Stellaris Dev Diary #181 : Threading and Loading Times

[Aerwidh]

This looks like a good speedup. Nice work!

 

[Rosthun]

Edit: quoting broke, this is intended as a reply to Pyzayt.

Trying to play devil's advocate is kind of disingenuous in this context. I've played Stellaris from the day it was released, ever since that day the game was riddled with problems. But I thought to myself -- I do like this game very much, and its a PDX game, they will make it better over time. Stellaris was released 4 years ago, megacorp that broke AI, sector AI, crisis AI (should I even continue this list?) was released two *years* ago. And over those years all I heard from PDX was "we're working on it". Fact of the matter is, 2/3 of the systems that were present prior to 2.2 release are still in the worse state today. Call it complaining, but I just dont believe empty promises at this point, I need some tangible results. And for Pete's sake stop talking about the virus like only devs at PDX are dealing with it. I don't remember taking a 2-months summer vacation, so forgive me for saying that they probably won't be overworked at this point. There are countless problems that people were complaining about, legitimate problems I might add, and then they got a DD that talked about a problem I've never heard *anyone* complaining in *four* years. Cool that they did it, but like someone said in this thread, prioritize please. I just won't be fed empty promises that they are "working on it", I've heard that one too many times without seeing any results. So don't try to spin it like people are just hating on paradox for no reason, that they just need to wait, be content with what they have and so on, absolutely ridiculous statement.

 

[Kayden_II]

you forget that stellaris fans are the kind of people who can spend a hundred hours on a game and then call it unplayable.

This is far too true.

So in other words: If I've reached an arbitrary limit of played hours ( so that I can be called an experienced player on top ) then it's no longer justified that I express any form of critique ?

How about the thing that critiques refer to the latest version of this game ( V2.7.2 ) whereas the counter for played hours is an accumulated one that includes not only the current, but all previous versions as well ? Wanna tell me that a guy or girl who had played ( for example ) V1.9.1 extensively is as satisfied with V2.7.2, just because he / she had accumulated a zillion + 1 hour of play-time altough said zillion hours are from V1.9.1 whereas just said 1 hour is actually from V2.7.2 ? In theory, this counter for played hours has to be resetted every time this game gets a new update.

It's also a thing that this counter for played hours counts also when you're playing with mods: You two adorn Paradox with borrowed plumes if you think it's Paradox merit that players have accumulated a zillion hours of play-time altough they had actually played a completed, fixed, optimised, balanced, changed and extended ( modded ) version of this game that makes it not only playable, but enjoyable, too.

How about the "wasted" hours of play-time ( that're also included in said counter ) due to bugs that have led to CtDs or due to other bugs that have led to abandoned games ?

Stellaris players always seem to need to find a reason to complain about what the devs are doing, and while I think that Stellaris could certainly be improved (and frankly does need more polish for its existing systems), the way people here go about it is... not okay.

Bad customer, BAD !

We got radio silence, and we complained.

So, you think that 3 months of radio silence is something that should be celebrated instead ?

They said they're looking at performance,

So, you think that a non-committal intention ( I've "never" "ever" heard before on top ) is something that should be celebrated, too ?

We demanded they fix systems, and they did, and we complained (specifically about it not being enough in this case, despite "enough" being subjective).

I'm sorry, but it's the ingame-performance-problems that most people complain about, not such outgame-performance-"problems" how Stellaris wouldn't boot, save and load that fast ( and we're just talking about seconds here on top ). Stellaris is not a Total-War-game in which something like this would make an actual difference ( several "breaks" in a session due to switches between the campaign-map and battles ) since it's still a Paradox-game that runs continuously once you're in your session.

Frankly, every time this community asks for something, when we get it, people complain.

It's rather the other way around: People have to complain in order to get what ( patches ) they want, especially if it's not that profitable as ... for example ... DLCs since otherwise Paradox gets the excuse that everything seems to be fine and dandy.

PDX has been absurdly tolerant of our crap, and seriously deserves a break from it all.

You've never heard about these rules against this so called "toxicity" ? And the 3 months of radio silence ( that qualifies as such a break ) you've already forgotten ?

I don't want to see the Stellaris dev team go the same way a lot of my favourite old things went; abandoned and despised by its creators for the people that came to call themselves fans.

