1.0.6.0 Ships and Bases Dialog

[jostapo]

Greetings.

I've got a 400 world game going, late late, with hundreds of military ships and thousands of freighters.

Zooming and scrolling in the main game screen is tolerably fast, albeit a slide show with slow updates on ship locations (I figure this is 'as designed').

However, when opening the 'Ships and Bases' dialog, it takes well over 30 seconds before I comes up. About 20 seconds in to the process, I hear a single 'beep' which I assume is supposed to coincide with the button click or dialog opening (which is most definitely is not).

I'd post the save, dxdiag, etc... but as a software developer myself I've a sneaking suspicion this might be a limitation of the way the dialogs are presently coded (ie, not virtualized).

Please advise. I'll gladly provide any information you might need.

-Joel

PS> Briefly my specs.

Q9450 (quad core, 2.4ghz), 8gb ram, 2 Vertex SSD's, GTX285 Squeaky clean Windows 7/64 install, all Microsoft Drivers except the latest Realtek Audio codecs and Nvidia driver (but NOT nforce as this causes TRIM issues for the SSDs).

The only significant additional programs running are Microsoft Live Essentials (av) and Windows Home Server connector.

Also, I have Visual Studios 2005-2010 installed but the debuggers are set to generally stay out of the way.

[Equendil]

However, when opening the 'Ships and Bases' dialog, it takes well over 30 seconds before I comes up. About 20 seconds in to the process, I hear a single 'beep' which I assume is supposed to coincide with the button click or dialog opening (which is most definitely is not).

I'd post the save, dxdiag, etc... but as a software developer myself I've a sneaking suspicion this might be a limitation of the way the dialogs are presently coded (ie, not virtualized).

Yeah, there's a big problem with the way (UI) lists are populated, takes a lot of time on my aging machine during the late game, should that be when listing planets/moons or my truckload of ships. I'm guessing there's a classic mistake at work here where adding each item to the list causes the whole list to be travelled as a side effect, resulting in a complexity in the order of n² and much unnecessary CPU activity. It shouldn't take a second to display a sorted list with a few thousand items.

[Foraven]

I guess this is true to all list in that game. I noticed that in the design list as well as in the empire planner (or whatever it's called) when i want to build new mining bases / colonies. Sometimes the list are so long the game crawl each time i select something... And i must say, my computer isn't old, it's quite close to be up to date.

[jostapo]

It's a relief to know it's 'as designed' and not something with this latest build of my machine (everything is working great but I don't trust it 100% yet).

That said, they need to look into disabling/locking window updates to deal with the scrollbar jitter in almost all the dialogs and look into virtualizing all their list/grid controls so they don't have to fill the entire box.  

In the meantime, a quick patch to have the Ship Dialog come up with a NONE selection would speed things up dramatically.   At least then you'd only pay the hit for populating the list with things you want to actually see.

[EDIT] PS> I really think they should look into LOCK WINDOW UPDATES for the lists. That's going to buy at least 20% and is only a couple lines of code. (low hanging fruit)

[torrenal]

I mention the construction window problem here, and give roughly what the fix is for my line of work: 1.0.6.0 ExpansionPlanner woes.

That is for an n^2 problem.

That said, I'm not sure the ships/bases window problem is the same thing. 1) That I recall (sorry, currently at about 7 ships+bases in my current game...) the delay to open the window was greater than the delay to change ship-type that I was viewing, which implies that the display of the list is only a part of the problem. 2) The n^2 problem I was looking at has the scrollbar snapping from full-view to top-of-a-huge-list view as a symptom, which I do not recall ever seeing on the ships/bases screen. This symptom I find to be a 'fun' trait of the n^2 list problem. 3) Best as I am able to judge, the problem on the ships & bases screen is not a n^2 problem, but a straight n problem. Granted, I own 1 ship, it comes up quickly, and when I own 100 ships, it takes a good moment. But when I own 1500 ships, it does take longer to open, I wouldn't say I'm looking at 15^2 times longer, but closer to 15 times longer. (And when I own 1500 ships, and accidently OK the build of another 600, I quit the game, but that's for other reasons which *are* naturally n^2 problems, and have nothing to do with the list....)

Some real metrics might clear things up a bit for us players, but really all that is is arm-chair programming. The cause shouldn't much matter to us. All we need to do is mention (as vocally or repeatedly as the problem may merit) about a slow performance problem in the game, at which point the programmer loads it up into the profiler tool he has and fusses with the 10% of the code chewing 90% of the cpu... (Either of the last 2 [Torrenal] saves do a fair job of demonstrating this problem as they are 1400 star galaxies with a developed empire). //Torrenal

Best of luck to the developer, I know the game deals with some monster performance puzzlers and does quite well