Stellaris Dev Diary #181 : Threading and Loading Times

[Attitude Adjuster]

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.

If we're gonna bring decency into this, think a lot of people would agree that there is a deficit on both sides.

Stellaris is the most expensive game I own. Stellaris is the buggiest game I own, and considering I own a few early access titles that's really something.

I don't want to imply that the Devs themselves are behaving indecently, but at the company level, yeah this reeks of an exploitative cash grab rather than a fair exchange of currency for goods.

 

[RaptorsofSkyrim]

If we're gonna bring decency into this, think a lot of people would agree that there is a deficit on both sides.

Stellaris is the most expensive game I own. Stellaris is the buggiest game I own, and considering I own a few early access titles that's really something.

I don't want to imply that the Devs themselves are behaving indecently, but at the company level, yeah this reeks of an exploitative cash grab rather than a fair exchange of currency for goods.

Perhaps you're right, and Stellaris was just meant to be a cash-grab by the higher ups since space 4x games were popular (And one could argue still are popular) at the time Stellaris was released.

Bringing it back on topic with the DD, I will admit that the Loading time issue wasn't much of an issue (Though something at least a few people had, given some of the posts here) but, as mentioned in the DD, it helps the developers most of all.

That includes getting to the bottom of the performance issues and seeing where they can be streamlined.

For example, if the number of pops is the issue, make it so each pop is roughly equal to a number of people (Something like 1 pop equals 1 billion people). If that's the case, just make the district system run on that assumption, 1 job is roughly equal to 1 billion jobs of that type.

That would lower the amount of pop calculation lag.

 

[Kayden_II]

Perhaps you're right, and Stellaris was just meant to be a cash-grab by the higher ups since space 4x games were popular (And one could argue still are popular) at the time Stellaris was released.

I will admit that the Loading time issue wasn't much of an issue but, as mentioned in the DD, it helps the developers ( Paradox ) most of all.

Fine, you've spotted how Paradox sets its priorities, but ...

I CAN blame people ( customers ) for being iackasses about it instead of being decent human beings.

You don't blame Paradox for its egoism, but the customers as being "jackasses" and in-"decent" if they're expressing any form of critique in regards to this ? And before you may begin to explain how normal this is since Paradox is a company, 01. egoism is also normal for customers and 02. you were the one who had begun with your subjective indignation in regards to morality that's not aimed towards Paradox at all, but strangely ( in this context: exclusively ) towards customers.

 

[tului]

64 bit, AVX-512, DX 12, Vicky III confirmed

 

[MatRopert]

64 bit, AVX-512, DX 12, Vicky III confirmed

Actually we thought about enabling AVX on Imperator release, turned out the gain wasn't worth making a whole class of CPUs unable to boot the game.
For the rest I cannot confirm or deny

 

[LocutusvonBorg]

All your suggestion would do is add an extra step.

where is it adding extra steps ? the opposite is the case. not every single pop have to "ask" the value of the stock and then rewrite it after "the work is done". this way all pops can be paralized. the way it is now, it cant and at the very end, the stock-value is rewritten. im not sure if you realy see the change here.

 

[Tamwin5]

where is it adding extra steps ? the opposite is the case. not every single pop have to "ask" the value of the stock and then rewrite it after "the work is done". this way all pops can be paralized. the way it is now, it cant and at the very end, the stock-value is rewritten. im not sure if you realy see the change here.

To start off, unless you have a few thousand cores, parallizing EVERY pop is overkill. I don't know exactly how much processing pops take up, and it might be that you can keeps jobs all on the same thread and split off other planetary stuff into a different thread or something. Also the actual number of threads available differs based on the computer so whatever system you have needs to be able to handle that.

The way I understand code, you HAVE to ask the value of something in order to effect it relative to it's current value (aka adding or subtracting). If you add one, you don't send it an "increase by one" command, you pull the initial value, increase it by one, then push back the updates value. The reason this can't be paralized is that if pop A pulls the value in the time between pop B asking for the value and giving back the updated value, when pop A updates the value it overwrites over whatever production pop B did.

