Developer Diary | Tech

[MatRopert]

What about performance late game? This is the real problem, not early game.

It should be a bit better due to this (and a few other improvements made). Truth be told I was hoping to get our hardware lab to give us a new assessment like we did last year but sadly they are kinda busy with this Victoria 3 thing coming soon .

I don't see a true better performance lategame? What about that? Are you going to answer or is paradox just gonna say the same old...

"We use only one CPU" although in 2016 like every CPU had multiple cores...

You would pleased to hear that HoI has been using multiple cores since release and we have since tried to move more game systems to the multithreaded update pass, but it's not always an option.
Are we ever gonna be as good as CK3 at core utilization? Most likely not, but then again that game is based on tech that is 5 years younger than HoI.
If you want more details I can recommend this watch.

@MatRopert Would you be to post a link to that YouTube video when its done?

There you go! Apologies for the first minutes of recording, we had setup the wrong mic. Goods news is, we should get 2 more recordings from CppCon and Meeting C++ later this year.

 

[MatRopert]

Hey Mat, thanks for sharing this!

If you have the time, I would love to know how you are handling performance improvements in the Hoi4 team.

• Do you do them "as you get by" while changing other code and then stumbling over something like "oh, this could be optimized!"?
• Do you have a list of things that need optimizing and that you try to get to when planning your next patch/DLC?
• Or do you just have a big note somewhere hanging around that says "PERFORMANCE!" but you don't know yet what to do and when someone is assigned that task, they just look through the code/profilers and try to find something?

Also I'd love to know, if there are optimizations that you and the team knows off, that would have a greater impact on performance but you haven't yet got the time/resources to implement them?

Thanks in advance

P.S.: You can get as technical/detailed as you like and your time/word count allows

At this point we two things: first we track overnight performance and tackle regressions introduced by new changes/features, then we also use tools from time to time to take a "visual" snapshot of what takes time in HoI and see what we can do from there.
Here's an example caputre from one of those:

Over time there are bits we know are not great, some of them we have addressed more or less when we found them, some we keep in mind for later as this would be a risky change, and some where we more or less have to accept that it's not realistic to change at this point.
As for how much we could spent on it, I'll be honest, it all comes down to the big money question: what will in the end generate more revenue? A faster game? More frequent DLC releases to sell? Going back and fixing older content?

Same game engine, so it still is one cpu core and minor use of couple of others.
You need HOI5, with new game engine, to get late game performance update.

See my previous answer about multithreading.

 

[MatRopert]

This profiler GUI looks very familiar to me; can you share its name? Is it some sort of an open-source stuff both of our overlords have happened to be in favor of?

It's called Optick and it's a free open-source tool.

 

[MatRopert]

Hoi4 already doesn't launch with Ubuntu 18.04, that is from patch 1.11.13 Barbarossa which was released at the end of August. Would have been nice if you guys had released this info way before and not put me, for instance, unable to launch the game anymore suddenly. Maybe you should update the steam requirements also, I've bought BBA yesterday and it still presents 18.04 as the recommended Linux OS for the new expansion.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/cannot-launch-game-ubuntu-20-04-resolved.1539653/post-28458256

There were launching issues with 20.04 also, as the above thread mentions those.

1.11.13 is still compatible with 18.04, we specifically used older build servers to make sure of that. I'm afraid your issue is related to something else.

 

[MatRopert]

Have ya'll thought about adding a Officer "death" mechanic to this DLC? Like with all these new officers, adding a 0.05% chance or something to these new Officers to die during a battle could add good flavor.

I'm no game designer, but seeing how we cut "officer goes disloyal at random" in No Step Back after realizing how not fun and arbitrary it was, I'm doubtful we'd go about randomly killing your generals.

 

[MatRopert]

Just to confirm, will HOI4 still run on other Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux? It would be a shame to see HOI4 being locked behind Ubuntu.

It might, it might not. Paradox (nor Steam) never officially supported anything else than Ubuntu / SteamOS.

 

[MatRopert]

Any update on Metal API or MoltenVK build? Or even Native Apple Silicon? HOI4 runs poorly because of OpenGL on Mac because it has been deprecated for a couple of years now, performance drop can be big as 80% just by using it.

I wish paradox will be able to utilise the maximum performance of the M1 / M2 Macs

We have no plan to make native builds for M1 or support Metal in HoI4 at the moment.