I seem to be lagging but am unsure why?

Support Performance
#1

So taking que from another post I saw, my specs help with figuring out the bottleneck, so here goes.

Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 14393)
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte
System Model: g.1 Sniper Z170
Processor: Intel i7 6700k 4.0ghz
Memory: 16GB DDR4 3000mhz RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8gb

This seemed to be the relevant information. I have the settings set a bit high but not maxed but this system shouldn’t have an issue handling that. It seems to go smooth sometimes, but slows to a crawl others. I feel it has to do with too many commands happening at once since, if I put the rally down and they all group up i seem to run smoothly until I release them again. I am currently working with 25 hearthlings, but have had this issue since 22.

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#2

Sounds like you have too many hearthlings then – there’s a pretty distinct line where the game goes from being able to handle all your hearthlings easily to bogging down when they all need to think at once.

Now, your computer is quite the way up there (it’s literally twice as powerful as the computer which I play Stonehearth on, and I run with 22 hearthlings without any lag), so it’s probably not a processing power issue; although perhaps your HDD is on the slow side?

I think it’s simply a case though that your game is trying to run too many queries at once. Try simplifying the pathing if you can (e.g. don’t make them run up and down hills to get to their destination, give them straight roads and direct routes); and possibly clean up some of the items lying around.

Unfortunately, Stonehearth is one of those games that will always eat up all of the available processing power if you let it. You need to find the comfortable limit your computer can run it at (and be aware that you’re not just running Stonehearth, you’ll need to factor in anything else your computer runs in the background so that limit may be lower than you’d expect), and make sure you’re not throwing too many questions at your computer at once. Hopefully team Radiant can further improve the game’s efficiency at answering those questions, but there’s a long road ahead so for now the best we can do is understand the game’s limitations and not exceed them.

#3

Thanks for the answer! I want to preface everything I say below for anyone reading, I UNDERSTAND THIS GAME IS IN ALPHA. My message here isn’t a complaint, but just me making sure that this is a game limitation, and not some setting or hardware issue I missed. With that said, here we go!

It may very well be limitations of the game (like i said my issues started around 22, so might be close to the same). I am running two hard drives, one SSD one HDD, the HDD is this: (UserBenchmark: Toshiba DT01ACA200 2TB), incase you dont wanna see the link and just want numbers, 7200rpm, SATA 6gig, peak sequential read/write speeds of 193/182 MB/s and peak 4k read/write speeds of 1.16/2.28 MBps.

It may still be the hard drive, but if it is then my only real option from here is to move it to the SSD, which I may do. As to background, I tend to not have much other than a few tabs with nothing running in them, MAYBE music, and stuff like skype, nothing too demanding.

Like you said it may very well just be what the game can handle right now, which is fine :slight_smile: but I figured better to ask and see if I missed something. Also thanks for the computer compliment! I was running an 8 year old laptop and had a bit of luck and decided to really go for it haha.

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#4

Mine does just the opposite, I lag alot if I have the rally down. I have a worse computer in every way, I do lag at times though and I also have shadows turned off and lights turned down. Probably have a lower resolution too since my monitor is around 10 years old.

Not sure if this is an unplayable lag for you or if it’s just a slight annoyance. I’m currently at 36 hearthlings and it’s still playable, just spikes at different times, but a few seconds later or a save/reload and it’s fine again. Mine really spikes when I have it where I can see inside buildings though so I have to keep that turned off unless I’m actually doing something with the inside of a building.

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#5

Nope, that hard drive is plenty fast enough so it’s not a bottleneck either.

It looks like 22 hearthlings is where your computer starts to feel the strain, but like I said you can use a few tricks to simplify those hearthlings’ AI queries and thus squeeze another few ounces of processing power into the game before everything fills up. One key thing is to never block off your settlement entirely, and to make sure that there are no “stuck” monsters or livestock around – they constantly bug the pathfinder to find a path for them, eating up chunk of memory. In a similar vein, it’s good to over-do it with your storage space and sell off excess items so that you always have space for any items which are lying around; otherwise they pile up and the hearthlings have to find a path to them in order to go pick them up.

Basically, keep things neat and tidy and the game will thank you for it. Also, take regular breaks (I’d say every hour at most) and completely shut the game down in-between – that will help the game to collect the “garbage” which piles up from unanswered/unanswerable queries and any minor errors.

One last tip: try to avoid town defence mode, and combat in general. When hearthlings get into combat they cancel their current job, but they don’t drop whatever they’re carrying, and that leads to all kinds of inefficiency down the track (in particular, the “why on earth did my farmer drop a bag of carrots out in the wilderness when they went to pick up a rock to bring back to storage?”) Once you have your town relatively well defended, you can place soldiers at key points and keep your civilians back where no enemies spawn, meaning that your soldiers will always be the ones taking up the combat so you don’t have to use the town alert.

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#6

Fair enough, I will keep that in mind. I am pretty anal about storage (it drives me NUTS when there are items sitting around they wont move even though i have space, like fences, then i gotta place them, then pick them up again, bleh…) so that isn’t much of an issue. I tend to keep my guys mostly confined to town, but when i kill things further out of town, like undead crypts and such, they still gotta run out to pick stuff up. Other than that I keep roads to all major stuff, feed in small containers near their respective animals, and materials near their crafters.

