Cosmoteer Release Candidate 0.15.5 RC1 - Performance Improvements & Bug Fixes

Walt

Cosmoteer "unstable" release candidate 0.15.5 RC1 is now available for testing! This is a general "quality of life" update that fixes a bunch of bugs and has some significant performance improvements. I'm seeing roughly double the framerate in large AI-driven ship battles, but your results may vary. I've only just gotten started on optimizations, so hopefully you can expect even more performance improvements in future updates.

Download Cosmoteer 0.15.5_rc1 or auto-update via the "unstable" branch in Settings->Misc or on Steam.

Changelog:

Performance Improvements:
- Added a "Target F.P.S." option which will cause the game to slow down if the framerate falls below the selected target. The options are 30 FPS, 60 FPS, and disabled to turn off the feature completely.
- Improved performance of audio and visual effects.
- Improved performance of ship A.I.
- Improved overall performance by reducing the update rate of some simulation elements from 120 hertz to 30 hertz.
- Improved crew performance by reducing the crew update rate from 8 hertz to 6 hertz. You may notice that crew appear a little more smooth when going around corners as a result.
- Miscellaneous other performance improvements from code optimizations.
- When running on a computer with duel integrated/dedicated GPUs using NVidia Optimus technology (such as many laptops), Cosmoteer will now run on the faster dedicated GPU unless the user has specifically overridden that behavior in the Geforce control panel.
- Loading or saving a ship design will now automatically remove any decals that won't be rendered because there is no actual ship at the decal's location. This should generally improve loading speed of ships that have a lot of such decals, but you'll need to re-save the ship to see most of the performance improvement.
User Interface:
- Added three new community translations by the Cosmoteer Translation Project: Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, and Dutch.
- Added a "Show Recommendation Bars" option that can be disabled to hide the crew/power/ammo recommendation bars.
- Added a Benchmark Helper to Creative Mode when running in Developer Mode. This can be used to measure average framerate over a period of time.
- The Camera Helper is now only available when running in Developer Mode.
Misc:
- For new players, VSync is now enabled by default and Limit Framerate disabled by default.
- If the data folder can't be found in the initial working directory, the game will now search in the folder one above it. This means it should now be possible to run the game by directly double-clicking Cosmoteer.exe inside the Bin folder.
Bug Fixes:
- Crash when viewing the FTL tutorial while the language is set to Spanish.
- Crash on the multiplayer game setup screen when there are A.I. players with ships and the host changes the game mode to Creative Mode.
- Crash if choosing to add Cosmoteer to your Steam wishlist and you do not have a default browser set on your operating system.
- Selecting a ship that takes a long time to load could cause the player to become disconnected from a multiplayer game.
- If an Ammo Storage only had one bullet remaining, crew would wait at it indefinitely instead of picking up that one bullet.
- The list of players and scoreboard in multiplayer games weren't showing the names for the A.I. players.
- Using Ctrl+Shift+L to load a saved game would load the most recent loaded or saved game (same thing as Ctrl+L) instead of the game that the player selected from the list.
- Clicking the "Restart Without Mods" button after crashing didn't actually restart the game.
- If the game failed to run because the Data folder could be located, no error message would be displayed.
- The text that was intended to read 'Set All Priorities in "Missiles & Mines"' actually read 'Set All Priorities in "Missiles & Mines"'.
- Some DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED crashes likely caused by Cosmoteer running on the integrated GPU instead of the dedicated GPU on a computer with NVidia Optimus technology.

CaptainRedstone

Walt Lets see here...

Walt Added a "Target F.P.S." option which will cause the game to slow down if the framerate falls below the selected target. The options are 30 FPS, 60 FPS, and disabled to turn off the feature completely.

YES THANK YOU I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR SO LONG

Anyway, prepare your 🤔 emotes everyone

Walt Improved overall performance by reducing the update rate of some simulation elements from 120 hertz to 30 hertz.

Walt Improved crew performance by reducing the crew update rate from 8 hertz to 6 hertz. You may notice that crew appear a little more smooth when going around corners as a result.

Walt Miscellaneous other performance improvements from code optimizations.

https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/9038-cosmofine-optifine-for-cosmoteer - Modification by me that drastically improves performance by reducing the physics simulation speed, reducing the crew simulation speed, and various other code optimizations

🤔

Nordwolf

Wow! This is absolutely fantastic, I can run my two 18mill ships battling each other at 4x speed now.... While it does slow it down, I still believe it's faster than 2x. Previously I could only run it without too many problems at 1/2x speed, and once the battle was underway (lots of parts and missiles) 1/4x, and even then it would be choppy and slow.

This update is absolutely fantastic, thank you 🙂

EDIT: Ok after further testing I think the slowed down speed actually averages at about 1x speed, which is still fantastic though for such a huge battle!

