EU4 - Development Diary - 9th of April 2019

[Chazb5046]

Guess what, I disagree. There is something off in your reasoning: more tags, more late game lag. Late in the game, the amount of tags is drastically lower as many of the minors have been eaten (take the HRE or the New World). I don't claim that the game no longer checks decisions etc for them, but it should be logical that the game no longer performs checks for dead nations. Having more minors gives you also more chances when playing as a minor. It would be a lot harder to expand as the Karaman when the other Anatolian minors + Aq Qoyunlu don't exist. The natives are a weird case though: they give the player the choice to play over there, they give the player the choice of which country they want (obviously the one with the prettiest flag) and give potential allies when the Europeans arrive.
Back on the topic of performance, I believe that the amount of provinces is the real killer. Take events/decisions that affect provinces. There are way more provinces than countries, and both have events/decisions that affect them. Not only that, but more provinces gives more distance calculations, both for moving armies as the AI. More provinces gives more manpower and more force limit, so a lot more armies are present on the map; later in the game, many of the previously uncolonized provinces are now also producing troops. More provinces gives the AI more places where it trains troops from (and since it loves spamming 1K armies, we get lag spikes since suddenly the world contains +10% more moving armies). This is IMO the reason why late-game lag exists: it's more about the multitude and the magnitute of provinces/armies than about the multitude of tags. Lag due to tags is something that can easily be greatly minimized (for example by ordering the triggers). Lag due to provinces is a totally different story.

As last thing: try to find a mod that fills in the current map with fewer nations. I'm rather sure I recently saw one on the workshop. Else, maybe try to propose one or even make one yourself? It's not a very difficult modification.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. Agree almost totally. I perhaps shouldn’t have mentioned late game lag in the same post as your quite right, it doesn’t stand up to logical reasoning. However I think it is a valid observeration/assertion that, crudely, more tags = more lag. Would never suggest taking away old world tags for exactly that reason. What’s the point of natives as allies are as a colonizer? Other than that agree.


Valid point and it’s made in this very dev diary as well.

I am planning on doing that actually, watch this space

Cheers

 

[gigau]

That's not hard enough - discover world, switch to trade map mode, make some additional modifiers visible, zoom out and scroll map a bit. )

Got to turn up the heat slowly... or they'll get scared...

 

[Celdur]

Is one of those benchmarking machines running on a Ryzen CPU? because a significant number of people already have them, all my friends that have upgraded their machines have bought Ryzen 1600's and then 2600's.

 

[PedroLuiz]

Ok, I know that dev diaries aren't meant to be suggestion places but:
Couldn't you create, in some safe places, pre scripted paths between some regions and incorporate with the ai and mechanics, for example:
The Castilian AI has some troops in Seville when it's declared war by France, so it have to move its troops to Navarre, instead of calculating for every possible province in Iberia it moves to one of the provinces of a predefined "road" connecting Lower Andalucia and Vasconia areas (that can also be used to reach nearby provinces) you could tie infrastructure development and AI strategy as it could pull some resources to upgrade such road and block enemies from using it

 

[MatRopert]

Let's talk about the objectively most important question raised by this dev diary:

Romanée-Conti vs Pomerol intensifies...

The huge question is "Are Bordeaux winemakers right in mixing grapes differently every year depending on harvest to get a nice blend or are they alchemists who have forsaken the art?"

 

[MatRopert]

However I think it is a valid observeration/assertion that, crudely, more tags = more lag.