It doesn't matter if the Number that the pops are updating is the base stockpile or some other value. If multiple pops are accessing it, they have to do it in sequence (or write in safeties which would take even longer). The only way to properly paralize the jobs would be to split the pops into multiple groups, calculate the changes in each group sequentially, then combine the results of all the groups sequentially.

Something I just realized is that the easiest way to divide up pops is by empire, since each empire calculate resources individually.

 

[tului]

Actually we thought about enabling AVX on Imperator release, turned out the gain wasn't worth making a whole class of CPUs unable to boot the game.
For the rest I cannot confirm or deny

I was just kinda throwing buzzword salad in there
.

 

[Pyzayt]

Something I just realized is that the easiest way to divide up pops is by empire, since each empire calculate resources individually.

Personally, I feel that calculating individual pops is the cause of a lot of the problem there. Every single last pop needs to calculate a lot of things, and as a result, every-time a new pop is generated, a lot more calculations need to happen. I feel turning pops into a more abstract thing would work better to calculating them all as individual objects.

Have a planetary population variable that counts how many pops are on a planet. Use the local ethics attraction to divide their ethics; since there are no individual pops, it uses this to set different variables for how many pops in the main count belong to a specific ethic. (Say, the planet has a population of 30, and a 33% spiritualist ethics attraction. It then decides it has 10 spiritualist pops; though there is still no individual pop. Everything would simply be integers that go up slowly, rather than new pops that individually calculate things being generated. A total population per planet, the populations of specific ethics and species, ect. When it comes to empire-wide demography, you just add up these numbers and do some division. (Which I think it already does.)

Basically, make pops be abstract numbers instead of individual entities with their own things to calculate. That's how I think pops should be calculated.

 

[CrazyJ]

Basically, make pops be abstract numbers instead of individual entities with their own things to calculate. That's how I think pops should be calculated.

i've made a thread about this idea, it didn't get the positive reaction i was hoping for

 

[KaiserTom]

Personally, I feel that calculating individual pops is the cause of a lot of the problem there. Every single last pop needs to calculate a lot of things, and as a result, every-time a new pop is generated, a lot more calculations need to happen. I feel turning pops into a more abstract thing would work better to calculating them all as individual objects.

Have a planetary population variable that counts how many pops are on a planet. Use the local ethics attraction to divide their ethics; since there are no individual pops, it uses this to set different variables for how many pops in the main count belong to a specific ethic. (Say, the planet has a population of 30, and a 33% spiritualist ethics attraction. It then decides it has 10 spiritualist pops; though there is still no individual pop. Everything would simply be integers that go up slowly, rather than new pops that individually calculate things being generated. A total population per planet, the populations of specific ethics and species, ect. When it comes to empire-wide demography, you just add up these numbers and do some division. (Which I think it already does.)

Basically, make pops be abstract numbers instead of individual entities with their own things to calculate. That's how I think pops should be calculated.

Once again proving the pop system of vic 2 is just plain superior.

 

[Kleithn]

Once again proving the pop system of vic 2 is just plain superior.

LoL. Why you say that? Pops in Vic2 are even less abstract than in Stellaris )

 

[Janx14]

i've made a thread about this idea, it didn't get the positive reaction i was hoping for

Yeah it seems to be a trend, though I haven't seen a convincing counter.

 

[LocutusvonBorg]

The way I understand code, you HAVE to ask the value of something in order to effect it relative to it's current value (aka adding or subtracting). If you add one, you don't send it an "increase by one" command, you pull the initial value, increase it by one, then push back the updates value. The reason this can't be paralized is that if pop A pulls the value in the time between pop B asking for the value and giving back the updated value, when pop A updates the value it overwrites over whatever production pop B did.

that is the point, dont pull the values. u dont need to for example energy-production, or mineral production, cause not a single resource is based if the stockpile-value. so u can calculate ALL the pops what they produce and what they consume and AFTER that u sum every resource and THEN access the stockpile.

right now u did not said why this whouldnt work, just assumptions, weired assumptions. and no one said anything with tthousand cores, pls be serious.

so, simple: no pop does access the stockpile-value. all ress that are produced/consumed are summed and THEN added/subtracted to the stockpile. until you tell me a very good reason this should not work ... i dunno where there is a problem. and i mean a real good reason.

