I’m sure it’s not a problem of hardware characteristics, I have a very decent computer and there’s no reason Sunless Sea needs that much hardware. Also, in my case everything was completely fine and all of a sudden the stuttering appeared. After more than 50 hours of playing. There’s something nasty hidden between the way the game makes save files I think, as other people said.
Have you tried to erase the last game files before starting a new game?[/quote]
Plus if you run hardware monitors you’ll see that CPU & video card useage/temperatures don’t spike when the chugging and stuttering happen. Best video card and CPU in the world don’t matter if the game doesn’t take advantage of them.
[quote=Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]Yeah, if you have the stuttering slowdown bug to the point where you’re choosing your route based on which ports you can get to with a minimum of turning, there’s no current workaround apart from starting over with a new game/captain. It’s not due to computer or graphics card speed and it’s not a steam/GoG/Humble Bundle issue, and it’s not a virus/malware thing - it’s just some weird bug in the game code that FB hasn’t fixed yet, unfortunately. edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 2/16/2015[/quote]
I went to bed last night and things were fine. Woke up this morning to try and put in 20 minutes or so and…Holy Cannoli What happened to my GAME!!!
After 150 hours with the game I finally had a captain that was making significant progress in the main quest and had saved up some heirlooms for the one who would follow and…the game is unplayable?
[quote=dfs][quote=Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]Yeah, if you have the stuttering slowdown bug to the point where you’re choosing your route based on which ports you can get to with a minimum of turning, there’s no current workaround apart from starting over with a new game/captain. It’s not due to computer or graphics card speed and it’s not a steam/GoG/Humble Bundle issue, and it’s not a virus/malware thing - it’s just some weird bug in the game code that FB hasn’t fixed yet, unfortunately. edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 2/16/2015[/quote]
I went to bed last night and things were fine. Woke up this morning to try and put in 20 minutes or so and…Holy Cannoli What happened to my GAME!!!
After 150 hours with the game I finally had a captain that was making significant progress in the main quest and had saved up some heirlooms for the one who would follow and…the game is unplayable?
The primary issue as far as I can tell is that this game runs in Unity.
Unity’s a great platform for developing games - good tools and tutorials et cetera, but it’s actually pretty bad at running them in my experience. It requires a TON of optimization before performance becomes bearable.
My example comparison is between Sunless Sea and Prison Architect.
I was playing through SS for my first five or so Captains on my laptop with a "power saver" function turned on. It made the game nigh unplayable once I unlocked about half the map (and certainly once finding the Khanagate). I looked online and found out that the game had an issue with the power consumption being set to a low level on laptops and switched it to a more normal mode. Night and day difference. What once was impossible (probably 5-10 fps) was now MUCH more playable (probably a solid 30fps).
However there are still issues. At the start of a new game with a covered map I’m at around 30-40 fps (and my laptop is well past min specs and runs at least Xbox 360 - PS3 level games no prob) consistently, but once half the map is uncovered I hit fps spikes regularly and especially once the whole map is uncovered. Now I’m in the later stages of a game and I’m getting hitches every 3-5 seconds when traveling, and major hitches that freeze up the game for a few seconds if I get into combat at high traffic areas (Khanagate again) or with multiple enemies in a storm (having Storm’s curse is starting to suck right now for performance reasons actually).
The issue is obviously poor memory optimization somewhere. I can’t tell where through just playing exactly, but considering others have found performance boosts by deleting old saves on top of other tricks (changing graphics settings does bupkiss because this isn’t a hardware issue but a software one) related to memory, that’s a likely culprit. Again, I’m thinking it’s map coverage related too, because they only really start once a map is half - fully revealed and the game starts to try to track all the AI everywhere I think.
Now this has to be in no small part due to Unity. Because if I compare this to Prison Architect, which is made in what I’m pretty sure is a proprietary engine by those devs, they’re fairly similar games in terms of what’s going on: both have 2D graphics systems with lots of layers for most of the graphics, and both run lots of AI at once on a scalable map. However PA can run literally hundreds of prisoners on a really large prison before it starts running into performance issues on my laptop (I think I only saw dropped frames when I had 400-500 inmates, which means there were probably like 600 or so AIs running at any given time once you account for guards and support staff in that game). But again, they’re not using Unity to develop their game as far as I can tell.
Alas, I worry that for all FB can do to improve this issue, it may be ultimately a fault of the chosen platform. Still hoping for a fix on this though. The game is great in a vast number of ways, but performance is just not one of them right now.