It's interesting that you bring that up as lag.
At the risk of being pedantic, it's best to distinguish some things in that matter:

• Lag is tied to latency (ping) and usually due to either slow network connection, the server being overloaded or your machine being too slow to keep up with the host speed. Symptoms are usually a delay between a player input and an actual effect in the game. It's most commonly seen in shooters when you shoot some dude in the face, but instead of the expected result (said dude dying of bullet wound to the face), your target moves and your bullet hits whatever was behind him. Basically what your game shows is a couple in-game time units behind what it actually is. It is tied to the nature of multiplayer games and will not happen in singleplayer. Ideally you should play at a speed in which all clients can keep up with the host without ever needing to slow down or pause to allow them to catch up.
• Stuttering (french: "ça rame grave") happens when your computer is too slow to render the game graphics. It is usually synonymous with frame drops, like rendering a video with a low FPS count. It is normally due to your GPU being too slow for the game (or we did something terribly wrong ).
• EU4 employs some tricks to keep your framerate stable when you CPU can't catch up with the game speed, your graphics might still look fine but the daily ticks pass slowly and your actions take some time to be processed. This is an issue tied to the many computations done every ingame day. It is more noticeable later in the game. Pausing the game should make the problem disappear and allow you to give as many orders as you wish as fast as you can.

Lag is not something we can do much about, but the others we try to investigate.
The most important ones are when the game stutters, even paused. This shouldn't happen since the rendering of EU4 is cheap by modern standards. Sometimes we miss something (like a recent trade company alert performance bug) but it should always be fixable.
Daily tick getting slower is trickier because it's tied to the complexity I mentioned in the original post. As I mentioned we do make sure it stays below a reasonable average every patch. The biggest reason for this is AI, and the fact that almost every day each country needs to make decisions, and there are a lot of them and a lot of things they can potentially do. For fun you can use the 'ai' command in the console to turn it off (in SP non-ironman) and you should see a drastic difference in speed.

Hope this clears things up and helps you describe your issue(s) better.

 

[Philadelphus]

Huh! Guess I can add "EU IV loads faster" to the list of reasons I use Linux. I thought it was just the SSD I was using. I finally get why people complain about the load times now...

 

[Vakz]

Good diary that also is an eye opener on the other Paradox titles.

Think you might have persuaded more people to try Linux btw

I started dualbooting shortly after new years, when I installed Manjaro. Now, I honestly can't even remember the last time I booted into Windows. Granted, I've only been playing Paradox games and some CSGO (which also works great on Linux), but I haven't exactly felt like I've been missing out.

I'm now in the rather ironic situation that I game at home on Linux, and I work (as a developer) on a Windows machine (because stupid company enforces it).

 

[Chazb5046]

It's interesting that you bring that up as lag.
At the risk of being pedantic, it's best to distinguish some things in that matter:

• Lag is tied to latency (ping) and usually due to either slow network connection, the server being overloaded or your machine being too slow to keep up with the host speed. Symptoms are usually a delay between a player input and an actual effect in the game. It's most commonly seen in shooters when you shoot some dude in the face, but instead of the expected result (said dude dying of bullet wound to the face), your target moves and your bullet hits whatever was behind him. Basically what your game shows is a couple in-game time units behind what it actually is. It is tied to the nature of multiplayer games and will not happen in singleplayer. Ideally you should play at a speed in which all clients can keep up with the host without ever needing to slow down or pause to allow them to catch up.
• Stuttering (french: "ça rame grave") happens when your computer is too slow to render the game graphics. It is usually synonymous with frame drops, like rendering a video with a low FPS count. It is normally due to your GPU being too slow for the game (or we did something terribly wrong ).
• EU4 employs some tricks to keep your framerate stable when you CPU can't catch up with the game speed, your graphics might still look fine but the daily ticks pass slowly and your actions take some time to be processed. This is an issue tied to the many computations done every ingame day. It is more noticeable later in the game. Pausing the game should make the problem disappear and allow you to give as many orders as you wish as fast as you can.

Lag is not something we can do much about, but the others we try to investigate.
The most important ones are when the game stutters, even paused. This shouldn't happen since the rendering of EU4 is cheap by modern standards. Sometimes we miss something (like a recent trade company alert performance bug) but it should always be fixable.
Daily tick getting slower is trickier because it's tied to the complexity I mentioned in the original post. As I mentioned we do make sure it stays below a reasonable average every patch. The biggest reason for this is AI, and the fact that almost every day each country needs to make decisions, and there are a lot of them and a lot of things they can potentially do. For fun you can use the 'ai' command in the console to turn it off (in SP non-ironman) and you should see a drastic difference in speed.

