battles
X3: Albion Prelude harder to run than terran conflict
X3:AP FPS issues, another data point
low fps - extremely low in albion beta
Fps issue with Albion Prelude
Little/No Video Acceleration?
Extreme lag/low FPS and freezes/crashes in AP

These threads all came from page #1 of TC/AP tech support at time of writing. Whatever happened in this thread, it seems has also completely changed ES's responses to Albion Prelude lag complaints from "check drivers" etc to "we're working on it".

As a player I couldn't care less whether it's ABC generic mission or XYZ generic mission that has been causing late game lag in X3. As a player I just want the problem eliminated so I can have fun in late game as well as early game. A promise to fix sometime next year when I'm back at work isn't exactly the same. Egosoft cannot use the excuse that it was unaware of late game lag. The message may not have got to those that make the decision to assign a dev to do the fix, but I know for a fact that it got through to Xenonslayer and when it comes to generic missions, I understand he's the man.

Using google to reveal global opinions:
Using a series of google searches, one can quantify associations between terms. Of the 66,200,000 webpages that contain both "unreal" and "game", 2,950,000 of them also contain the word "laggy". So that's 4.4 percent. If we try the same but exchange unreal for egosoft, (3090000 / 3480000 ) * 100 = 88.79 percent. When you enter your search terms, make sure that you use a "+" in front of every term, which tells google that it's not optional. Be aware that google does some filtering, for example duplicate pages are not counted by default, and it thinks that in some pages "slow" can be counted as if it was "laggy". But it's still a useful too for gathering stats. Advanced google search has nice options for stats gathering.

(windows+game) + "laggy": 1.83%
(playstation+game) + "laggy": 1.91%
(valve+game) + "laggy": 4.15%
(ps3+game) + "laggy": 5.12%
(terran conflict) + "laggy": 8.3%
(x2 the threat+game) + "laggy": 12.8%
(beyond the frontier+game) + "laggy": 19.4%
(x3 reunion+game) + "laggy": 21%
(albion prelude) + "laggy": 28%
(egosoft) + "laggy": 56%

(valve+game) + "worst game": 6.3%
(unreal+game) + "worst game": 0.63%
(egosoft+game) + "worst game": 0.29%

(half life+game) + "best game": 4.15%
(unreal+game) + "best game": 8%
(egosoft+game) + "best game": 13%

(game) + "valve": 11%
(game) + "unreal": 8%
(game) + "egosoft": 0.42%

Egosoft Marketing manager, are you with us?!? :)

Alan Phipps
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Post by Alan Phipps » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 19:17

@ glenmcd: We do appreciate players' interest in helping to get things resolved, but I would like to add something. We do not say verify cache/remove nasty codecs/update drivers/clean & defrag hardrive/update OS etc becuse we think it will magically fix all issues. We do it to eliminate things that might contribute to the problem and indeed a few players do go away with their immediate issues resolved after doing some of these things. Several issues can be cumulative or reinforcing in their effects.

After a player's system has been optimised and the game cleaned up (as far as we can see) in order to play the game at peak system performance, yet still has an issue, then the thread gains significance and is more likely to get Egosoft rather than just volunteer moderator attention. Of course when someone such as yourself independently proves the source of an issue then that gets attention too.

A lot of game issues did not get fully resolved in TC. That said, most players can still play and enjoy TC even with very lengthy games. Check my stats and you can see that I have a very long vanilla game and have passed through significant numbers of gates in the process and have taken many, many missions of all types yet I still get a totally playable and fun game now on Vista with a 4 year old merely mid-range system. Sure fps are worse than at the start, but still quite playable. My point is that some issues do not manifest to the same degree on all systems and playstyles.

Anyhow my personal opinion is that while I would expect X3AP to be made playable and enjoyable as soon as practically possible, I would also hope that the main point of attention for the Egosoft devs just now (apart from having a pleasant family Christmas) would be XR. Just my opinion there though.

I am not disagreeing with you or challenging what you say, I am just giving a bit of perspective (I hope).
A dog has a master; a cat has domestic staff.

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Kzorsh
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Post by Kzorsh » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 22:56

My main gamesave is now unplayable T________T 101 game hours ...
I'm having 5 fps now ... in pretty much ... all sectors .

HELL ARISES if i'm in combat . About 2-3 fps.


Just to mention, i started new game and *Oh my god* its soooo smooth ... so ... beautifull ... even in battle ... even when fighting a fleet .... "Crying"


So . I cant play this anymore . Not until Ego fix this bug . (101 hours ! 101 Hours of my life >_<)

p.s. I understand, that Ego wanted some fast money ... well i dont mind ... but only if can PLAY *_* But i <censored> can't play it because of this bug .
p.p.s. You cannot imagine my frustration, when i'm loading my gamesave, and not able to leave the station, because there are hostile pirates outside . I'm on m6, they are on m5 . I'm laggin, they dont ... they win. RAAAGEEE ... so much RAAAGEEE

CBJ
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Post by CBJ » Wed, 21. Dec 11, 23:25

glenmcd wrote:a very long post
From the very first report of slowdown over time in X3AP, we have taken the matter very seriously. With the help of feedback from people on this forum we have looked into the problem and found the cause, and as soon as it is practially possible for us to do so we will be issuing a patch which fixes it. The solution to the problem involves changes to code, not to the mission files, which is why it will take us a little longer to sort out and get appropriately tested than a simple mission patch.