Walt

Nordwolf Glad it's an improvement for you! Yeah, you'll need to turn off the Target FPS option to be able to directly compare framerates.

Walt

CaptainRedstone Cosmofine goes way further than I've gone here. Slashing physics updates from 30 to 8 is downright medieval. 😛

Note that my reduction from 120hz to 30hz doesn't actually make the game do less work or reduce the fidelity of the game simulation, it just makes it do the same amount of work in bigger chunks, which turns out is actually quite good for performance.

A couple obsolete things I noticed in Cosmofine:

MicroUpdatesPerPhysicsUpdate no longer exists as of 0.15.5. Everything is now tied to PhysicsUpdatesPerSecond,
JobAssignmentRate no longer exists as of the 0.15.x updates. JobAssignmentsPerSecond is the new version of that.

Kroom

In this update, fast ships don`t slow down fast enough, they tend to pass the desired position and crashing into enemy ships.
I found a bug when saving a BH game while a ship is on fire. When i try to load the game It give me this error:

image https://forum.cosmoteer.net/assets/images/765-To5fKMiohjNLWSrQ.png

Walt

Kroom In this update, fast ships don`t slow down fast enough, they tend to pass the desired position and crashing into enemy ships.

I can't think of a reason why this would be; I haven't touched the physics code. I just did a quick test with one of my fastest ships and am not seeing any difference between 0.15.4 and 0.15.5. Can you please give me an example ship or save I can test?

Kroom I found a bug when saving a BH game while a ship is on fire. When i try to load the game It give me this error:

Will fix, thanks!

Kroom

Here is the save:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/419eyl5pj4td976/fast_ship_test.savedgame/file
It seams to happens when i send a ship to attack another form a far distance (2000m or so) or when i use boost thrusters.

Walt

Kroom That doesn't appear to be any worse than in 0.15.4.

Stormi_chan

Awesome update! Helped prefomence in MP and single player. And fixed my GPU problem!
Well done!

CGDW

The auto updater still (or again) wants to install at cosmoteer/bin.

Walt

CGDW From what version to what version? I'm not having that problem going from 0.15.5 RC1 -> RC2. Are you sure you're not updating an install that was originally installed to the Bin folder?

CGDW

From 15.4 to 15.5 rc1. I'm pretty sure I previously already did a manual install for 15.4(b?) so it wouldn't try to install to /bin anymore. I installed 15.5 rc1 manually, and the auto update for rc2 installed in the proper folder, so I guess there's no issue anymore, I just thought it was weird 15.5 rc1 wanted to go to the bin again.

newageofpower

Massive improvement in framerate, thank you! Though when I try @Star-sized (illegal 40m+) ships it still degrades below 30 FPS, lol

Equalizer

I guess one thing to look at is whether the performance improvements are enough for larger ships to be used in domination mode.

The current credit limits made it so that small fighters are pretty much the only way to contest all control points. For more standard size ships to be usable (i.e. ~1m credits) the fleet credit limits need to be much higher (around 10m), which the current stable version definitely can't handle.

tarrith

I have to say, a couple of (really) large ships hammering at each other certainly makes a good burn-in test. I wanted to see if Cosmoteer could make my system cry It certainly gave it a run XD
What I don't get is why my GTX 1650 was barely awake... my RTX 2060 probably won't bat an eye when it arrives.
Pity :\

Have I got something configured wrong?

CaptainRedstone

tarrith It's been 9 months since the last message on this post, and 5 full updates have gone by since; You'd be much better off just creating a new post for future reference, as this breaks the 15th forum rule pretty badly.

To answer your question though, the game's graphics are incredibly lightweight, so on most modern computers you'll always be CPU limited rather than GPU limited. Cosmoteer tries to process each ship on a different thread for performance's sake, but it'll ultimately be limited by the largest ship, and possibly the 'master' process thread if there is one (I'll have to check with the dev, I don't remember and I'm curious now). Really the more stuff you have on screen the more the processor starts falling behind, and therefore the GPU usage goes down in turn.

Walt

CaptainRedstone it'll ultimately be limited by the largest ship

This is, mostly, no longer true. Most of the expensive simulation elements can run multi-core within the same ship. The biggest notable exception is physics.

tarrith

9 months? My how time flies in COVID lockdown. Oh well, I guess we all needed a refresher 😃
I chose it actually because it was stilled pinned to the top so I thought it was still relevant and Walt still has plans for the future.
Anyways my RTX just arrived so I'm about to clobber it with Cosmoteer. 😆

Cheerio.

Altraxia

tarrith It's not even pinned tho. Is it possible you misclicked on this thread instead of the "MY PLANS FOR THE FUTURE OF COSMOTEER" thread? Because that thread is pinned,and you mentioned how you thought

tarrith Walt still has plans for the future

(Of course,he still does)