[quote=MisterGone][…] I was playing through SS for my first five or so Captains on my laptop with a "power saver" function turned on. It made the game nigh unplayable once I unlocked about half the map (and certainly once finding the Khanagate). I looked online and found out that the game had an issue with the power consumption being set to a low level on laptops and switched it to a more normal mode. Night and day difference. What once was impossible (probably 5-10 fps) was now MUCH more playable (probably a solid 30fps).
However there are still issues. At the start of a new game with a covered map I’m at around 30-40 fps (and my laptop is well past min specs and runs at least Xbox 360 - PS3 level games no prob) consistently, but once half the map is uncovered I hit fps spikes regularly and especially once the whole map is uncovered. Now I’m in the later stages of a game and I’m getting hitches every 3-5 seconds when traveling, and major hitches that freeze up the game for a few seconds if I get into combat at high traffic areas (Khanagate again) or with multiple enemies in a storm (having Storm’s curse is starting to suck right now for performance reasons actually). […][/quote]
Could not agree more, totally in line with my own experiences. When I first started having slight hitches with the graphics I switched my laptop to "Full Power" energy mode. That way I could play quite fine until I uncovered about 2/3 of the map. After that it deteriorated with every new bit of map uncovered. I manually saved that captain now and won’t touch that game again until the issue is fixed because it’s simply unplayable atm (combat is impossible), and I don’t want to suicide or retire him just because of that.
I agree with your point sir, but from my experience, the guility one it’s not the map.
I’ve done some tests, mumbo-jumboing with savegame files, edting things and here are the results:
I Pick up a savegame with the full map explored and the frame rate issues always present, also at game start, then retired my captain and started a new game, of course at first there was no frame rate issue (ok i have 20-30 fps, but my system is pretty old, so i think it’s normal).
Then, as you do, I tought it could be related to the map, cause maybe in late game, when you’ve supposedly found all the spot and spawners of all the tiles, there will be so much information to be processed that the system will start hanging.
So, i paste the Tile disposition of the autosave where i have the issue into the new one, effectively coping my old explored map into the new game. But i was wrong, because there was no stuttering at all.
To be sure, i also copied the new, unexplored map, to my old savegame file, in this case the issue was there, little rascal.
Then i start messing with "QulitiesPossessedList" in the savegamefiles, i found that in my original savegame with the issue always present, there was 477 of theese entries, so i brutally chopped them to 240, but the issue was still there. I continue chopping until i get to 150 entries, at this point there was a bit of stuttering, but it was barely perceptible and at 100 entries it was not perceptible at all.
I checked with a fresh games and found that there was something around 50-70 entries (it depends on legacies, metaqualities and so on), so, the game will run smoothly until the entries get into the 150 range, and go worse progressively.
Don’t know if a much more powerful system will someway compensate this effect, at least in some degree, maybe in that case the issue will start later in "game progression time", or maybe it’s totally software related and nothing will change. edited by Frenzgyn on 2/18/2015
I did some testing on my PC. Specs FX8320 4.5GHz, R7 265 1100mhz/1500mhz.
I had played the game for 25 hour with my last captain of total 30h. I have explored the map, it has some black spots.
Using Afterburner I notice that SS doesn’t trigger the 3D profile on my GPU so it runs all the time on 400/1500. The usage on the GPU is realty low. I get 25% usage and 60 fps when in paused game or in a port. The moment leave the port the FPS goes down to about 40-55 and the GPU usage is between 0-20%. During all this, 1 of my CPU cores is at 50% and other 3 around 20%. This is making the game fill like is constantly chugging. I tried forcing some option thru the AMD drivers, like V-sync, but is not working.
From all this it looks like the CPU can’t feed the GPU (to much overhead), which is really silly for a game like this. I got CIV 5 running 60fps almost all the time, and that game is very CPU heavy.
[quote=Mysteoa]I did some testing on my PC. Specs FX8320 4.5GHz, R7 265 1100mhz/1500mhz.
I had played the game for 25 hour with my last captain of total 30h. I have explored the map, it has some black spots.
Using Afterburner I notice that SS doesn’t trigger the 3D profile on my GPU so it runs all the time on 400/1500. The usage on the GPU is realty low. I get 25% usage and 60 fps when in paused game or in a port. The moment leave the port the FPS goes down to about 40-55 and the GPU usage is between 0-20%. During all this, 1 of my CPU cores is at 50% and other 3 around 20%. This is making the game fill like is constantly chugging. I tried forcing some option thru the AMD drivers, like V-sync, but is not working.
