Processor health meter pegged- hearthlings struggle to even move

I have a town with 4 square structures and 18 hearthlings. Processor meter is now pegged full and hearthlings struggle to even move. Maybe one foot step every 2 seconds. it is between 90 and 99% singlehandedly “lua” as indicated by the color key(blue) in the health meter. Game is now completely unplayable for that town and i fear any that is 18+ :frowning:

Latest Steam version, no mods.
8gb ram
Phenom XII x4 910 Processor @2.6ghz
2gb video mem AMD R7 200 series

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its because you shouldn’t play 18+ games, they’re violent/inappropriate :wink:

sorry for the derailment :grimacing:

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hahahhahah very funny

Also upon closer inspection of my system it is largely untaxed although in game the health meter is pegged.
All hearthlings were mining at the time of issue. I suspended mining and it went back down to 80%(almost entirely lua still)
Pathfinder at 18 hearthlings seems to be eating a significant portion of time as well.

Is there a way/method of allocating more system resources to the game?

Can you describe what events were going on at the time?–combat, building, mining, collecting resources, etc., and how large these tasks were. The general processor demand due to the pathfinder and lua is known and is being worked on, but certain actions in the game push the requirements noticeably hard. I know that several people have had difficulty when making very large structures at once or mining a huge area. Combat in general is still being tweaked, so errors due to the scenarios and interactions between soldiers and goblins is fairly common.

You called it- they were mining. I stopped it and the game started to function enough.

Left to their own devices(I can no longer mine) they still put lua at ~70% of entire health meter and the whole thing rarely sees green(idle) I am currently at 25 hearthlings

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JEEZ! That’s part of the problem right there!

While the game eventually will have players with even more than this, right now it does its best at no more than 12-15 hearthlings. Otherwise, it starts to kill the game’s processing. Also, the longer the game runs with more people, the worse it is; it’s a memory leak issue the team’s trying to tackle alongside continuing working on new features at the moment. Fixing this should give the game a much longer lifespan per playthrough.

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yep this indeed is the problem. I’ve encoutered it too so many times. Sadly enough the best advice i can give you @tronman2020 is to set your population around 13. It’ll start bugging and running a bit less smoothly but it’s playable.
Another helpfull thing is to try and build everything as close together as possible and try not to build too many stockpiles far away from eachother. This also hurts the pathfinder a LOT!

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The distance between stockpiles does not matter as much as the distance between a hearthling and the stockpile.

So, if you have a stockpile that only accepts ores and stone and that stockpile is next to your mine, it’s likely draining much less performance than if it was in the middle of your town square (assuming there is no other stock pile with these, however).

In terms of pathfinding, the distance between a hearthling and a resource candidate is the most critical one, with resource->stockpile being annoying too, but likely much less.

Generally, having a mining area drains a lot of performance. The bigger the area, the worse.

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this is why i never mine areas bigger than 8x8

I had this same bug happen that the OP is having, but with 10 Hearthlings when I tried to mine a 64x32 area. Even after they finished mining, and the zone cleared itself, the error remained.

I’ve also been experiencing this as well, but my starts/stops started before there were even 12 hearthlings. While I have had them mine out spaces (trying to protect my stockpiles), the mining projects start and stop. I’m noticing also that the hearthlings seem to forget to finish some of the tasks they have (putting the beds that are waiting to be placed in their houses, etc). Since I’m fairly new to this, I’m not sure if this is an existing issue, or something unique to the lua useage. I’m also farming fairly large plots of land, which may have contributed to the slowing, as well as trying to separate out large stockpiles of items to rooms in the mountain.

I share this not so much as a complaint, just as this is what I’m doing, hopefully it helps somehow down the road.

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Saving and reloading semi-fixes that.

Shouldn’t scale be more important then new features? StoneHearth’s original kickstarter showed huge sprawling cities if I remember correctly.

this what you talking about, :wink:

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New features are visible, performance improvements are not. People, even here, would probably complain about the lack of new features if they decided to “take a break” for a month to focus on performance.

Not to mention that they couldn’t do that anyway. Not everyone can contribute to performance (for example, I don’t think there’s much performance improvement in the sound department), so there are people that could only do two things: Prepare new assets (for game ideas that are not fully developed/thought through due to a lack of time, which might be a dangerous timewaste) and do nothing. There’s only so many asset one can prepare in advance.

Personally, I think as soon as the game has all the core content required, they may shift their focus from new features to performance. But then again, I’m being really pessimistic and say that cities, such as we saw in the Kickstarter, will likely not make an appearance in the final game.

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Personally, I’m slightly entitled to agree. Under the current setup, we can’t manage more than 15 Hearthlings before the pathfinding starts having a stroke and takes the processing cycles with it. That being said, I’ve also noticed that whatever engine they’re using, doesn’t port to GPU and renders completely on CPU. I noticed this when I try to watch the weekly stream and play the game at the same time, my quad core will be pegged with both not rendering properly. But I digress. Unless they rewrite this on a new type of engine, or completely over haul the engine from the ground up to use all of the computer rather then part of it, then, and only then, might we see cities.

As far as the promise of procedural generated land, they killed that when they “noticed” players weren’t building the full maps yet. Personally I don’t think they’re taking everything into account, but I’m not a developer.

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i didn’t know they had killed it… how sad :disappointed:

as for not using the entire map, i never bother to because building on more than one level kills my game, thus i also would say that they haven’t taken everything into account. could be wrong though…

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Their own. Which is also the main reason for the current delay. Which means that

is somewhat unlikely. I would very much assume the game to use hardware acceleration, however it’s possible that for some reason your CPU (which I assume has a graphic chip too) takes over. That would probably be a bug.

Rendering is an irrelevant part of my estimation. With a halfway decent optimised engine, you could easily have a billion units out-of-view running smoothly, because they take up zero rendering cycles. The issues will most likely arise from lua.

Wrong-ish. The terrain is procedural generated and in theory could expand to all infinity, it should even be possible to create tiles after the original world has been created (i.e. “loading”). I haven’t heard anything about them axing the feature for good.

For the time being: That’s because of multiple reasons:

  • As you’ve mentioned there is no need for this yet because the standard map is large enough for the current game. Therefore, investing time into developing that now would be pretty much wasted - players would rarely make use of it and if they did, they may run into issues (read: the points below).
  • By keeping things small, one can reduce the amount of possible bugs (that could arise if there’s more than X entities in the world, for example).
  • The game in its current state may not deal well with it (performance-wise). There’s no absolutely no concept of loading or “unloading” parts of the map yet, which has to be dealt with. Because the whole save/load business is still a work in progress (as in, they have to “find” themselves with/in it), I doubt that this is tackled anytime soon.
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Unless I misunderstood, which is possible, I thought Tom mentioned them axing the idea in one of his streams a couple weeks ago. I’ll try to find it later. If I’m wrong, then my apologies.

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