Gateways+ trade routes = massive performance drop

[BarbeQ]

[...]

On the star base click on trade routes... and to select the target click right on the target starbase... it then should draw a route to that starbase, if one already exits it cancels the route.

Thanks for the hint

 

[Riftwalker]

it does most certainly. Trade protection range from starbases functions the same as trade collection range

THAT could very well be the source of a HUGE amount of lag... since it will always go out a number of tiles, if you're going through gates, it will ALWAYS check appropriate tiles through the gates. wow, i've programmed a descent amount of pathfinding, and that sounds like it could easily chew into performance. wonder how often it updates its coverage...

 

[krios41]

THAT could very well be the source of a HUGE amount of lag... since it will always go out a number of tiles, if you're going through gates, it will ALWAYS check appropriate tiles through the gates. wow, i've programmed a descent amount of pathfinding, and that sounds like it could easily chew into performance. wonder how often it updates its coverage...

i'm sure the piracy calculation is done daily... i hope that doesn't require an update on each starbase everyday too. But the more i think about that, thhe more i'm convinced it does

 

[Captain Conundrum]

I don't see why trade even needs to extend through wormholes or gates. Realistically, can you imagine the traffic jam of civilian ships all lining up to take their turn going through? It seems like something that would generally be reserved for military or VIP travel.

 

[krios41]

I don't see why trade even needs to extend through wormholes or gates. Realistically, can you imagine the traffic jam of civilian ships all lining up to take their turn going through? It seems like something that would generally be reserved for military or VIP travel.

Same could be said for hyperlanes though "can you imagine all these ships lining up, waiting for their turn for a hyperjump so they don't collide mid-jump?"
its convenience. But im' not oposed if trade collection/protection projection didn't go trough wormholes/gateways as a temporary band-aid if that helps with the stutter

 

[Aepdneds]

I don't see why trade even needs to extend through wormholes or gates. Realistically, can you imagine the traffic jam of civilian ships all lining up to take their turn going through? It seems like something that would generally be reserved for military or VIP travel.

Like in the real world the panama and suez canals are reserved for military and vip ships only. Oh wait..

 

[PuchForLife]

I don't see why trade even needs to extend through wormholes or gates. Realistically, can you imagine the traffic jam of civilian ships all lining up to take their turn going through? It seems like something that would generally be reserved for military or VIP travel.

Wow your post really fired up my brain. I gues how bad the traffic jam would be depends on the exact way the gate system works. First of are the gates al connect or do they contact one another and then establish a connection from Origen to destination (think stargate). now if they are al connected does that mean they are all connected to a sub space as the slow zone in the expanse in whitch case the amount of traffic jams would be dependent on the size of the connecting space and the competency of space traffic control but fundamentally no different then the airspace near an airport. This does not Fit with the instantaneous travel of the game so I think it's unlikely. Other option is that all gates connect to a single point in space in witch case only one ship can use the network at a time witch would not seem very efficient and cause masive traffic jams at the gate. A third option is that the gates can form a connection on demand in witch case a convoy system and timetable could be used. imagine convoys waiting for the time slot where the gate conects to their desired destanation. If each window is 15 minutes one one way two way taking 30 minutes would still mean 48 possible destinations per day witch is roughly the same interval as modern day air traffic. And with priorety access for military fleet movements. Still interesting to think about. I would images the stellaris gates to work as option number 3.


Now as to the stutters I've also experienced them. Strangely however my laptop did not get warm so I opened task manager to find that my game used about 25% of my CPU while running and as the game freezes my CPU drops to 5% my GPU also stops giving clear spikes. I'm no programmer but it appears that as the game stops it starts to wait for a process that does not require a lot of power but does need a lot of steps. Looks like checking trade collection on al star bases through gates would fit perfectly in that category so many they should block trade collection and protection through gates and wormholes

 

[Infin-Vec]

Same problem encountered.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...bf4-new-trade-hubs-cause-game-freeze.1136683/
I got a gateway in every star system which has habitable planets or observation posts or enclaves or megastructures, and then...

 

[Infin-Vec]

By the way, I don't know is this one the same problem...
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...n-advancing-every-single-in-game-day.1135491/

 

[Alblaka]

I wanted to verify this by building a Gateway in my capital system.

The moment the Gateway Construction Site finished, the game slowed to a crawl.

I then tried to see whether I could boost performance by downgrading all starbases... which however did not increase the performance.

Which now has me severely confused, but I can agree that Gateways seem to be part of that issue.

 

[annccew]

I tested some situations with gateway. At default condition, it takes 16s for 90days of game. But, when I constructed 5 gateways at starbases, it was 19s. Finally, with 3 more gateways, it was 43s for 90days! Indeed, i couldn't play a game at all. If it was a ironman game, it might be a horrible exp for me. Please fix this bug as fast as you can developers. Game without gateway is so annoying you know.

