Unity Completed Stationmaster [v1.1] [StationmasterDev]

[bshippers]

After encountering some of the performance issues others mentioned in this topic, I started experimenting with a few stop-gap solutions. One that seems to make larger stations much more playable is a little freeware program called ImDisk. I haven't read through all 66 pages of this topic yet, so perhaps it was already posted earlier.

Before I post this link, however, this will only work if you've got a lot of RAM to spare.

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I created a 10GB max-sized dynamic ram disk (I've got 32 GB on this machine) of which this used just over 5GB, so you can likely get away with a 6GB ram disk. I mounted the entire installation directory on this ramdisk and told it to syncronize on windows shutdown. I mean, the only files you really need to sync are the saves anyway, so you can copy them over yourself if you don't want to sync it. Just don't forget or you'll lose all your progress when you shut down.

My medium-sized game (i.e. 550 slaves, 100 citizens, 160 tourists), on an i7/GFX980M laptop went from stuttering on my NVMe SSD to almost perfectly smooth gameplay, with only some very slight stutters when the game seems to be calculating something more intense. This isn't a long-term solution, but for those who are testing out the newest dev builds this greatly amplified my enjoyment and allowed my station to get much larger.

Just a thought for those who want to try an alternative approach.

 

[UnDeaD_CyBorG]

Well, I certainly am not surprised that a RAMdisk will accelerate this game, but as you say, that can't possibly be a longterm solution.

 

[bshippers]

Well, I certainly am not surprised that a RAMdisk will accelerate this game, but as you say, that can't possibly be a longterm solution.

Oh for sure, but that's always the tradeoff when playing a game under active development. It's worse to optimize before everything is finalized because the dev will just have to do it all over again when new assets or features get added.

Hopefully they will be able to profile it once the more pressing features and bugs are worked out to find the bottlenecks as the bases get larger. This is definitely just a stopgap.

 

[UnDeaD_CyBorG]

He/she could try to implement customizable pathing.
I remember that became a problem in Dwarf Fortress, and you could improve performance by setting lanes the dwarves had to move through, thus reducing the search space, and thus calculation needs, of path finding.
That doesn't help with texture loading or animation, but it's probably one source of lags.

 

[annonymous99]

Does anyone know where I can put the saves in the Mac version?

Currently I cant even save a new game, so I don't know where the folder is

 

[x7xas4UprEta]

He/she could try to implement customizable pathing.
I remember that became a problem in Dwarf Fortress, and you could improve performance by setting lanes the dwarves had to move through, thus reducing the search space, and thus calculation needs, of path finding.
That doesn't help with texture loading or animation, but it's probably one source of lags.

A start could be to have the npc's go to the closest available object they are looking for. I've seen slaves walk across the entire station to get to a bed while they are passing over 100 empty beds. Building a bed right next to a brothel is pretty useless since it seems the slaves prefer beds farther away. You can limit the slaves movement pretty effectively at porn studios and beds by using lots of walls, but trying that with brothels only seems to seriously limit the number of tourists.

 

[UnDeaD_CyBorG]

I thought every slave just had a fixed bed?

 

[aifman7]

Just downloaded this for the first time so I'm not sure how the women looked before the 0.18 update, but so far every slave available to me looks like a man's head/face on a woman's body. Is this normal? Do you get better looking slaves as you progress in the game or something?

I love the idea here, game concept seems fantastic, but holy fuck those are some ugly bitches. Boner killer ugly. They all look like John Malkovich to me.

I'm not even being melodramatic here, I'm speaking with total sincerity. I've been cycling through the initial slaves available to you for 5 minutes now and they all look like this:




Any help? Did I do something wrong?

 

[Wolfman13]

I thought every slave just had a fixed bed?

Nope, they choose randomly. And it's really annoying that, in my experience, they almost always choose the beds farthest away

I think it would already help, if each type of assignement had their own beds (brothel, pet, porn studio, spa ... etc.). I don't know how much work it would be to implement, but StationmasterDev then wouldn't need to work on pathing /wayfinding routines.

