Low Framerate in AP - No-missions workaround but marked as modified

[glenmcd]

Thanks to @sneakbyte for pointing out in this post that the latest Albion Prelude now has options to reset "Mission Director" which is the part of AP and TC responsible for low framerates which gets worse each time you enter a sector.

To use: First, save your game in case you want to go back to vanilla (and degrading framerates for now). You will need to activate the Script Editor (SE), which will immediately mark your game as modified. Hey be thankful at least you can continue to play AP and TC games with framerates that are almost identical to that experienced at absolute game start. Niiiiice!! To activate the SE, set your pilot name to "Thereshallbewings". It must be exactly this including capital "T". If you typed it in correctly there will be a pause for a few seconds, and your pilot name will go back to what is was before. Next go to gameplay options (escape, up arrow a few times and enter on gameplay). Near the bottom of the list in there you'll see a new entry "Mission Director". Select that and you'll open a huge list of stuff to do with the Mission Director. The option you want is all the way down the bottom, "Reset Mission Director". The rest of it could provide valuable information about what is happening inside Mission Director, should you have an issue and you need to rule out MD issues. Until the full MD fix is released we may see moderators asking for info from this page in response for some tech support posts/threads.

Once you reset the MD you'll get a pause for a few seconds and your framerate should increase dramatically depending on how many sectors you have visited since game start or last time you reset the MD. On a high end PC and in late game this could be as high as 100x but more often 5x to 20x. As your game will be marked as modified if you are intent on continuing a vanilla game you can still test this option, but you will need to reload your vanilla game and thus go back to your further degrading framerate. For now. If you are playing modified anyways I'd expect you can just continue your game and then reset MD regularly to keen things running nice and smooth.

Annoyed at only having a "modified" temporary solution? Don't be. You have been provided with a choice, just like Egosoft had the choice of not providing anything at all before the full MD fix was ready. So either rejoice and accept, or keep playing vanilla for now.

Kudos to Egosoft for including this while we're waiting for the full, official fix which will mark the end of significantly degrading framerates in vanilla TC and AP games.

EDIT: Please see below for discussion of effects on main plot missions.

[Groosum]

Thank-you for this ! Now call me stupid thick but I just cant find the "Mission Director" and yes Script editor is running an game is "Modified". Im playing X3TC 3.1.1 modded.

Just loaded Albion (Steam) an can do this adjustment is this only for Steam versions or just Albion ?

[GunAngel]

Thank you! The performance is top notch now.

[Huillam]

Sadly it removes all active missions.
What happens to plot related ones? Do I have to start the plot from scratch or will it be fully broken?

[Kvalyr]

Beautiful.
It's a bit silly that this option has been there (in modified games) and that none of us noticed/found/thought of it until sneakbyte posted about it!

Sadly it removes all active missions.
What happens to plot related ones? Do I have to start the plot from scratch or will it be fully broken?

It wiped my plot missions when I did it. I hadn't actually started the plot at all in my AP game, but the initial mission to get the plot going was in my missions menu until I reset the MD; then it disappeared.
I'm unsure if it can be acquired again or if the plot is lost to me by fixing the problem this way.

To avoid losing plot missions you could try the other temporary fix that Coruskane and glenmcd have posted about in other threads with the blank/fixed MD file.

[Groosum]

To avoid losing plot missions you could try the other temporary fix that Coruskane and glenmcd have posted about in other threads with the blank/fixed MD file.

Can you please give us a pointer too the thread that discusses this.

[Kvalyr]

To avoid losing plot missions you could try the other temporary fix that Coruskane and glenmcd have posted about in other threads with the blank/fixed MD file.

Can you please give us a pointer too the thread that discusses this.

Yep: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=313603

Had planned to edit it into my original post but you posted before I could.

[glenmcd]

It wiped my plot missions when I did it.

Hmmm well that devalues it somewhat. Enough to remove my sticky request. But it still gives us an easy way of seperating MD framerate issues from hardware or driver related framerate issues though. AFAIK, if you disable the worst offender generic missions at game start, it still allows you to do the main plots. I've been using exactly this in TC since June. I had not until AP arrived attempted to do an MD reset, and since then I haven't looked for any main plot missions outside of vanilla AP.

[Kvalyr]

I compared the two temporary solutions to see what happens in both cases with regards to the information shown in the "Gameplay->Mission Director" menu.

In my own laggy game I had ~1k completed missions and ~12.1k 'cancelled' missions (which appears to include missions which were created and never accepted, since I definitely didn't actively cancel over 12'000 missions.) and 1 'active' mission (the AP plot mission that I hadn't really started yet).

Resetting the MD appears to do exactly as it says and wipes every mission from memory: active, cancelled or otherwise; thus restoring framerates.

Using the modified director\3.01 Generic Missions.xml achieved the same result for performance, but left active missions intact and a few other counts in the MD menu remained at non-zero values.