My concern is more the other way around that Paradox continues to throw out DLCs ( as long as said DLCs get selled ) without having the prioritized intention or even the ability to overcome the state of this game.

 

[Sinper]

It needs time, and we don't actually know when it will be done.

 

[Garfazz Steamfang]

Edit: quoting broke, this is intended as a reply to Pyzayt.

Trying to play devil's advocate is kind of disingenuous in this context. I've played Stellaris from the day it was released, ever since that day the game was riddled with problems. But I thought to myself -- I do like this game very much, and its a PDX game, they will make it better over time. Stellaris was released 4 years ago, megacorp that broke AI, sector AI, crisis AI (should I even continue this list?) was released two *years* ago. And over those years all I heard from PDX was "we're working on it". Fact of the matter is, 2/3 of the systems that were present prior to 2.2 release are still in the worse state today. Call it complaining, but I just dont believe empty promises at this point, I need some tangible results. And for Pete's sake stop talking about the virus like only devs at PDX are dealing with it. I don't remember taking a 2-months summer vacation, so forgive me for saying that they probably won't be overworked at this point. There are countless problems that people were complaining about, legitimate problems I might add, and then they got a DD that talked about a problem I've never heard *anyone* complaining in *four* years. Cool that they did it, but like someone said in this thread, prioritize please. I just won't be fed empty promises that they are "working on it", I've heard that one too many times without seeing any results. So don't try to spin it like people are just hating on paradox for no reason, that they just need to wait, be content with what they have and so on, absolutely ridiculous statement.

As a day one Stellaris player (first paradox game bought on release date) i can only agree with you. Firstly i will never more buy a paradox game on release and secondly i stopped buyed DLC since Apocalypse patch. I prefer to wait and see what they are going with this game first. We paid for an enjoyable game and, 4 years latter, Stellaris still full of problems and still not enjoyable with AI and pop management problems (without counting the economy, internal politic and diplomacy near non existance and the fact that only warfare is rewarded).

If they are doing like CK2 (6 years of support) we still only have 2 years of support to make it an enjoyable game, i admit i'm kind of sceptic here. I have already throw too much money into this game and will follow patches and DLC to see what they are doing and if the game is trully improving before doing anything else and buy another DLC. And, if it don't i will never more buy a paradox game of my life, simply as it. First Stellaris state, secondly vampire the masquerade lead narrative designer fired without reasons, i start to have high doubts about this company and their methods.

 

[Phil76]

merci Mathieu

 

[Industrious81]

Loading times lol.

Okay dev team.

 

[UltimateTobi]

Loading times lol.

Okay dev team.

I saw the comparison video and I must say: the game NEVER took this long to load on my SSD. It loaded in, maybe, 10 secs?

So after those improvements, starting the game should cause my PC to go back in time I guess.

That is not to say I don't appreciate these improvements.

 

[GnoSIS]

As a day one Stellaris player (first paradox game bought on release date) i can only agree with you. Firstly i will never more buy a paradox game on release and secondly i stopped buyed DLC since Apocalypse patch. I prefer to wait and see what they are going with this game first. We paid for an enjoyable game and, 4 years latter, Stellaris still full of problems and still not enjoyable with AI and pop management problems (without counting the economy, internal politic and diplomacy near non existance and the fact that only warfare is rewarded).

If they are doing like CK2 (6 years of support) we still only have 2 years of support to make it an enjoyable game, i admit i'm kind of sceptic here. I have already throw too much money into this game and will follow patches and DLC to see what they are doing and if the game is trully improving before doing anything else and buy another DLC. And, if it don't i will never more buy a paradox game of my life, simply as it. First Stellaris state, secondly vampire the masquerade lead narrative designer fired without reasons, i start to have high doubts about this company and their methods.

I have to agree with your stance. I highly doubt I'll buy any other game from PDX, perhaps only Victoria 3 and then, only if it will be good (doubt it). Stellaris will be my last. They've lost all their credibility as quality developers.

I'll tell you what I'll buy though: Factorio DLCs and expansions. Wube is King on quality.

 

[charliex3]

I saw the comparison video and I must say: the game NEVER took this long to load on my SSD. It loaded in, maybe, 10 secs?

So after those improvements, starting the game should cause my PC to go back in time I guess.

That is not to say I don't appreciate these improvements.

I got it on SSD too and it never loaded so fast, never.