 

[Tamwin5]

that is the point, dont pull the values. u dont need to for example energy-production, or mineral production, cause not a single resource is based if the stockpile-value. so u can calculate ALL the pops what they produce and what they consume and AFTER that u sum every resource and THEN access the stockpile.

right now u did not said why this whouldnt work, just assumptions, weired assumptions. and no one said anything with tthousand cores, pls be serious.

so, simple: no pop does access the stockpile-value. all ress that are produced/consumed are summed and THEN added/subtracted to the stockpile. until you tell me a very good reason this should not work ... i dunno where there is a problem. and i mean a real good reason.

I think you might not understand how computers do math. THAT is the reason. If my explanation here isn't making sense, I recommend googling some resources that might explain it better.

In order to sum, you have to pull both values from where they are stored, then push the new value to somewhere else. If you are adding X and Y, you need to know what both X and Y are. In order to combine the production of all your jobs, after you've added X (current resources) and Y (job production) you push that updated value back to X. If two different cores try to add (or subtract) some amount to/from X at the same time, Whichever one happens second will effectively "ignore" whatever process the first one did.

Now let's take your idea. Instead of pulling from X and pushing to X, we create a brand new variable/location Z, which serves as a buffer so you don't need to access the stockpile. Only now instead every pop needs to add resources to Z, so you go from [X+Y->X] to [Z+Y->Z]. The pops still need to know how many resources are in the buffer in order to increase that amount. Summing the production of those jobs still needs every job's production to be calculated in sequence. Instead, if you were to split the group in half, now you could sum each half in sequence (they are pulling from separate sources, so no errors), then combine the two halves and then add it to the base stockpile. The trouble then becomes how do you split up the jobs and ensure the proper distribution of cores (remembering that cores are also processing sound, graphics, AI, etc.).

 

[SephirothWS]

The thing about pops is how they behave. Each pop can have different jobs with different resource costs and resource production values. How would you be able to calculate say, 10 Clerks, 5 Researchers, ... etc if pops themselves aren't entities?

Jobs - Stellaris Wiki

stellaris.paradoxwikis.com

 

[EventHorizon42]

I love that you're working on making the game faster, but this post touched on an issue that has plagued the vast majority of the (multi-session) multiplayer Stellaris games I've played:

On the server the Prikki-Ti action is resolved first, killing the Blorg. The Blorg action that comes after (possibly on another thread) is discarded as dead Blorgs can’t shoot (it’s a scientific fact). The client however distributed the computation in another way (maybe it has more cores than the server) and in his world the Blorg dispatched the Prikki-Ti first, which in turn couldn’t fight back. Then both players get the dreaded “Player is Out of Sync” popup as their realities have diverged.

That is, the dreaded "desync" issue. Are these "out of sync" issues simply an unavoidable consequence of how the game is designed? Why can't a single player (i.e. the game host) preform these order-dependent calculations so that the "out of sync" issues can be avoided?

Disappointingly, it seems to happen for us most often when we host a save file, immediately after attempting to continue games we have already invested hours into playing.

Is Paradox investigating (or otherwise working on) this problem?

 

[ProtoformX]

Er, I wonder about the elephant in the room.

Has anyone asked why pdx is using dx rendering instead of vulkan?

 

[KaiserTom]

Er, I wonder about the elephant in the room.

Has anyone asked why pdx is using dx rendering instead of vulkan?

Because the game is bound by the simulation thread, not the graphics thread. Switching to vulkan is meaningless.

 

[ProtoformX]

Because the game is bound by the simulation thread, not the graphics thread. Switching to vulkan is meaningless.

Okay,
Then I've obviously missed something somewhere.
DX12 and vulkan can both do low level (low overhead) resource and task management.
DX12 and vulkan can do graphics.

What do you mean by simulation thread, and how does that translate to dx11 doing something that opengl and vulkan cannot?