Heart of Gold mission 2 - extreme fps fluctuations

7upman

8 years ago
Views 8,572
updated 8 years ago
Completed - Resolved

Hi Lee,

I'm in the second Heart of Gold level, having discovered and activated half of the golden artifacts. However, after some time, after I created some outposts deep in enemy territory, I start getting extreme fps fluctuations, somewhere between 30 and 1 fps. The CPU load monitor in the Windows Task Manager is all over the place for my four cores. The game becomes completely unplayable.

I could repeat this behaviour by reloading a previous savegame and continuing to play. First my fps were at a steady 40 fps, then with the creation of outposts and expanding into enemy territory the same behaviour started to show - extreme lagging and fps fluctuations. Do you know of this issue? If not, can you please have a look into this savegame? Maybe you can tell where the issue is.

Best,

P.S.: I read through some of the bugtracker entries, and I can say that my AMD Phenom II X4 3.4 GHz normally runs WFTO with a steady 30-40 fps. Even the last mission of the main game ran flawlessly until the moment when I threw about 100 creatures on the enemy's defenses (then it became a slideshow). I have 8 GB of RAM (as menioned previously), and WFTO eats up to 6 GB of it (at times even more). Still, even then it runs flawlessly with all four CPU cores on full load. Only Heart of Gold mission 2 seems to be an issue (so far). I have yet to play the next mission.

P.P.S.: WFTO is the first game where I have to open my computer case and cool my CPU with an additional fan. Due to the load on all four cores the CPU heats up to 73 degrees Celsius and the BIOS warning starts beeping. With the additional fan I keep the temps around 63 degrees, which is perfectly fine.

HeartOfGold-Mission2.zip

Game Version:

Steam Public

Platform:

Windows

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Replies 18

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Scott Richmond Programmer & Producer

8 years ago
Under Review

Could you please review the bug submission guidelines to also submit the logs of the game after playing a session with the issue? It is very likely we'll see the problem there.

Reply Link

8 years ago

output_log.7z

Okay, this should be it. Hope you can read the file format.

8 years ago
Accepted

Thanks. This should be enough for us to get on with for now.

Stefan Furcht Programmer

I did a look at the logs but despite the typical load NullRef issues caused by Unity MonoBehaviours, there seems to be nothing harmful.
So I do not know exactly what we are looking for.
Anyone else an idea?

Strange. What I could try is to un-claim all the "islands" I created an the map and see if the fps fluctuations decrease or even go away. It's strange, my computer is capable of running the game with 40 fps in almost all scenarios, and the previous levels weren't a problem as well (main campaign and the first HoG mission). I'll get back to you once I've found out if un-claiming has any effect.

Okay, I've found out (by trying it two consecutive times) that the culprit is the area around the Summoning Stone Shrine to the right and below the final Summoning Stone (if you look on the map). I've added a savegame where I un-claimed all the tiles around that Summoning Stone Shrine and put an imp on that Shrine. Immediately after doing that I saved the game. What you should now witness when running the game is that the previouosly steady framerate and CPU utilization becomes more erratic, the more tiles the imp claims. The other areas don't have the same issue, it's this one area and this one alone.

I really hope you'll catch that bug, whatever it is.

HeartOfGold-Rhodes.7z

Guys, I see you're quite active this week. Did you find the time to have a look at my latest savegame?

Lee "Noontide" Moon Designer & Community Manager

From what I can tell this is slated for review for the next major patch at least. Can't say exactly when it'll get another look by the coders but there's a small chance it might get a look into sooner.

Lee, I'm not even sure that there's something wrong with the game code. Maybe it's an issue with the map? Did you load the gamesave I attached? Did the game show the same behavior on your computer?

Quote from 7upman

I've not had the opportunity to load the map myself as I've been kept busy with other duties but also that the save files need to be opened in Unity and as we're currently working on a Beta version I do not have access to it (while the code team does.).

Either way it's best to get a more expert view on these issues and although the issue might be in the map (fairly unlikely as we'd see it affecting more users) it would still require resolution by code. :)