Hope this clears things up and helps you describe your issue(s) better.

Merci monsieur, Je suis tre desolé, votre enterprise ces’t tre Bon! et vu et vu compains. Pardon moi pidgin Francais, je suis un roti de boeuf.

Si vous pardon mon anglais, that’s a really good point I do apologize I shouldn’t have used the word lag I was being lazy. The slow down of the daily tick is what I was referring to. I shall indeed try that for fun.

As ever thank you, and keep up the good work!

 

[bigbadwolf_45]

Wait? So I've always been embarrassed for using my Mac to game with, but it's actually better??

P.S. Anyone know how to in-game screenshot with Mac? It's no longer the backspace button.

I believe you press fn and f11 at the same time for a screenshot on mac

 

[Abnormalmind]

Randomize tag execution instead of Rebels, Pirates, Natives, Sweden, Demark, etc?

 

[William Lee]

Experienced Byzantium players recommend playing on Linux or Mac due to the very fast restart time

^this.

 

[Knut Skallagrim]

About the controlled crash to desktop done to reset checksum: If this was the reason this thing was done then the original “fix” would have been enough i.e. game greyeing out the multiplayer button once single player is clicked or a game has started. No lets make the more elegant solution of game crashing to desktop if you misclick single player before going to options, game crashing to desktop AND restarting (loooool) if you want to click on the back button on the map scree, while all you wanted to do was to to back and quit without restarting. Idk really how this thing has been allowed on a game where before it worked. My 2 cents are that the game has a memory problem and aint able to wipe for good the memory even in SP, its not just about checksum, there was an exploit couple years ago that made you change original grand campaign settings by just switching bookmarks before starting the game, and i think this is the issue that devs didnt manage to fix, not a checksum affecting 2% of player population of which 1.9% aready knew about the checksum issue anyways. Funny thing is that you can de facto change bookmarks anyways before starting the game so this horrible workaround is here to literally make people restart the game because a little part of the players pop can't close the game before re entering a multiplayer game (i repeat, a pop up informing about checksum change or greyeing out the MP button as it was in the original game would have been way more elegant and less neapolitan)

Also ui saying bullshit about truces expiring is well know if you play one (1) game, i’ve played a game with byz yesterday and the truce for my 2nd ottoman war (not the varna pregame truce) should expire at december according to the tooltip but when time comes it expires amost always in november, once at october, once the pop up came in in november but i was still truce breaking if i dowed in nov, once i wasnt, i mean full randomic, its like that the game has 3 different counters taking count of the same thing and none of them are synchronized, like popup msgs arent synced to the real truce checker, and the humiliate rival/conquest casus bellis arent synced aswell cause they always are spawned in a later date compared to the truce being gone. In this game it also happened that my truce with ottomans as byzantium lasted 1 month less than between them and the ally who helped me in the first war, albania xD

I got several backups of that game cause...well...byzantium... so if devs really need it its ok i can give it to them but i think its a bit absurd that they didn't notice it at all... its there in every game, maybe not for pre-game start truces but as soon as you peace out a war there is a chance that the truce after it will be bugged as hell XD

 

[grommile]

About the controlled crash to desktop done to reset checksum:

It wasn't just about multiplayer sync problems, though.

It was also about a steady stream of unreproducible crash bugs from SP players, that could happen an arbitrary amount of time into a campaign if that campaign had been "infected" by bouncing in and out of the lobby before starting.

 

[Tavior]

It wasn't just about multiplayer sync problems, though.

It was also about a steady stream of unreproducible crash bugs from SP players, that could happen an arbitrary amount of time into a campaign if that campaign had been "infected" by bouncing in and out of the lobby before starting.

