[Resolved 0.2.9] Periodic slowdowns

[Maxion]

While playing in free play mode I am experiencing that the game periodically slows down to a crawl, from the normal 120 fps to around 3 fps, also most notably, during this slowdown, the GameUpdate usage in the F5 screen shows GameUpdate taking about 100% of usage load and showing up to about 300k mc next to it.
I think these slowdowns may be related to the autosaving process, though I am not sure if it occurs as often as autosaving does, but it is getting quite often on my save.

Note that my save is about 33.8 MB now with almost 400 logistic robots flying around. F5 shows 40k-50k entities total.

Playing alpha 0.2.7 64 bit version on Windows 7, still happens in 0.2.8, but not as bad, only down to about 8 fps with 100k mc so far.
May be related to spawning a wave of aliens, I don't know.

The slowdown probably lasts about 10 seconds at most.

[slpwnd]

Might be the autosave.

Could you upload your save somewhere and post a link ?

[Wazzebu]

Same problem but it's when alien pop up (a lot of alien, I play to this game like more ten hours).

[Volrak]

I've experienced the problem too. I am pretty sure it occurs when aliens are spawning.

[Mysteria9]

I have the same issue and I'm quite sure it's when the aliens calculate their pathfinding, all at once. It's quite annoying!

[MF-]

Hmm.. that is probably my case as well

[Kadaban]

I can confirm this bug as well. I'm also pretty sure it has something to do with the alien pathfinding as it only happens either while aliens are not visible yet but are soon attacking your base or while they're already visible and trying to get to you.
I do have a savegame that's RIGHT in the middle of such a slow down and there are more to come. If anyone can provide a file hoster where you don't have to go through all that mail-spam-thank-you-for-registering-crap I'll gladly upload it there.
Or i could just e-mail it. It's about 3 MB 7zipped up.

Edit: As a sidenote: The forum sends out the registration mails with "Welcome to Forums forums". Might want to edit that at your earliest convenience.

[Ween]

Same here, when the industry grows too much, I have periodic slowdowns...

[FreeER]

Since i've been watching this thread for possible fixes or specific reasons for this bug i've finally decided to post a pic of the slowdown (f5) since no one else has.

notice the high node count on the path find recent: line!
I've currently been playing for 13 hours 7 minutes and 2 seconds on this map, and the slowdowns usually take about 30-40 seconds to end. in this screenshot however (and i'm assuming it's because i'm right next to a base) it took closer to 2 minutes and only after i managed to get into my car and back away. FPS are usually around 60 btw and pc specs are:
HP DV6-6135dx laptop
AMD A8-3500M (quad core 1.5ghz amd)
Graphics Cards: AMD Radeon HD 6620g, AMD Radeon HD 6750M

Also maybe something to do with the total entities??? (btw i have about 550 logistics robots flying around but it's fine when the aliens aren't sending waves )

[kovarex]

Since i've been watching this thread for possible fixes or specific reasons for this bug i've finally decided to post a pic of the slowdown (f5) since no one else has.

notice the high node count on the path find recent: line!
I've currently been playing for 13 hours 7 minutes and 2 seconds on this map, and the slowdowns usually take about 30-40 seconds to end. in this screenshot however (and i'm assuming it's because i'm right next to a base) it took closer to 2 minutes and only after i managed to get into my car and back away. FPS are usually around 60 btw and pc specs

I guess, that the only fast fix of this problems at this moment is to turn off attacks completely (by removing control.lua in the save game folder)

Also maybe something to do with the total entities??? (btw i have about 550 logistics robots flying around but it's fine when the aliens aren't sending waves )

100k entities is not a problem, I think I had 10 times more without any problems.

[slpwnd]

It is quite possible that the pathfinding is the cause of a slowdown. We haven't touched that code for quite some time

I will have a look into that. However it would help me to verify this if some of you with this problem could post a save somewhere and provide a link.

[Kadaban]

I went ahead and sent an email with two savegames attached (highly compressed of course).
I can't be arsed to register on some obscure filesharing site just for those two files.
Hope they reach you guys.

[slpwnd]

@Kadaban I got it, thx.

[slpwnd]

I found the problem. It will be fixed in the 0.2.9. The problem itself was not in the pathfinding but in the "optimalization" that was supposed to lower the number of paths that are calculated.

[Kadaban]

I found the problem. It will be fixed in the 0.2.9. The problem itself was not in the pathfinding but in the "optimalization" that was supposed to lower the number of paths that are calculated.

Great news indeed.
This slowdown bug was pretty much comparable with the "FPS death" in Dwarf Fortress. Once you reached a certain "complexity" everything came to a crawl and you didn't want bother with it anymore so you just restarted.