You mention this problem existing in X3TC, but having identified the cause in this case I can state quite categorically that it cannot be the cause of any similar problems in X3TC, for the simple reason that the code concerned was not present in X3TC. There were indeed some similar problems related to missions in X3TC, but those had a different underlying cause and those that we are aware of have were fixed in the various patches issued for that game. If you are aware of missions in X3TC that still suffer from this problem then I would be very interested to hear about them.

As Alan has mentioned, the advice to check drivers and codecs is always the first response to any reported problem, and rightly so. System issues are a very common cause of problems in any game, especially when those problems are not affecting everyone, and eliminating those first is by far the most efficient way to get as many people playing as quickly as possible. Once you know that a specific problem does exist with the game and that the symptoms reported by a particular player relate to that problem then fairly obviously it is more efficient to simply tell them about the problem and let them know what you are doing about it.

So, once again, we will be issuing a fix for this as soon as it is practical for us to do so, which in practice means January.

Kvalyr
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Post by Kvalyr » Thu, 22. Dec 11, 02:38

A seemingly related issue is the stuttering/slowdown caused by weapon impacts which appears to be woefully exacerbated in a game suffering from the mission bug.

Youtube videos to demonstrate the problem here:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 88#3758488
Last edited by Kvalyr on Thu, 22. Dec 11, 14:05, edited 1 time in total.

glenmcd
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Post by glenmcd » Thu, 22. Dec 11, 03:48

@Alan Phipps and @CBJ,
even a very long post can't include everything and missing from the final version was agreement with a need to rule out drivers etc as the cause of a problem. To truly make any difference to Egosofts product requires a change in attitude first. Currently no matter how how it's justified, players cannot possibly add to the bulk of considered lag complaints without first "jumping through some hoops". I'm not saying that the hoop jumping isn't a necessary part of discovering whether any particular complaint should be justified. But I would like to say that the response behind the scenes at Egosoft is inadequate. The latter part of my post provides perspective on this, by looking at global opinions. You're talking to people on the forum here that won't be a part of any market share increase because they're already part of your market. But they also happen to be a key source of feedback on game performance. Egosoft will improve their products faster if they relieve players of the bulk of the burden by switching some of their reactive to proactive.

CBJ, you continue to get into specifics about underlying causes of lag. If I were to be drawn into this it would result in some very long posts. I'll compromise here by saying that the lag in question in TC comes about by changing sectors, but also goes away in time. That doesn't make the game any more playable for players such as myself that have a playing style that sees regular sector changes. Whereas in AP it's triggered the same, but never goes away. So if you change sectors slowly in TC, you'll hardly notice it at all. In AP, it's just a matter of time before all games become unplayable, including your own CBJ and Alan Phipps.

I may be away for a while as I've just received my computer upgrade package in the mail. And I now have no doubt at all that even with the new Intel LGA2011 platform with 32GB of 2133MHz quad channel DDR3 CL9 memory, dual GTX-460 gfx, water cooling and close to 5GHz of 12 core overclock and with C: on a Revodrive II 240GB SSD, that both vanilla TC and vanilla AP will be just as laggy as ever.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=299831
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... c&start=45
The above problem does still exist in latest TC. I've stopped communicating with ES about it because they didn't respond to my last 3 emails in regard to it. LAG LAG LAG -> GAG

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Post by CBJ » Thu, 22. Dec 11, 11:49

Thanks for this link. I don't know what happened about the testing of your savegame, but at least I now have a better idea of what you're referring to.

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Post by Coruskane » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 12:03

I know it is only a workaround and not addressing the underlying issue, and I know that it will need reverting before the official proper fix but, by Jiminy Cricket, my 1 day 17 hour savegame constant FPS went from 13 to 31 just through disabling all but a few fight and sector info missions.

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Post by justanothaguy » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 12:44

I thought you were all crazy but Its happened to me as well...

My PC can play Battlefield 3 in 1920x1080 with all settings Maxed out and average over 60fps... however X3 AP is running at 17.5 fps

GPU usage % around 25 - 40
and cpu core #0 around 60 - 75%


Brand new build literally about two weeks old... All drivers are up to date



Specs
I5 2500K "sandy Bridge"
over clocked to 4.5 Ghz
MSI GTX 560ti Hawk
8Gb ram
OS and games are on a Vertex3 120gb SSD
Last edited by justanothaguy on Fri, 23. Dec 11, 12:55, edited 1 time in total.

glenmcd
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Post by glenmcd » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 12:51

@justanothaguy, how many flying hours is your game and how many gates have you passed? Also how many sectors visited. Three others have developed the problem around 300 gate passes but at widely varying flying times. Press "p" key twice to get the stats. So far there is also wide variance in mission types accepted.