 

[Midnight-Paradox]

I tested some situations with gateway. At default condition, it takes 16s for 90days of game. But, when I constructed 5 gateways at starbases, it was 19s. Finally, with 3 more gateways, it was 43s for 90days! Indeed, i couldn't play a game at all. If it was a ironman game, it might be a horrible exp for me. Please fix this bug as fast as you can developers. Game without gateway is so annoying you know.

I have now reached a point where it's not days per second anymore but seconds per day! This issue is the single most game breaking thing in the latest version for me. Maybe not using gateways or using them more sparsely would keep it manageable in future savegames, but my current game is abso-friggin-lutely unplayable now.

I also would like to reiterate my wish for the engine to use multiple cores. I'm using a Ryzen 7 and it hurts seeing that 15 of its 16 logical cores are twiddling their metaphorical thumbs while the one that's used can't handle the load and slows down the game to a crawl. I know an engine update won't sell as well as a new content DLC but it's sooooo badly needed. Make it Stellaris 2 if you have to, but give the good old Clausewitz engine a big revamp. And - yes I know - not every calculation can be parallelized that easily but specifically Stellaris strikes me as an application that would put itself forward to be distributed to different cores even at a higher level (not talking about assembler code level optimizations here). Given all the global policies each planet should be calculable independent of all the others, heck, even the pathing problems described here should be calculable for each empire individually (though I don't want to advocate the lazy brute force approach to solve the problem!).

 

[Riftwalker]

Wow your post really fired up my brain. I gues how bad the traffic jam would be depends on the exact way the gate system works. First of are the gates al connect or do they contact one another and then establish a connection from Origen to destination (think stargate). now if they are al connected does that mean they are all connected to a sub space as the slow zone in the expanse in whitch case the amount of traffic jams would be dependent on the size of the connecting space and the competency of space traffic con...

they could just connect through some sort of harmonics, and so the ship just tunes to it's destination gate as it goes in, then safety equipment prevents the placement of ships inside each other. The gates acting more as subspace routers.

also there's the chance that the gates have multiple entry and exit points and so they just make several gate jumps but this is removed due to convenience as the interchanges would occur in less than a days travel.

 

[moonrise1988]

i want to play so badly i hope they fix it today. smash every 10 minutes the F5 button...

 

[iskaci61]

This issue makes large galaxies unplayable. No way i can play in 1000 star galaxy without at least 10-15 gateways. Hope they fix this before holidays

 

[NurAbSal]

This issue makes large galaxies unplayable. No way i can play in 1000 star galaxy without at least 10-15 gateways. Hope they fix this before holidays

Not only 1000 star galaxy... 600 star will stutter as badly if enough gates are activated...

 

[wormasc]

to me, it sounds like trade is making arbitrary distance calculations that should be saved and not redone. gateways are a problem with pathfinding because every gate has access to every other gate, which will make pathfinding start polling across the galaxy. if trade on it's own is producing lag, then gates will exasperate it. i wonder what their pathfinding coe looks like, is it A* or something more crude.

edit: does anyone know if starbase piracy protection extends through gates? this may also be a big performance eater

Gateways and wormholes will actually make A* not work as well because A* will often result in it missing the presence of a gateway that could cut a lot of nodes off the route and just going the slow way if the gateway is a little out of the way. You'd have to use something more like Dijkstra's Algorithm if you want to ensure it'll always be the fastest route.

That said, I doubt it's a case of what pathfinding algorithm their using, since none of the paths in stellaris are going to be very long or complicated, it's more likely to be a bug causing something to take far longer to execute then it should or is making calculations too often.

 

[Less2]

Gateways and wormholes will actually make A* not work as well because A* will often result in it missing the presence of a gateway that could cut a lot of nodes off the route and just going the slow way if the gateway is a little out of the way. You'd have to use something more like Dijkstra's Algorithm if you want to ensure it'll always be the fastest route.

That said, I doubt it's a case of what pathfinding algorithm their using, since none of the paths in stellaris are going to be very long or complicated, it's more likely to be a bug causing something to take far longer to execute then it should or is making calculations too often.

They are probably using Dijkstra's algorithm or something similar. A* requires a heuristic, usually the absolute distance between points, which is obviously not relevant at all to Stellaris travel. Pathfinding in Stellaris is already using gateways just fine at least in terms of finding the right path, maybe not computing time.

 

[HamHamJ]

It would make sense to me if trade collection did not work through gateways but trade routes did, if there is no other way fo fix this.

 

[Alblaka]

Adding another Insight to this: I'm now into 2400, with Wormholes/Gateways disabled (x0 setting). No AI empire has created any Gateways yet, thus the only gates are the L-Gates, plus the special event wormhole that leads to a single system.

My game is running extremely smooth and fast. Of course, slightly slower than 2200, but definitely faster than 2400 in 2.0.

Gateways/Wormholes ARE the cause of this.