New update is the best one yet...

No more crashes, no more slowdowns even.

from Stardock Forums

I'm playing a 5-player FFA, and not only has there not been a single crash in 6 hours of gameplay (oh man I need something to do), but at 1x and 2x speeds there is no stuttering of any kind anymore. It used to be that around the halfway point of even a 3vA the game would become utterly unplayable, chugging along for no discernable reason. Now for damn-near the first time ever I have all my research and fleet maxed, and I can finally see the massive battles I've been hoping for!

This is a major performance increase that was needed since game launch \o/

21,270 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

I use to get that issue to and got me thinking, does SOASE scales the graphic quality based on zoom level, as in zoom out and the quality decrease and zoom in the quality increase (like in Homeworld1/2) or is it fixed regardless of zoom level?

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The choppiness was not due to graphics (at least for me), as evidenced by the fact that once I paused the game, all choppiness was gone until I unpaused. Since the primary purpose of this patch was to eliminte 'running out of memory' crashes, it likely was that - some sort of memory leak slowing eating up RAM leaving less and less for more 'liquid' assets to swap in and out of RAM, creating slowdowns and bottlenecks, until it ran out of minimum space completely and crashed. 

To answer your question, yes, it's scaled. Models are LOD scaled (meaning it reverts to lower detailed models as you zoom out) until you get far enough to remove models altogether and replace them with the icons. Textures on models and planets use what's called 'mipmapping', in which a texture is saved in a variety of sizes - as you revert to lower details, it uses the smaller sized textures, which take up less memory.

On that note I'll say that the mipmapping and LOD scaling of the game is very well done - there's no abruptly noticable changes in detail.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Good to hear Uranium. Its been about a year's wait to get those much needed memory optimizations done. It wasn't until we hit the 2gig barrier with the new Entrenchment assets that we were forced into making them though. More are coming too!

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I agree!

it became much more smooth in late game now even tho I pump up the speed to 2x or 4x with a 2300 vasari fleet and 4 hard AIs.

with the old game at this point even my 3.6 GHz E8400 couldn't handle it anymore but now it's getting better and better with every patch.

 

of course i'm still dreaming of real multithread support for one of the next expansions coming up ;)

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

When do Vasari and Advent get mines back?

Only then will we see the true optimization.

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

Thanks for the explanation Uranium! :D

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

Actually I was wrong - sorry. Mipmapping takes MORE texture space (but not too much), but it takes less RENDERING time. A mipmapped texture contains the default (say 128x128) texture size, the 'full detail' one. Included on the very same texture file is a 64x64, 32x32, and 16x16, or what have you. Since it's one FILE, it needs to be slightly larger, since it contains four copies of the image - however since they're lower detail, generally the impact is somewhat negligible. Ultimately the faster rendering (as well as better visuals) you get from mipmapping offsets the downsides.

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top

I noticed even when I had very little ram that running 1x or 2x cleared up a lot of issues for me.  I just found it hard online wise as most games were running at Fast speed and people would complain I lagged them.  No longer, got more ram and it's obvious some optimizations have been done, I can run most games very well now :)  Thanks SD/IC :D

 

Game just keeps getting better and better.