Engine Question

[Arheo]

Indeed. This topic makes @Meneth curl up into a small ball, and start weeping. It's quite a sight to behold.

 

[Groogy]

Eh no only having access to 2gb of memory and going above that would cause the game to crash not slow down. More RAM available does not make the game faster. That's an OS thing because the OS can swap unused memory down to harddrive which might make things slower. But the game itself being 32bit or 64bit won't make the more availability of RAM for the game faster or slower.

Also our 32bit games are Large Adress Aware meaning it have access to 4gb

 

[Meneth]

Indeed. This topic makes @Meneth curl up into a small ball, and start weeping. It's quite a sight to behold.

This is true. It is a very unfortunate reaction, and can be very disruptive to my work.
As a result I've gotten quite good at typing while curled up though, which is always a plus.

 

[PDX_Gorion]

Yes, Imperator still uses the same Clausewitz Engine. Stellaris performance as of 2.2 is abysmal in mid-late game. Probably has to do with the much-discussed engine limitation with CPU cores. I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about Imperator's performance as well. I'm no game developer so I wouldn't know the specifics, but it does seem like Imperator, being a larger game, is more demanding on the CPU to begin with (than EU4 or CK2 for example).


The Jomini layer sounds great though.

Hello,

Imperator uses the Clausewitz engine together with the Jomini 'engine' (more a layer between games, or middleware for between the game and the clausewitz engine if you want to call it).

Now to immediately address the issue with this post:

Probably has to do with the much-discussed engine limitation with CPU cores.

The engine is not the limiting factor in multi-threaded performance, it is very difficult to correctly program a game to make use of the many CPU cores. All our games use multiple threads, but not as efficiently you, or we, would like. The main reason is because our games are deterministic; starting a game with the same random seed and the same player input will result in the same exact game. Adding multi-threading into this mix complicates it a lot more. (More in-depth article about some of the problems we face)

To give an example, we have the AI running on several cores alongside as the player is playing. This means a couple of complications. What if while AI on thread B is looking at something that is being changed by thread A? That could cause the game to crash, invalid values to be used or whatever horror we can't imagine.,

Multiplayer does not help either. We have to be extra sure that the order of operations that happens are exactly the same on all computers. Because we can't be sure that you have the same amount of cores or same speed between the clients.

Some systems this is easy to achieve, such as the AI. Others it is nearly impossible, like executing arbitrary script.

Now this only counts from the game tick perspective.
Imperator will have ~8 threads active regardless of the game being paused or not. Multiple threads will render the game (shadows, buildings, units, etc). Another one will update all UI data. Another will update the sound. Another will update incoming network traffic etc etc. But these threads won’t have work to do the majority of the time.

We are not yet ready to release the system specs, we are still improving the performance (and continue do so after release) and finalizing art, but because of the increased graphics fidelity, somewhat higher minimum specs compared to Stellaris is to be expected.