Performance Issues

Some keep mentioning that the hitching is spawn related. If that were the case I wouldn't be hitching while crafting in my basement. I do think that spawning exacerbates the hitching, but is only part of the issue. I do think a lot of it is to do with garbage collection and what @Feeyo suggested:

 

I am willing to create a tmpfs fstab entry and take part of my RAM and mount it as a ramdisk to copy SotA over and give it a try.

 

i've done this in the past and it works very well.

I had to stop after the game data + memory footprint started to exceed my 24GB RAM ~release 45.

 

I am not saying it will not work, ramdisks are already a old GNU/Linux technique. I am just curious if this will FIX all hitching.

 

Just to jump in here and FYI - the way I did a RAM disk was:

1. Install game to SSD.
2. Set up the RAMdisk to start empty (some RAMdisk apps have the facility to write the contents to HDD on shutdown and restore on boot - but this makes restarts painfully slow every time).
3. Create a .bat file on desktop to copy the game install over to RAMdisk
4. Create a second .bat to copy back to HDD

So I'd start the PC, click on the appropriate .bat file to load the game I was playing today into the RAMdisk (coming from an SSD it didn't take long for most games) and run the game from there.

Once finished - if there had been any client patches or the game saved settings etc into its install directory, click the second .bat file to save these changes after exit.

I haven't tried this for SOTA - since my last rebuild with a 3.2Gb/sec NVMe drive the benefits for most games were too small and I stopped using it. (and put 16 of the 32 Gb I'd installed into another PC as I didn't need it )

 

That’s exactly how much my system has now 24GB. I created the largest RAM drive it allowed me to and I was barely able to install SotA... in fact during the install it gave a warning message saying the target drive (i.e. my RAM drive) was not large enough but I ignored this warning and told it to proceed with installation.

I don’t know why the install data footprint of SotA is so big. I seem to remember when I first played about a month and half ago the SotA game folder was only 4GB or so. Now it’s more than double that.

Definitely worth a try!

 

That players are doing these things to get a game playing is just ridiculous, this should just not be a solution..

Its mostly the patches that are downloaded, these are big and are also stored in that directory..

I am willing to test it out and see if the hitching is really a disk I/O problem instead of a Unity/network/game problem.

 

I believe the ImDisk Toolkit (https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/) allows you to save the drive image to a file (do this after each SotA gaming session) then you can load it when the RAM drive starts also.

 

While I rarely have hitching, I gotta say that I had a few minutes before work today so I bounced into the 4 skull zone in Grunvald (north Grunvald I believe, was raising my tamming) and I was pretty much chain hitching in there which is absolutely unheard of for me. This does not surprise me since Seq Collosus was a clone of that back in the day and I spent a 1000 hours farming in it (was a great spot before they broke it by unclonning it and changing it). That zone has a lot of serious issues all over the place still to this day, there is just something fundamentally wrong with the terrain all around and you see it a lot with a pet and pathing. Maybe this is a marker for hitching, seriously bad terrain issues.

Dont forget, that zone was made 4+ years ago and has changed none through multiple Unity upgrades.

Maybe the hitching in tears for me when the cycle starts again (human mobs) is due to them popping in that oddish terrain in the spot?

 

Agree!

 

While I’m more inclined to believe it’s a CPU and GPU issue, there are cases were games are coded in such a way that latency will throttle frame rate to prevent rubber banding.

I don’t think that’s the case for SotA (based on my own observations on how the game performs with p2p) but there might be inconsistencies with certain game functions and that, somewhere, it’s throttled.

 

You guys... even you Gix ?!

I found the TOTAL solution to hitching like months ago... made 5 threads about it and got 100% ignored by devs and players alike (even people in my guild FCS, how is that even happening)...

I gained 20 FPS, have 0 hitching EVER, I can double click everywhere, play music flawlessly and join instance with tons of player with stable performance.

All with simple tweaks of the OS and simply limiting CPU/GPU usage to 80% to give room for peaks and prevent stupid unity buffer overload.

No joke, its so simple a kid can do it.

Ok I will take the day off, this is my first post of the day and I'm already wanting to rip hairs off my head.

a RAM drive... common.

I have a crappy 2GB graphic card, and I'm getting better performance than players with a 1070. I know my best friend tried to install SOTA and uninstalled it after realizing it had only 20% of the performance of other games.

I gave the solution to him too, but he was so frustrated he uninstalled... like my guild BTW, they are MIA.

It's UNITY and the OS... your CPU and GPUs are fine... haven't you guys done some video and audio editing ? Don't you know how the OS handles ressources and how a program optimized for multi-core will work 200% better than one without ?

Mars calls the moon... we have a communication problem.

 

@2112Starman thanks for the support... I'm trying to figure out how its possible that when I give a solution like this people are so frustrated that the game isn't perfect that they will blame the devs for doing a bad job and use that excuse to leave ?!

The devs did what they could and made ALOT of efforts for optimization, it should give us a clue, or at least spark a question : WHY is it making close to no difference.

Some scenes have had shader upgrades, why don't we see a better performance gain ?

It's UNITY vs the OS... we all know that unity isn't really made to run such a huge game with so many effects and options. Unity is perfect to make games like Fortnight where everything is limited players instances etc...

So our devs basically did a miracle that its so stable and reliable.

I'm trying to get people to see this... ok time to take a walk.

 

I actually was gonna post something like this because like I have said, I dont have a lot issues.

But in real life, one of the many things I do is support a 300 Win10 VMware VDI environments with GRID cards that run everything from video & Audio editing to CAD Civil 3D (including any game like SOTA) . We can run 50-100 of these machines on one server (and 2 video cards). Yes, I can have 75 people using these machines at the same time and pop open SOTA and play if fine.

However, by the way... RAM drives (of more specifically things like a Fusion IO card, hybrid flash on the SAN or one the servers themselves in the form of an SSD), significantly improve performance.... but at the desktop... nah... just silly.

 

Exactly my thoughts...

And by any chance have you run into similar problems while working in high memory load programs, and noticed the problem was worse when working with data on a cloud ? I assume perhaps yes, and perhaps you already optimized your machine to overcome such problems ?

Maybe if someone else finds the solution in another manner I did, that the devs will think again about pushing an e-mail with the proposed fix (simple registry editing) !

 

A lot of talks, but where is your solution?

 

At this point I'm willing to try anything. What are these specific OS tweaks? And how do you limit a processes CPU usage? I'll give it a try.

I can always make a System Restore Point.

 

I remember hitching started in R54, but then on the other hand I have several hours of hitch free gameplay, so it's not always consistent.

But yesterday it started where it was unplayable for the first time.

I don't think it has anything to do with the hardware we all have tho, I think that's a red herring.

 

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof !

 

Yeah same with me. The only significant change to the engine at R54 was however the reflections.....