I believe some of those if not all came from SP players who did "weird" thing like changing the history bookmark before finally settle on who to play as or even loading a different save game, only to see unexpected behavior or game state. Or even outright changing the checksum without any mod installed which can block players from getting achievement or start ironman game. It is not just multiplayer only issue and it can affect SP on it's own as well.

If I remember right, EU 4 team tired a few things to try fix this only to break the game even more than it was before. At some point they just gave up and forced EU 4 to completely restart. EU 4 was build on top of EU 3 code and EU 3 was build on EU 2 code and clean code didn't exist back then. So I wouldn't be surprised if those bugs can be traced to ancient code that no one on EU 4 can understand or if they try to they would get a serious headache. In fact I recently read an article that one of the most bug-prone programming language is C++ and guess what EU 2 was build with? Yup you got it.

I wouldn't be surprise if you didn't remember that SP players were affected badly by this issue without touching a multiplayer lobby as it has been a long time since they implemented the hard restart. In fact you can look up some of my ancient post talking about this issue if you care to.

 

[grommile]

I believe some of those if not all came from SP players who did "weird" thing like changing the history bookmark before finally settle on who to play as or even loading a different save game, only to see unexpected behavior or game state.

Just entering the SP lobby and leaving it would corrupt the gamestate. (Moving back and forth between start dates made things worse, of course.)

 

[Mic199]

I did not have time to read the DD for the past week, but many thanks to the dev team for finally adding the culture view to the start screen

 

[InvictusLampada]

• Stuttering (french: "ça rame grave") happens when your computer is too slow to render the game graphics. It is usually synonymous with frame drops, like rendering a video with a low FPS count. It is normally due to your GPU being too slow for the game (or we did something terribly wrong ).
• EU4 employs some tricks to keep your framerate stable when you CPU can't catch up with the game speed, your graphics might still look fine but the daily ticks pass slowly and your actions take some time to be processed. This is an issue tied to the many computations done every ingame day. It is more noticeable later in the game. Pausing the game should make the problem disappear and allow you to give as many orders as you wish as fast as you can.

Lag is not something we can do much about, but the others we try to investigate.
The most important ones are when the game stutters, even paused. This shouldn't happen since the rendering of EU4 is cheap by modern standards. Sometimes we miss something (like a recent trade company alert performance bug) but it should always be fixable.
Daily tick getting slower is trickier because it's tied to the complexity I mentioned in the original post. As I mentioned we do make sure it stays below a reasonable average every patch. The biggest reason for this is AI, and the fact that almost every day each country needs to make decisions, and there are a lot of them and a lot of things they can potentially do. For fun you can use the 'ai' command in the console to turn it off (in SP non-ironman) and you should see a drastic difference in speed.

Hope this clears things up and helps you describe your issue(s) better.

Purely out of curiosity (I'm no programmer) but I would have always thought that as the number of tags decreases going into the later game (in most scenarios) that the stutter found in the late game would be reduced since there's not as many calculations? I just find it a little galling when I get to the last 20 or so years of a game and it starts to grind to an almost halt and capped out a core on my i7 9700k.

 

[Tavior]

Just entering the SP lobby and leaving it would corrupt the gamestate. (Moving back and forth between start dates made things worse, of course.)

OK I think I am lost. What do you meant by SP lobby? Exactly?

I take the lobby word as a place to gather together to talk or a chat room for players before they start a multiplayer. Similar to lobby room on the first floor of almost all hotel except just in digital form.

Are you using a different meaning of lobby that I am not aware of?

 

[Knut Skallagrim]

@grommile you can still move back and forth using bookmarks iirc, so de facto the “bug chance” in SP is almost the same as before, excluding the bugs you would get by playing a game and starting a new one in the same session, rest is the same as before for SP

@The_sherbet game engine takes in account also dead tags that could spawn from their core provinces. Idk if it rules them out once they cant be released anymore, but i think not