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Post by CBJ » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 12:58

justanothaguy wrote:I thought you were all crazy but Its happened to me as well...
Please confirm that your performance issues only started after playing the game for a while. If not then your problem is not the same as the one reported in this thread, and you'll need to create a separate thread and post the information requested in the very first thread in this forum.

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Post by justanothaguy » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 13:14

Sectors visited 92
Jump gates Passed 382
Flying 9-18:05


and just for giggles I started a new game and all was well... I had forgotten how smooth it was

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Post by glenmcd » Fri, 23. Dec 11, 13:33

justanothaguy wrote:Sectors visited 92
Jump gates Passed 382
Flying 9-18:05
Awesome! Before this the only pattern that held among those that I'd been watching was a gate passing count of between 260 and 360. None of the others were even close to your flying time of nearly ten days. Anyone reading this that is still getting a constant 50+ AP framerate after say 500 gate passes would quickly disprove the above association. Entering a sector with friendly NPC stations and ships triggers additional generic mission offers, especially if you haven't been in that sector yet or for a long time.

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Post by glenmcd » Sat, 24. Dec 11, 02:56

Going on the jumps alone causing fps decrease theory I created a script last night to do nothing but jump sector to sector, move the ship so that it had a view of an open sky and take a framerate reading. With the AP run I ran into a problem around 300 jumps due to being destroyed in Earth sector.

The TC run was done while I slept and visited only sectors of five main races. The install was vanilla other than the above script so all missions enabled.

[ external image ]
Vertical is frames per second, horizontal is jumps. System specs:
Asus Rampage IV Extreme mobo, 3930K Intel LGA2011 CPU 3.2GHz, 32GB 2133Mhz quad channel DDR3 CL9 memory, 2 x GTX-460 vid, Asus Xonar Essence STX audio, V7.12.8.17731 drivers, mobo audio disabled. This system is only 24 hours old, previous was Gigabyte UD9 mobo, i7-950 3.06GHz LGA1366 CPU, 6GB triple channel 1600MHz CL7 memory. I loaded an AP save that I downloaded from one of the above posters. Framerate immediately after load was identical to that experienced on older computer system (19 fps). To end of run in AP took 92 game minutes, TC run took 315 game minutes (five and a quarter game hours). SETA was not used at any time during both tests. So this stuff takes a long time to capture. I'd like to do similar test with all missions disabled. If I do I'll create a seperate post. To spell it out, no missions were accepted in above runs. Ship didn't fly faster than 0 m/sec at any time. No shots fired and no weapons aboard. Start was Humble Merchant. Universe was not touched through removal of stations, ships etc. HUD was off for most of above runs, with exception of sometime during the TC run, when a message came which forced HUD on. So once the script was started, no keyboard/mouse/joystick input was given for the duration of each test.

EDIT: The fps readings above are all median over a sliding ten sector window.
Last edited by glenmcd on Sat, 24. Dec 11, 06:53, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by omik » Sat, 24. Dec 11, 03:39

Those are some very interesting observations, glenmcd. I noticed the slowing of the FPS after I got a jump drive, and I started jumping back and forth doing mostly taxi and military transport missions. So I don't know what it is in my case, the large increase of taxi/military transport missions being done, or the fact that I was jumping about ~30 times every hour of playing.

But what I CAN confirm is that the FPS issue became noticeable/severe enough after I had the capability of jumping back and forth everywhere to do taxi missions.

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Post by glenmcd » Sat, 24. Dec 11, 05:42

Following on from fps benchmarking test results two messages up, following is the combined results from AP and TC vanilla runs, plus an 80 sector run in Albion Prelude with generic missions disabled and a 145 sector run in no-mission-offers TC. Unfortunately AP CTD'd in sector #80, while I still had around 27GB of mem free. Going back to the raw figures and then using first and last 5 sectors, the AP no mission run achieved 429.4 fps average for the first five sectors and 431.8 fps average for the last five. Sector #80 achieved 627 fps, over six times higher than the max fps in any of sectors 71 - 80 in vanilla AP run (101) and same with vanilla TC run (99).

[ external image ]

In case you're wondering what the point of all this is, I'm trying to provide something to backup my contention that both AP and TC can have excellent performance if only the generic mission bottlenecks are addressed, even on old / cheap computers. Like the one that you replaced when you thought doing so would improve X3 performance.

EDIT: I've updated the above graph to also show a TC run with mission offers disabled. I confirm that precisely the same testing environment was used for the AP and TC no mission runs.
Last edited by glenmcd on Sat, 24. Dec 11, 08:57, edited 2 times in total.

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