Nonstop crackling/tearing in audio + constant micro-lag spikes, in sync

CaptainMacHaddish

Whenever I run Cosmoteer with mods, I get this sort of constant crackling/tearing in the audio, synchronous with a nonstop barrage of nano lagspikes. Most sounds become nigh-inaudible over the constant crackling, and the lagspikes make building and combat a headache (but still possible). I read that the issue might be related to mods using a lot of random-access memory, but where that falls flat is my PC is a high-end-ish gaming tower, with 16GB RAM. Doubly strange, the same mod collection running on my 7-year old craptop has the same problem, but it's bizarrely far less bad. I can record an example of this if needed.

Ultranova

CaptainMacHaddish What mods do you have enabled?

It's also pretty common for a lot of mods to use up a lot of RAM, but I've never heard of the audio glitching before.

General

CaptainMacHaddish This happen to me also. How much sound volume do you have? but the crackling only came when a reactor exploded.

CaptainMacHaddish

Ultranova My mod-list is the following:

-ABH
-Akinata's (Weapon Variants and Stargate Weapons)
-Automation++
-Coalition Weapons Pack
-Additional Weapons (originally by Meranera, updated by some other guy)

After further investigation, I've found ABH to be almost singlehandedly the cause of the entire problem - however I want a solution, not just "uninstall ABH" (it's a staple mod for me, and hasn't ever caused this kind of issue in the past).

EDIT: A further oddity, now Cosmoteer constantly produces a very soft whooshing sound while on the main menu, but ONLY on the right stereo channel.

Ultranova

CaptainMacHaddish I'm pretty sure there's a version of ABH that doesn't use as much RAM, because it just adds the parts instead of adding all the other ship types. That's probably the first place to look, otherwise you may want to manually comment out un-needed parts, like so.

// <example_part/example_part.txt>/Part

There are other, similar things you could do, but they require a little bit of Modding knowledge to accomplish.

Lafiel

CaptainMacHaddish This does seem to happen with some of the old wav files when the game converts them but I dunno which one. Checking them with ordinary audio player programs didn't show anything odd. It doesn't happen often and for me sometimes when I zoom in and change the game speed to a lower than 1x. I got 8GB btw. Zooming out fixes it for me. Sound problems in general has been reoccurring from time to time.

CaptainMacHaddish

Lafiel I've seen this before to a much lesser degree, behaving like you described, but never this bad. it happens all the time at annoying levels even at minimum zoom and 1x speed, and only gets worse from there. I don't know how to disable the special ship categories from appearing, nor if that would help, but any assistance you, as the author, could render would be greatly appreciated, and any assistance I can provide to you on that front I gladly offer.

CaptainMacHaddish

Interesting development! Turning Vertical Synchronization on all but eliminates the problem. Not sure why, but it does.

EDIT: Nevermind! The problem returns with a vengeance in Bounty Hunter mode.

Lafiel

CaptainMacHaddish I'm guessing it's a conversion problem with lower bit sounds but could also because several are played at the same time. Since it does seem to be reliably replicated with your system the best way to track down the wav files that causes it is to eliminate them.

There are 28 files but you only need to target the oldest ones (17) from before 2016 (I think the newer ones are fine). To avoid touching the code create an empty (text) file; rename it to the file you replace and replace it. Except for 3 (newer) they are all in the ammo_shots folder. To shorten the test do it by checking only half the field at one time (halving the field in each step on each side if need be); and then repeat and rinse always halving the field. This will reduce the number of tests (log(17) times) and by luck turns up hits very fast most of the time.

I'm not sure if converting the wav files to a higher bit rate or so would solve it but it might work.

CaptainMacHaddish

General , I keep my sound volume at full.

Also worth noting, despite my high-end PC, the game slows down massively whenever I have more than three ships in existence at all, regardless of how big, but only when I have ABH installed. Also there seems to be some odd interaction between ABH being installed and Kroom's Forge landing pads causing extreme FPS drops, down to reliably about one frame per second or two. Sound tearing intensifies to blot out all other sounds in these cases.

Lafiel

CaptainMacHaddish Currently, the game is dependent on one cpu core for the most part and crew massively influences lag. Number of parts does too but to a lesser extend. Previous versions had an inefficient (bug) with crew carrying ammo causing serious lag with some of the early Abh 0.53RC transition versions for 0.14.x.
Kroom's Forge uses collisions boxes for the landing pads which are currently the main culprit for its extreme FPS drops, This is due to the new collision algorithm in 0.14.x. Although, it's been improved a lot compared to 0.14.0 it's still worse than older versions. The main reason being adjustments for multiplayer, overlapping issues, and simply more stringent checks.

CaptainRedstone

CaptainMacHaddish Lafiel IIRC, Cosmoteer is actually multicore, dedicating one thread to each ship (I can run 8 ships just as well as 1, but a ninth starts to lag). It can be common for slight audio glitches when the game lags, so perhaps something is causing the game to repeatedly lag spike very quickly. Just for the heck of it, what is your mode of windowed/fullscreen set to, and what are your framerate settings (things like FPS cap, and vsync). It would also be wise to check task manager to see if anything is out of the ordinary

CaptainMacHaddish

Huh. Well, thus far I've found that removing ABH helps with the FPS drops, though the collisions still sometimes spazz out and make the game seize. Meanwhile, I've done a little investigating of old sounds in ABH, but have nothing conclusive yet.

Lafiel

CaptainMacHaddish Well, there are two parts that cause lag in Abh when used

expanding_sphere_generator
nullspace armor parts
everything else is relative. I suppose buffing parts could cause more lag than ordinary parts.

Yeah, when deploying the clamps of the landing pads the collision boxes come to live.

Lafiel

CaptainRedstone For the sake of testing my settings are standard (no change afaik) except for controls like building and ship handling.

CaptainRedstone

Lafiel I was more talking to Captain about that part