From all this it looks like the CPU can’t feed the GPU (to much overhead), which is really silly for a game like this. I got CIV 5 running 60fps almost all the time, and that game is very CPU heavy.[/quote]
Have you submitted an actual bug report for this? The effect might be substantial.
[quote]Hello Giuseppe,
I’m pleased to say that we have found what we believe to be the cause of the stuttering problem and are now working on a fix. We’re aiming to have this fix in the next update, but this will entirely depend on how we choose to tackle the problem.
When this fix is live we expect the stuttering issue to be resolved for most of the players that were affected. There will also be additional changes aimed at improving performance included in the next update.
Thank you for all the information you’ve provided so far and your patience, it was a great help in getting to the root of the problem.
If after the next update you are still experiencing issues, please get back in touch with support and we’ll get to the bottom of the issue :).
All the best,
Liam McDonald
Failbetter Games
[/quote]
[quote=dfs][quote=Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]Yeah, if you have the stuttering slowdown bug to the point where you’re choosing your route based on which ports you can get to with a minimum of turning, there’s no current workaround apart from starting over with a new game/captain. It’s not due to computer or graphics card speed and it’s not a steam/GoG/Humble Bundle issue, and it’s not a virus/malware thing - it’s just some weird bug in the game code that FB hasn’t fixed yet, unfortunately. edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 2/16/2015[/quote]
I went to bed last night and things were fine. Woke up this morning to try and put in 20 minutes or so and…Holy Cannoli What happened to my GAME!!!
After 150 hours with the game I finally had a captain that was making significant progress in the main quest and had saved up some heirlooms for the one who would follow and…the game is unplayable?
I’m so disappointed.[/quote]
FWIW … I reloaded that evening and the game was indeed playable.
Could have been laptop power. Could have been something else. I donno. There was an update before the game restarted.
I just wanted to let FB know that while that kind of bug didn’t kill the game for me, that kind of experience CAN. edited by dfs on 2/19/2015
"Just yesterday, we discovered the cause of the stuttering/framerate bug some of you have been experiencing. Thanks to everyone who submitted a bug report about it! "
PLEASE continue to address this, recent patches have had zero to possibly negative impact on the quarter-second visible pause the game engine suffers every time it “ticks”, which my game developed somewhere around the 70th hour.
I’m not particularly interested in the New Game solution, as I’ve put more than 100 hours into my FIRST captain. I’m a little proud of her. But I DO wish experiencing the game didn’t make the game stop working properly.
[quote=Frigglish]PLEASE continue to address this, recent patches have had zero to possibly negative impact on the quarter-second visible pause the game engine suffers every time it "ticks", which my game developed somewhere around the 70th hour.
I’m not particularly interested in the New Game solution, as I’ve put more than 100 hours into my FIRST captain. I’m a little proud of her. But I DO wish experiencing the game didn’t make the game stop working properly.[/quote]
Weirdly, the latest updates seem to have CAUSED the stuttering problem - the view leaps backwards about once a second, which is extremely jarring. I’m running a high-spec laptop on full power mode. I’m not a technical person so I don’t understand some of the points made on this thread, but is there any way to get around it? It’s basically made the game unplayable (I can’t start a new captain).
Edited to add: I’ve tried lowering the quality from "sublime" to "adequate" - also doesn’t make a difference. edited by Casidy2 on 2/27/2015
Yeah, the latest update - BLEMMIGAN - has had a weird effect on performance for me.
On the one hand, still getting the big stutter. In fact, it’s worse now. Big, jarring jumps whereas before it was more of a delay with every “tick”.
BUT, I can tell the performance has improved inbetween the jumps, if that makes sense. Like, turning is smoother in between them.
However, this may be at the cost of losing a lot of enemies spawning in. I passed by a bunch of spots where I normally expect enemies to appear, but they didn’t. Maybe they’re altering spawn behavior?
So, I guess I’m back to waiting for MAGELLAN. Unfortunately it’s going to be over a week from now according to the update with BLEMMIGAN, since it’s happening after GDC.
I’m still happy it’s coming and all, but like everyone experiencing this issue, man do I want it as soon as it’s done.
Mayber I should switch to the test branch to see if that’s more playable?
For me, the stutter is very minimal and is still there, however now I can turn on a dime. It feels far too responsive with the latest update. It might be because I’m simply so used to turning at a slower rate before this patch, but it certainly feels unrealistic to turn so quickly, and if not for the enemies ability to now suddenly ram me from across half the screen at massive speeds then the combat would be far too simple now that I can pirouette like a dancer, blasting crabs and bats at all sides.