Alpha 21 performance issues

Hi fellow Stoneheartians,

Naturally, when I saw the Alpha 21 update I had to try it out.
I booted up the game, was happy to see that I could carry on with my a20 savefile and pressed the coninue button.
Once in-game, after ignoring the common errors, I noticed a heavy degredation in the fps I got. Waiting for it to solve itself I played for a bit but things only seemed to get worse. Monitoring the fps showed me a mere 13 fps no matter what I did.
I tried to disable mods, make a fresh start and lower all the possible settings but to no avail.
To make sure it wasn’t anything to do with my computer I opted out of the latest branch to get back to a20. Even before I was in the game, thnings were a lot smoother. Even the menu in a21 was limited to 13 fps while in a20 I saw thousands. In-game the game ran smoothly. With all setting maxed and mods enabled I still managed 100+ fps during the day only to see it drop to 50-60 at night with a lot of lamps and fire on screen with their respective light-emitted features.
After more research showed my pc using 60% cpu and 80% gpu on the a20 build and then drop to 50% cpu and only 40% cpu when in a21.
I sense the game has trouble allocating resources correctly to my system. I know the new pathfinding should decrease cpu power necesarry, but should not affect gpu. I am unable to show you any real graphs unfortunatly but tell me how to do so if that would help.

Specs (constant):
Win 10 64bit
Intel I5 6600k
nVidia GTX 970
Game booted from harddisk

Crazy thought, but how does the performance go with starting a new game? a20 didn’t have the trait system, so the computer may be creating a memory leak trying to fill those blanks in for your hearthlings. Sadly this is one time we may lose our saves.

A fresh start did nothing.

Something strange is happening here. You should need a horribly powered machine (way below minimum specs) to only hit 13 fps on the main menu - and your machine is certainly not min-spec.


Before I bring out the big guns (see Devs), I’m curious if something might have gone wrong with the A21 update. Steam can be wonky at times, especially with a game like Stonehearth where we go and add things manually to the install folder.

To do a clean install:

Note: This instructions do not deal with mods. Make sure you know how to re-download the mods, or back them up first. Make sure to not back up the built-in mod files, as that would defeat the purpose of a clean install!

  1. Launch Steam.
  2. Right-click Stonehearth and click Properties
  3. Click on the Local Files tab
  4. Click Browse Local Files...
  5. If you have saved games or templates to save, complete the following. Otherwise, skip to step 6 below.
  • For saved games, copy saved_games to another location, like your Desktop.
  • For templates, copy saved_objects to another location, like your Desktop.
  1. Go up one directory level to the common folder.
  2. Delete the Stonehearth folder.
  3. Close Windows Explorer and return to Steam.
  4. Right-click Stonehearth and click Uninstall...
  5. Once removed, right-click Stonehearth again and click Install Game...
  6. If you backed up saves or templates in step 5 above, do the following. Otherwise, skip to step 12.
  7. Right-click Stonehearth and click Properties
  8. Click on the Local Files tab
  9. Click Browse Local Files...
  10. Copy the backed up folders into Stonehearth folder.
  11. Close Windows Explorer.
  12. Launch Stonehearth
  13. Finally…
  • If this works, great! Please let us know so we can mark this as resolved.
  • If not, give us all the details like your first post did (great details by the way)
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Make sure it is not a driver issue. I know that the driver the windows update auto install for me makes Minecraft run at 1fps (not joking) at the start menu. Manualling installing a different version make it run again at 60 fps

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The picture beneath show the (non) progress. The develop and release numbers should indicate versions.


^ Alpha 21, now 17 fps (top right) after fresh install (I did not even put back the additional mods yet)

^ Alpha 20, same settings and 164 fps (bottom left becouse f12 is apparently also the move fps button as well as screenshots)

Edit: not adding back the saves and templates (full full clean) has no effect

My mind is confused.

OK. Can you upload (or copy/paste) your stonehearth.log after launching A21?

stonehearth.log (18.0 KB)
Ok, so I did a fresh install again this time.

  • Launched once to enable fullscreen (note that at this moment ~15 fps is the max) and restarted.
  • Created new game, left everything at default.
  • Once in game I followed the camera tutorial and plonked down the flag and ordered to cut one tree.
    Left the game without saving. First to menu, then to desktop. END LOG

All this time with a maximum of 17 frames per minute and similar cpu/gpu usages.

Well I’m out of ideas… @not_owen_wilson, any thoughts?

Very strange. I wonder if this is a (rare) nVidia driver issue? Could you try rolling back to a slightly earlier driver version, to see if that makes any difference? (nVidia’s normally super-stable, but I actually do recall an instance where a specific driver version torpedoed my performance).

Well, I downgraded the driver as seen in the screens below. Went as far as to go back a couple of months. MSI Afterbuner shows the current applied version while the nVidia program shows its not the latest one.
You can see the difference in the fps in both menu’s. I fully started both versions untill I was in a game with a21 capping at 17 fps and a20 flourishing to a nice and comfortable 150 fps.


Notice the clear “willingness” of the gpu to work in the a20 screenshot. The a21 does not ring any interest in my gpu.

I am at a loss. I want to keep playing so I’ll opt out of the dev versions for now.
This does not mean that I’m not willing to invest more time into figuring out what has gone wrong here. If you’d like me to try more options, even if that asks for a closer way of comunicating, please reach out to me.

Hey Stonehearth Team and support,

@jomaxro, @not_owen_wilson

With all the problem described in this thread and not able to play the newest version I went on with my life, hoping for better times. After laying the game aside for a moment I recently saw a development update had been pushed through around the 16th of march. Without any expectations I headed straight back into the same savefile I had so much trouble with. And what a surprise that gave me. Whatever it was you updated in that itteration (I havent seen the patchnotes as of writing this), it did wonders for my particular problem. No more unusual low fps or stuttering, everything works great now.

Nothing much to add here, but I thought you’d like to know this (particular) issue has been resolved.

Happy Stonehearthing Y’all

Cheers

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To potentially give some context to this: I was able to talk with Chris about this at PAX, as there was a second report from a user with an AMD card (ruling out NVIDIA driver issues) - and he had some ideas of what might have been causing this.

Out of curiousity, did you have some type of game controller (or wireless receiver for a controller) attached to your computer?

I saw you mentioning this thread indeed.

As for the controller, I’m 95% sure I had no controller wired up. I know this since the only game I use a controller is Fifa, and becouse the PC port is a mess you allways need to boot up the game (fifa) without any controllers attached, so I tend to keep that organised.

Because of the wireless capabillities of my PC’s motherboard I might have had the bluetooth module looking for controllers. (bluetooth and ps4 contollers(Fifa) dont really go hand in hand so I use a wire). I dont know if that qualifies as a ‘wireless reciever’. But I haven’t changed any of those settings in a long time, so the settings will have been the same now and 16 days ago.

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@not_owen_wilson, did you end up adjusting the controller code? Could a Bluetooth module have done what we discussed?