Of course it would be the best solution, when they would simply use the nearest (unoccupied) beds. Would love to see that

 

[bshippers]

I'm not even being melodramatic here, I'm speaking with total sincerity. I've been cycling through the initial slaves available to you for 5 minutes now and they all look like this:

You're not wrong, at least from what I've seen. I'm not playing it for the eye candy and I'm hoping we can find a way to help the dev prettify the model's faces at some point. Given that they appear to originate from DAZ3D gen7 models it'd be great if they could offer us the ability to import our own models into the game, or perhaps upload to a private github to be rolled into future updates, if such a thing was possible.

I just don't know how convoluted their import pipeline might be.

A start could be to have the npc's go to the closest available object they are looking for.

Watching my CPU cycles increase seems to correlate to all of the slaves "shift changing" when multiple groups move from their assignments to their beds. Pathfinding is a notoriously computationally expensive undertaking and once there are hundreds of NPCs on the move the game seems to grind to a halt.

I think there must be some optimisation opportunities, such as those you described, in finding a suboptimal but computationally simpler shortcuts for moving those NPCs around.

 

[pliugbr]

Watching my CPU cycles increase seems to correlate to all of the slaves "shift changing" when multiple groups move from their assignments to their beds. Pathfinding is a notoriously computationally expensive undertaking and once there are hundreds of NPCs on the move the game seems to grind to a halt.

I think there must be some optimisation opportunities, such as those you described, in finding a suboptimal but computationally simpler shortcuts for moving those NPCs around.

It doesn't seem that hallways are the main travel path, I have noticed alot of traffic (non slave) in areas that generally would be imo slave only like the slave quarters when I have an opening on both sides.

Dev could set it where a 2W*nLength hall assigns one side of the hall as one direction and the other side as another, like RL road systems. that way the main path finding would only need to look for an on ramp going in the direction of their destination. Of course a 1W hall would need to be treated as a two way.

Since 18 I started building my station like this:

 

[Jeepster]

Is there an updated Extreme Content mod... or is it the same for all. But eithier way can some one link me to the download. I have an older one is why i was wondering. I did a search maybe not deep enough but couldn't find it. The file size on the one i have is 355 kb

A side question - Does it keep some if any events from happening?

 

[StationmasterDev]

The extreme content mod works for all versions. It just unlocks things that are already there.

As for pathfinding, I have some thoughts, but am not sure exactly how I want to proceed. I saw a pretty cool writeup about the "flow fields" approach from Planet Coaster, and might try to replicate that for wandering, which should cut down on processing time for unassigned characters (which have been the largest CPU sink in my experience). I'm swamped for the purposes of this patch though, so that won't be happening until later.

 

[Jeepster]

Started new game, only building up was visited by couple leaders. Everything went normal till i checked my slaves... one of the leaders was in there working at brothel.
Not sure how it happened so i checked galaxy map and all looked good.
Went to Diplo. screen and the leader was not there. Went back to my slave list and she was back to being a slave.
went back and forth on Diplo screen then i had 3 of her but with different names... so visited all leaders and about 3 different ones became slaves and not staying on there planet.
Gonna load an old save and see if bug happens again.

EDIT --> Dev says my issue with this should be cleared up by next patch.

Side question, thought girls mouth moved when moaning?? did they used to or am i playing to many games lol <<<<----- This question still remains...

 

[SwissCheese]

Sooooo when i start a new game and build my desk and get access to galaxy map i suddenly get a slave saying ive become entropy's champion. dunno if that is supposed to trigger later in main story line or not

 

[Themanwithoutaplan]

Got laggy once the ship got big enough. Addictive non the less. Also can we get a feature that lets us select certain races in bulk? I want my all orc harem without selectively clicking. not hating, I love the game. Just adding suggestions.

 

[Neko-Hime]

A Question for the 0.18 A Version, ive i click on a Planet and start a Raid - it works all fine but if i start a Conquer all my Ships are Lost, not Destroyed, they just Gone and on my Station the Fields are empty, cant delete it or anything.

 

[StationmasterDev]

That's a known bug in 0.18a, and was fixed in 0.18.

 

[Neko-Hime]

So i have to wait for the Public Release or renew my Patreon

 

[SwissCheese]

So i have to wait for the Public Release or renew my Patreon

Go to page 64, has the .18 download with fix for ships