X3TC complex lag OOS?

[MrFiction]

So when planning complexes (in part for the HUB) I'm going for a few large ore/weapon complexes. Reading some other threads there seems to be the issue of lag creeping up, even OOS when the complex gets to big. Is this something I should worry about or is this inevitable? Plan is a couple of 50-200 station complexes.

[RainerPrem]

Hi,

So when planning complexes (in part for the HUB) I'm going for a few large ore/weapon complexes. Reading some other threads there seems to be the issue of lag creeping up, even OOS when the complex gets to big. Is this something I should worry about or is this inevitable? Plan is a couple of 50-200 station complexes.

The only time I encountered a lag with complexes of that size is, when I look at it IS. Even turning around and facing a different direction is normally enough.

cu
Rainer

[zazie]

Yes, it is an issue. The more stations you build, the longer the loading times. It is common to have loading times of >1 min with HD, about 40% less with SSD.
This kind of lag does not affect directly your grafics card, so it is not directly perceivable during the game. But as the engine is running on one core only, and as this core must calculate all threads, the number of threads related to the X3-economy can cause additional load on the CPU when a "Live-situation" IS needs all PC-power for proper performance; e.g. a heavy fight of your fleet with a Khaâk-invasion. In such situations the PC would run a little bit smoother if you only have a small number of stations.

[Gold Dragon]

One of the reasons, I think, that most here suggest making the Mega-complexes in out of the way, seldom visited systems. Less Taxing on the system.

[glenmcd]

One of the reasons, I think, that most here suggest making the Mega-complexes in out of the way, seldom visited systems. Less Taxing on the system.

In tend to disagree. I tested many sizes of complexes in sectors in otherwise completely empty sectors and the gate passing times had an exponential increase in relation to sizes of complexes. What using fairly empty sectors does do is to minimise the chance of passing enemies attacking your stations. Also when you visit, you will get a very slight benefit in FPS but once you have a large complex this will become relatively negligible.

I also tried various vanilla methods including superimposing one station over others of same station type. It does make complex building easier and whether this helps FPS or not is arguable.

There are other reasons for gate passing times increasing that have nothing to do with complex sizes. Most of them have greatly decreased with recent updates to X3, however some remain. You'll tend to notice them if you don't usually spend much time in sectors, but jump from sector to sector. If you fly between gates especially in slower ships, this issue will not be noticable.

There used to be a vanilla safe mod to make the complex tubes (connections) between stations invisible. This is great IS.

One suggestion that I do have is to not make any one particular complex too big. Instead of building a 200 station complex, build two 100 station complexes in different sectors. The reason that NPC stations can number 3000+ and yet not cause horrific gate passing times is that they're spread out across multiple sectors and not complexes at all. In my experiments, gate passing times increased noticably around the ninety station mark. If you keep it down to eighty per sector, I believe you'll have great success.

One possible question may be whether having several complexes in one sector of size eighty station would work well. That's something I haven't specifically tested. I tend to think that the exponential increase in CPU use is within complex and not within sector. Experiment and you'll know!

[MrFiction]

@glenmcd: great work there! I'll try to create multiple complexes with max 80 stations instead of a few big ones.