Late game simulation falls behind, applying massive latency between clock and events/economy updates

[relapze]

Hi there, this is my first DW game and I've been loving it. However, the game has suddenly become near unplayable once I've entered late game with the galaxy explored and all empires visible.

Odd and unexpected behaviour such as the game state updating behind the rate of the in-game day speed (even on x0.5 and x1 speeds) leading to an increasingly large latency between the game state updates (such as the economy, ship movements, events, basically anything the game has to constantly update). I can only assume that this is a result of a combination of the threading/loop implementation and how the game updates various states as the visible data increases.

Pausing the game (for up to 5mins), the economy continues to update, ships continue to move, notifications continue to appear - the game for all intents and purposes is "catching up" to where it should be, the time delta on this latency gets increasingly worse over time. Starting out there's not much issue but as the game continues to play (within 5 mins to 30 mins game time) that difference between the in game clock and the game state itself becomes severe and untenable.

The game itself is not being limited at all by my hardware (I7-8700k, GTX 1080 8GB, 16gb ram, SSD storage). The resource utilisation is fairly minimal compared to other large simulation games, typically only utilising only 20% CPU (appears to be utilising one core, with very minimal activity spread amongst the other logical processors) and 30% of my GPU and less than 50% of my RAM.

I realise that this is a superfluous issue as compared to other people being unable to play at all, but it kinda sucks that I've dropped 30 hours into a save that I am unable to complete because of this issue. The game otherwise has worked flawlessly and is unlike any other sci-fi strategy/4x game I have ever played.

I have attached a dxdiag file, please let me know if you would like any other information and I will try my best to get it back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers.

[hadberz]

Recommend posting the savegame and seeing if there are any logs. It could be a contributing factor for others crashes being a timing issue.

Site that can be used for sharing savegames too big for forums

https://wetransfer.com/

DW2 Logs And Savegames Location
\Matrix Games\Distant Worlds 2\data\

[Atts]

I noticed something extremely similar on my 12900KF, seems to stick to the first core.

A tip that might help which helped ALOT for me - force change the affinity for the cores assigned to the game, to do so, open the game, go to Task Manager - Details tab - Find DistantWorlds2.exe, right click, set affinity and turn off Core 0 and probably 1 - this still seemed to limit my CPU use to 20 percent but pushed the processing over to the 10 other cores on my CPU and drastically improved consistent frustrate and lag times in my game.

[relapze]

Hi there, thanks for the replies. Apologies for my delayed response, I'm from Aus so I assume my timezone is a bit different to everyone's here.

As suggested I am sharing my save game as well as the startup log. Interestingly, looking through the crash dumps I found perhaps 50+ copies of the same crash dump error despite my game not crashing once throughout play, it seems that there is a null pointer error related to spy missions - I've uploaded one such log (they're all the same and seem to happen consistently, every 1-3 mins).

Hopefully this helps, really keen to see the game become super awesome.

Cheers.

Save game: https://we.tl/t-I1GFSiA9oX

[baldamundo]

Yeah, I'm getting the same issues. Really crippling late-game on a max size galaxy. Haven't tested on a smaller galaxy.

Task manager says it's only using ~20% of my CPU and about 70% of RAM, but research projects that are forecast to finish in a few days sometimes end up taking months, while ships with the best hyperdrive in the game end up just hanging motionless in space for weeks at a time when they're supposed to be in transit. And similarly i'm seeing the same issues with notifications & economic changes coming and going irregularly even when the game is paused.

Honestly I thought I was going mad or just fundamentally misunderstanding how the game works before I read this thread.

I'm also getting periodic freezes, sometimes lasting a few seconds, sometimes as long as a minute or two even. Don't know if that's related.

DXDiag attached. Save file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3kr9tuhckw2k7 ... WGame?dl=0

[Ractaros96]

Yeah, I think that slow down have something to do with amount of private ships. Freighters are behaving very irrational and are utilizing often a small percentage of their total cargo space.

Right now, I have over 100+ small freighters, only 13 mining stations and like 15 colonies. In an earlier game I had nearly 1000+ freighters, over 100 mining stations (I just clicked yes every time there was a suggestion to build it despite not having a shortage of resource) and 30 colonies and simulation slowed down significantly too.

I feel that even with having only 1 or 2 miners for each fuel and construction resource and all luxury resources possible (they are always gobbled up by planets population like crazy) game will get to a standstill even if I try to colonize whole 500 stars galaxy. I have a decent CPU (i7-8700) and that should not happen.

I often see freighters flying with small amount of resources, especially the luxury or rarer, slower mined ones!

If cargo management won't be resolved then I'll simply set stockpiles on planets all luxury resources to 0 to stop this madness. Sorry, but colonizing whole galaxy is more important than this. Income per colony may be lower from lack of those resources, but at this point the game may not leave me other choice.

[relapze]

Glad I'm not the only one with the same issue - my problems are exactly as you guys have described, I believe my save file has >2000 private ships which could very likely be a contributing factor.

[Erik Rutins]

Thank you for the reports. Saves are very useful here and we'll investigate.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi there, thanks for the replies. Apologies for my delayed response, I'm from Aus so I assume my timezone is a bit different to everyone's here.

As suggested I am sharing my save game as well as the startup log. Interestingly, looking through the crash dumps I found perhaps 50+ copies of the same crash dump error despite my game not crashing once throughout play, it seems that there is a null pointer error related to spy missions - I've uploaded one such log (they're all the same and seem to happen consistently, every 1-3 mins).

Hopefully this helps, really keen to see the game become super awesome.

Based on the crash log, this may be an issue we already fixed. Have you updated to the latest 1.0.1.9 version yet?

[Machine7]

I am experiencing the same issue, there is latency that grows as the game progresses. 1.0.1.9 did help me as before I was crashing quite a bit, logs were filled of crashes from 'HaveRevolution', that seems to be now resolved. Now I only have crashed once since and I posted the crash log with a different error. This game will be really great once we can find and eliminate these bugs. The loading/saving speed is already a huge plus compared to DW:U. Slower end game speeds I can deal with.

I will try to play around with the speed settings in my long game to see if I can get any more errors to appear.

[relapze]

Hi there, thanks for the replies. Apologies for my delayed response, I'm from Aus so I assume my timezone is a bit different to everyone's here.

As suggested I am sharing my save game as well as the startup log. Interestingly, looking through the crash dumps I found perhaps 50+ copies of the same crash dump error despite my game not crashing once throughout play, it seems that there is a null pointer error related to spy missions - I've uploaded one such log (they're all the same and seem to happen consistently, every 1-3 mins).

Hopefully this helps, really keen to see the game become super awesome.

Based on the crash log, this may be an issue we already fixed. Have you updated to the latest 1.0.1.9 version yet?

I appreciate the update - 1.0.1.9 did not fix the simulation progressively falling behind unfortunately, there may have been a small difference but it was largely the same issue.

However, I did notice a significant fps and general performance boost, which was awesome!