The shut down thing I will keep an eye on, i normally just save/load, so maybe a good reboot of the game will do it some good :slight_smile:

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#7

so i kept everything else about 80-90% but turned my shadow detail off. It isn’t as pretty, but it runs like butter now :slight_smile:

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#8

Thanks for reporting the issue, and thanks to everyone who commented! We work on performance continuously, but it’s a many-faceted problem, so it’s always good to get more feedback.

Do you see the bar in the lower right corner with all the colored lines? That’s the CPU performance meter. If you click on it, it will give you a breakdown of the stuff that’s currently using CPU. What’s the breakdown when stuff is slowing down?

Adding @Albert just so someone else has eyes on this topic :slight_smile:

#9

seems the shadow thing only worked till i got to a later part in the game… boo.

When it goes snails pace, it is 85-95% “LUA”, which i did a quick search for and found out is more or less the program doing math and pathfinding I think

#10

@Mouse If you upload your save, we’d be happy to use it for performance testing.

#11

Sure! I have two different ones both experiencing the issue now, do you want them both? also, how do i go about that?

#12

Yes, having both will be good. :slight_smile:
To upload savefiles:

  1. Find the save folder for the saves you wish to upload. By default, they are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stonehearth\saved_games (assuming a default Steam install).
  2. Zip the folder.
  3. Right click the folder (should be a long set of numbers).
  4. Left click on Send to in the menu that appears.
  5. Left click on `Compressed (Zipped) folder).
  6. (Optional) Rename the folder to something different than the default set of numbers.
  7. Upload the save.
  8. If the zip is less than 10 MB, you can upload it directly. Either use the upload button or drag and drop it into the compose window,
  9. If larger than 10 MB, upload it to a cloud storage site like Dropbox, Google Drive, File Dropper, etc. and post the sharing link here.
#13

Don’t think I have any zipping software, unless it is the same as my unzipping… (I swear i am not a computer noob, just never have to zip haha) So I just put them both in google drive (Stonehearth Saves - Google Drive)

Pouldibry seems to have stopped lagging for the most part, but the final gong quest seems to have failed, I gave a goblin builder his 200 clay, an error window popped up (but I get them from time to time so closed it without thinking) and now I am stuck there.

Cherryshire is stuck laggy as balls, no idea what to do with it haha.

#14

It would be really great to see a resolution of this. :slight_smile: Stonehearth got to a point where I can play for hours without getting bored now. (Great new features) But now with 26 Hearthlings I have the same problem. It all runs in snail speed even if I use the 3 times as fast button. It’s really frustrating to see the Hearthlings don’t finish anything anymore. But to cut the population down would mean I wouldn’t have enough people to defend my settlement in the state of game anymore. Enemies are pretty hard to kill already. ^^

#15

I realize there isn’t a lot to add to this, as the devs are already all over it, but I’m definitely curious what resolution you’re playing at. I have a slightly less powerful system (4790k @ 4.7 rather than a stock 6700k), but I play at 1080p. I can’t imagine there being a big difference between 1080 and 4k, as it seems like it’s the CPU that gets stressed the hardest here, but it’s one of the only differences I haven’t seen directly addressed here.

#16

1080p on a monitor that can only do 60 frames haha. I haven’t done any overclocking myself, though i probly should given i paid for a water cooler >< but when i check task manager it doesnt seem to be being taxed so i didnt bother yet.

#17

Yeah, at a resolution like that I’m surprised to hear you’re running into issues (though stonehearth should be playable at 4k for people with just a discrete card).

I manage to get to ~45-50 hearthlings before I really start to feel it, but my cities tend to be pretty compacted and urban, so I guess that would remove some of the burdens that awkward pathing could create. That being said, combat doesn’t seem to actually be that big of a deal either at that point, when I’m running 2-3 teams of 5 heathlings together to fight off whatever crops up.

#18

I don’t feel like I am too complicated in my build. (20161230022056_1.jpg - Google Drive)

The only difference between this image and the current set up is I extended the bottom of the chick cook around the corner, moving that stuff out of the way, and put an inn with a bunch of beds in the bottom right corner of that image. My mine is a bit out of town, but not very winding and has a road, and the one leading out to the left just is a straight line leading to my trapper’s trapping area.

the great big long house you see beside my sheep pen is a store room for any items not in chests, and the rest of the chests are set up close to their crafters in chests, The cooked food is on the 2nd floor of that big white building, where a square of dining tables and chairs are, and my crafters are all in a row. The one just NW of the store house is my mason/black smith/potter/engineer. Counter clockwise from there we have the weaver/herbalist, the carpenter, and the cook. The wall of the white building facing all the crafters is just a straight line of chests with all the materials they need.

I currently only have enough for one troupe of guards, 2 clerics, 2 archers, 2 footmen, 1 knight. I have 26 in my desert world without nearly as much lag issue, and am thinking of making a save and risking increasing the population.

#19

so, been about a month, is this still being looked in to?

#20

Hmm for South Cherryshire, it’s mostly Lua and pathfinder. I think having a mining zone + several buildings being built at the same time is making the hearthlings travel too much, they can’t focus on one first and their progress is slow.

Also, on the tall townhouse you have a piece of scaffolding with a tiny ladder stuck behind the fine comfy bed of the first floor, against the stairs. Also some weird stuck scaffolding, might need to make ladders to tear it down.

The items pending to be looted are far away and the hearthlings are probably thinking how to reach them too, so it’s probably them thinking too much, despite the layout of the town not being too complex. You have quite a lot of items on the ground, but it could be way worse.

Not sure about Pouldibry, seems to be Lua and pathfinding too :thinking:

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