General lag and stuttering (and other problems)
Hello!
I recently experienced this issue.
Usually, i could play on medium to high settings normally, and be fine, but even on lowest setting, the framerate and constant stutters make the game unplayable.
Here's the problem:
On lag 1 video, it's laggy, mostly when possessing and exiting posession. General lag also occurs, as well as huge FPS drop when i click the unit window that has all the levels of the units (also happens with mood tab).
On lag 2 video, you can see in posession, a 1-2 second freeze mid swing. Also general choppyness.
I couldn't capture it on lag 1 video, but it happens in posession and overview modes. Constantly. It's horribly unplayable. It didn't used to be that way.
This is on lowest settings, installed on an SSD.
My specs:
AMD Phenom II x6 1090T 3.2Ghz
8 GB RAM
Samsung EVO SSD
AMD Radeon R7 260x 1GB
I know, not the best specs in the world, but they should handle (and indeed did previously), some My Ped Dungeon levels without stuttering so much at lowest settings.
Here's the log:
Also, here's some message that i never saw in game. Whenever i clicked anywhere near the upper portion of the screen, the message would appear and a cursor would blink. I couldn't find any way to stop it from opening, and i could only close it by clicking anywhere else to remove the blinking cursor, then pressing ESC to bring up the menu and getting back in the game.
I don't know what that's about but here's the screenshot:AI message
Lastly, it takes about solid 3-5 minutes to exit the game, load the game, enter the game, anything really that has to do with loading. On an SSD... This used to happen to me when i had a broken HDD that is super slow, but once i installed the game on an SSD it was fine, it still had to load, but it was way faster. Then recently it started to have trouble loading again.
Thank you for reading!
Hopefully this can be somehow fixed, or at least minimise the lag and stuttering.
Hi Vepar,
Apologies for the delay in responding to you. Busy times at Brightrock between working on the new project and various happenings in the past week I've not had much time to dedicate to reviewing tickets.
Now there are quite a few different issues that you've reported in this ticket so I'll try to go through them in the order you've presented them. Each will have to be treated as a separate issue and normally we'd ask for individual reports for each, but in this case I'll reply here and try to action further before the end of the week.
Before I start I'd like to confirm when it was that you last played. The game hasn't received any major updates since April 2018 so nothing significant has changed on our side since then and beyond general performance improvements there shouldn't be anything at the root cause of some of the issues you present with one exception. We updated our UI Middleware for patch 2.0 to fix a number of issues several different users were having, this could have had a few knock-on effects but none which have been reported to us thus far.
Also I'd like to ask you review How to: Submit a Bug Ticket and try to drop in as much info as you can. In addition to the output log presented can I also get a DXDiag output and if possible the save file which you're playing on.
Now onto the issues:
Video Titled "Lag 1"
Interesting watching this as you appear to be experiencing a short pause when entering and exiting possession as it culls and unculls the environment and everything you can now/not see. Never seen this before and I have two theories.
I also was very surprised to see the lag on the unit panel when toggling into the detail modes. This is something I'll see if I can try out myself before the end of the week. My suspicion is that the increased number of UI elements is causing an issue here. But I've never seen it reported or witnessed it myself.
Video Titled "Lag 2"
The freeze described looks like Unity's Garbage Collection which is freeing up unused memory. This is a problem with the Unity Engine where the GC Algorithm can't deal with large heaps of memory fast enough, the game pauses while this happens. Sadly this is unsolvable on the version of Unity WFTO is built upon (from 2016) and can happen on large maps, with lots of entities that have been going on for some time, it will occur more often on systems with lower available memory.
Unity had been promising a new GC Algorithm for a long time to address this and started work on it with the first 2019 release unfortunately it's still experimental even in current versions and WFTO's version is so diverged from the current version of the Engine now it's unlikely we'll be able to move to the newer version once it is stable. This is an incredibly frustrating issue for both us and many of our players and something we have done our best to limit the impact of where we can.
You can try saving and loading, but given a later issues this would seem undesirable. Are other levels are bad as this one in particular?
The choppyness isn't possible to see unfortunately and without knowing a little more about it it'd be difficult to say what it is. Can you describe in a little more detail what it might be.
Log
There's some exceptions in here that I'd like to get code eyes on. As it stands though all our resources are now on the new project so it'll be a while before we can come back to this. It'll be something that'll go in our backlog to see if they're issues we can identify and fix. I'm not convinced it'd be the cause of any issues but I'll try and ask around this week.
AI Message
This I have seen before. I think it's an issue that was introduced in Patch 2.0 when we overhauled the skirmish AI. For whatever reason the AI in this MPD level in particular was using the old Skirmish AI, when the update happened this was removed but it wasn't updated to be using a specific personality as such it defaults to the placeholder test version. This causes that message to appear. It's something I think we should be able to fix and should only appear on levels where the old AI was present and wasn't correctly updated.
Unfortunately the first time I saw this reported was after we'd moved WFTO into maintenance mode and we've not had time to come back since! It's a pretty low-priority issue for us due to the low impact in any case but I'll make sure it's in our backlog.
Long Loads, Exits & Starts
WFTO does have rather long load times but I wouldn't expect them to be in the scale of minutes as you've described. First startup on an SSD in our office is about 30-50 seconds, levels are around 20 seconds, exiting takes a moment but is a lot quicker.
The fact you're having multiple loading issues in this sense, coupled with the issue mentioned in Video 1 about loading assets to/from memory and storage could indicate something is happening here. Especially if it's most pronounced after you've played for a while.
This is just a theory but if your system is approaching memory cap whilst playing on this level then it may be offloading memory to the page file. Causing longer access times, if this is on your SSD it would be quicker but it's a lot, lot slower than memory. That might go some way to explaining why it freezes briefly on possession and why you're experiencing such long loading times.
There are two things I can think to try on this:
Finally I want to say I'm sorry for the dreadful experience you're having, we try our best to make WFTO as stable as we can. We've learned a lot about games since we started in 2012 and there's certainly a few things we could have done a lot better, but too deep to touch now. But in all cases WFTO should perform better than it did at any point over its lifecycle, that you're having new issues I'm sure is deeply frustrating and it is for myself as well. Especially as the scope to address new reports is greatly reduced.
I look forward to your reply. Hopefully we'll be able to work something out.
Lee