There's probably a way to restore the plot missions after resetting the MD, but rather than delving into that I just used the modified .xml file to load my game and then save it with the modified missions file.
Doing that fixed my framerate and cleared the junk from the MD menu but allowed missions to appear as normal on stations once I loaded the game up again with the stock missions file (or rather, without the modified file).

[Alan Phipps]

@ glenmcd: Could you please edit your opening post title which may confuse players awaiting the released patch solution. I don't consider this at all a 'temporary fix from Egosoft', rather it is an unintended usage of a new tool offered for the benefit of scripters and modders.

Could I suggest a thread title more like 'Low Framerate in AP - No-missions workaround but marked as modified.'

EDIT: Thanks for doing the change.

[hardergamer]

Thankyou, i can start playing AP again,

[kylania]

I'm confused by this. I've noticed that my game is supremely laggy, just moving the mouse around my Properties page is very "swimmy". The thing is I've only been playing for a few days! I own two ships and have only accepted 70 missions and completed 47 of them. Nowhere near the thousands of missions listed in this thread. I've also been offered the first AP intro mission but haven't started it yet. It would be a shame to lose out on the whole point of the expansion for this.

Is this 'modified' thing something I want to do? Or not do? I'm still a bit confused by what it means to be modified, but I'm having a lot of trouble playing the game since the interface is so sluggish now for some reason.

[Huillam]

A modified game won't allow you to gain achievements and if you choose to upload your statistics it will be uploaded with other modified games.
Most mods (and there are tons of pretty cool mods!) will mark your game as modified.

[glenmcd]

I'm confused by this. I've noticed that my game is supremely laggy, just moving the mouse around my Properties page is very "swimmy". The thing is I've only been playing for a few days! I own two ships and have only accepted 70 missions and completed 47 of them. Nowhere near the thousands of missions listed in this thread.

Forget all that stuff as none of it is directly related to the issue. Check how many jumpgates passed (pilot properties). I loaded up another players save yesterday that had passed 550 jumpgates. The framerate was 12 and dropped to 8 or so on SETAx6. Resetting MD increased the fps by a factor of over 200. Its the highest jumpgate passing count I've seen in AP so far and also the laggiest. I've produced laggier in TC with far less jumpgates but that was when doing nothing but flying through a single gate as fast as possible. Most players deem their game unplayable at around 300 jumpgates.

[kylania]

Yup, I'm at 406 jumpgates and it's basically unplayable. I have a UT and a ST and myself is all.

If I do this fix will I have no mission than or not AP plot or just lose any current missions?

[Dakota-]

Thank you for pointing this out!! I was right in the middle of trying to figure out why the game slowed down so much. I started selling off ships and stuff to try to figure it out.

I went from 60 frames per second at the start of a new scenario to a steady 15 frames per second falling down to 5 fps in battles (according to fraps) only after a few days of playing. Using these methods the fps immediately went back to 60. (Seems my fps is capped at 60 so the top end might be higher.)

Thank you!!

[CBJ]

Yup, I'm at 406 jumpgates and it's basically unplayable. I have a UT and a ST and myself is all.

If I do this fix will I have no mission than or not AP plot or just lose any current missions?

All missions, plot or otherwise, will be completely reset. This is not really a "fix" or even a "workaround", simply a way to solve the performance problem temporarily if you are not particularly worried about things like your game's modified state, the plot, missions, or achievements. A proper solution to the slowdown caused by missions (which, incidentally, includes some missions which trigger the slowdown, albeit more slowly than say the Taxi missions, just by being offered) will be included in a patch which is planned for this month.

[glenmcd]

Seems my fps is capped at 60 so the top end might be higher.

Thank you!!

Yep for sure. Disable vSync in your display software. If your GPU is nVidia go into display settings, Manage 3D settings. In my global settings page, vSync is at end of list. You can also force on or off per application. Not sure what other GPU makers offer but probably something similar. Be aware that some older games like GTA3 can't be played on a modern computer with vSync off. Text doesn't show so you can't get into the games options to enable vSync in there, unless you can work the menus blind. If you really want a laugh, turn off vSync and try out "Axel and Pixel" game. They've used an assumed constant framerate of 60 fps to set the pace of animations so it's like watching a movie on 10x fast forward.

[Coruskane]

Yup, I'm at 406 jumpgates and it's basically unplayable. I have a UT and a ST and myself is all.

If I do this fix will I have no mission than or not AP plot or just lose any current missions?

there is a workaround, until as CBJ mentioned there is a proper fix to the underlying problem, that turns off / removes piled up mission offers from your savegame that only effects generic missions and leaves all plot / war anything else alone. Look int the S&M section for a thread called AP Performance Mods.

[kylania]

I think I'll just sit back and wait for the patch. I started up TC last night and have been playing through the plot. Kinda fun, but I REALLY miss some of AP's features (better Autopilot, decent view distance and the like).