 

[GnoSIS]

I got it on SSD too and it never loaded so fast, never.

It depends what SSD, and what mods you have. With NVME and no mods, it's really fast.

 

[DiscoRay]

It depends what SSD, and what mods you have. With NVME and no mods, it's really fast.

I haven't found this to be the case on an NVME drive, even with no mods, still takes a good minute to load. It's possible having less DLCs might speed loading up.

 

[charliex3]

It depends what SSD, and what mods you have. With NVME and no mods, it's really fast.

All DLCs + NVMe Samsung 970 500GB. It's still not "really fast" mate My PC is definitely not a potato.

I haven't found this to be the case on an NVME drive, even with no mods, still takes a good minute to load. It's possible having less DLCs might speed loading up.

This.

----
I'm still more curious how much faster saves load. As usually when i turn on Stellaris I just go make a coffee or something.

 

[Phil76]

There are many post to criticize game performance, and when one dev comes and explains that they are working on it, it's still not enough !

From what I read in his post they are working on threading, not only on loading times.

Now bashers can do what they like most : bash the devs

 

[Kayden_II]

There are many post to criticize game performance, and when one dev comes and explains that they are working on it, it's still not enough !

It seems like that you weren't really around the last 4+ years since otherwise you would be aware of the mantra that they've always worked on performance-issues so that they're still doing it today. But since the performance-issues got / get out of hand, ... well ... I don't want to take away the joy from you to put the dot(s) together what this means whether Paradox efforts ( with actual results ( no non-committal ( and illusive ) intentions like "they are ( and always ) working on it" ) ) were / are "enough" or not.

Now bashers can do what they like most : bash the devs

Express any form of critique equals "bashing", "hating", "trolling" or whatever, I get it, but on a second thought, NO.

 

[CrazyJ]

the simple fact of the matter is that most of the issues that people are always "bashing" the devs for have been around for years(bad ai, performance) and people have mostly lost patience with the constant "we are always working on performance" line, and the fact that every update seems to bring more issues than it solves, even the much vaunted 2.6 bugfix patch barely made a dent in the massive array of issues, and then they promptly broke the ai immediately after they said they fixed it

can you really blame people for being skeptical?

 

[Attitude Adjuster]

the simple fact of the matter is that most of the issues that people are always "bashing" the devs for have been around for years(bad ai, performance) and people have mostly lost patience with the constant "we are always working on performance" line, and the fact that every update seems to bring more issues than it solves, even the much vaunted 2.6 bugfix patch barely made a dent in the massive array of issues, and then they promptly broke the ai immediately after they said they fixed it

can you really blame people for being skeptical?

Exactly this, been hearing the same line for years to no effect.

The crisis has essentially had some kind of issue in every patch since release.

War in heaven has almost never properly worked.

Performance was bad before they redesigned the economic system.

I remember in the build up to megacorp how one of the dev posts said that this rework would have some benefits for performance. We all know how that turned out....

I just don't understand how whilst the Devs were sat around a table discussing the economy system someone didn't say "we need to make it so the AI can use it and so its not a performance bottleneck"

I've said this a few times now, but at this point I believe stellaris to be unsalvageable due to bad design choices and poor implementation of said design.

There's two scenarios here:

They are unable to make stellaris into a decent state.

Or they are unwilling to expend the required resources.

 

[Ultimus]

As a programmer, I loved it that you described two classic Computer Science problems using Blorg and Prikki-Ti <3!
Kudos to the software engineers

 

[Wesen]

After playing with both EU4 and Stellaris loading benchmarks, I can give you one right now: try avoiding have lots of small files (like EU4 does with one text file per province). Windows is just terrible at loading those efficiently. My first idea was to "compile" the game text files into one big archive after the first load to speed up subsequent startups, but it would have taken some time to implement safely and wouldn't have benefited Stellaris as much as the other changes I made.
I still keep it in mind for later, but as you may guess there's always more things we could do than time to actually do them.

Loading things from an archive instead of straight from the file system you say... Isn't that one of the big reasons for using PhysFS in the first place and also what you are already doing for mods downloaded from the workshop?

 

[RaptorsofSkyrim]

can you really blame people for being skeptical?

No. But I CAN blame people for being iackasses about it instead of being decent human beings. And I'm speaking as a Day One buyer myself.