Factorio Forums

So I've been using the beta version the mod you've posted in here and I've noticed severe performance issues. I recently upgraded to a 1080ti so I was really blindsided when I can run Doom at 60fps but not factorio. I think it has to do with the sheer number of decoratives placed by this mod. I didn't have the same issues with my old card, but I also used to run sprite resolution at normal instead of high.

I don't really want to turn down the graphics options, does anyone have any tips to increase performance? I've been getting ~37fps/ups fully zoomed out.

EDIT: nevermind, didn't realize I was two versions behind, getting 60/60 now

DoxxMulder wrote:So I've been using the beta version the mod you've posted in here and I've noticed severe performance issues. I recently upgraded to a 1080ti so I was really blindsided when I can run Doom at 60fps but not factorio. I think it has to do with the sheer number of decoratives placed by this mod. I didn't have the same issues with my old card, but I also used to run sprite resolution at normal instead of high.

I don't really want to turn down the graphics options, does anyone have any tips to increase performance? I've been getting ~37fps/ups fully zoomed out.

EDIT: nevermind, didn't realize I was two versions behind, getting 60/60 now

Yeah the autoplace settings are awkward to configure, that's why I didn't release the preview version.

In v0.3.5 (uploading now):

If over 255 tiles are in data.raw the game won't load, so tiles are removed (replaced with landfill) until it will load an you can access the menu. This at least lets you access the menu and disable mods that add tiles you don't need, or you can play that way if you don't mind missing those tiles. You can see what is removed in your log file.

Some rogue tree and tile layer order problems should also be fixed.

I noticed that a lot of assets are just a recolor of each other, is it possible to just use tint while referring to the same file to reduce atlas? Also to reduce file size as well.

Edit : it's actually impossible for terrain but fine for decoratives viewtopic.php?f=25&t=56680

I'll give that a go once tile can be recolored / tinted.

Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

jooe wrote:Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

No, all it does is add some textures in a graphics folder. If Alien Biomes is still installed then you shouldn't see a 255 error message, so maybe you uninstalled both somehow?

Oh, there is an update ready to go but I can't upload it to the mod portal because of a mod portal bug.

Is it just me or does Alien Biomes disable almost all cliffs, i havent really seen any besides 2 spots of 3*3 minicliffs at my spawnpoint.
Default terrain settings minus low/big water.

Earendel wrote:

jooe wrote:Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

No, all it does is add some textures in a graphics folder. If Alien Biomes is still installed then you shouldn't see a 255 error message, so maybe you uninstalled both somehow?

I can reproduce the issue with my currently active mods list. Using the mods-list.json attached to this post works fine, but when you change "enabled": true to "enabled": false for alien-biomes-hr-terrain factorio does not load because of the tile limit error. I could not reproduce the case where factorio loads but the save file doesn't, maybe it was because earlier I tried disabling other mods to get below the 255 tiles limit ...
btw what I say is for factorio 0.16.16 (0.16.18 has some new issues with my mods ...), version for linux x64, running in Fedora 27

Termak wrote:Is it just me or does Alien Biomes disable almost all cliffs, i havent really seen any besides 2 spots of 3*3 minicliffs at my spawnpoint.
Default terrain settings minus low/big water.

It shouldn't, the elevation layer is not affected. The only change to cliffs is to make them slightly transparent so they don't clash with different rock colours as much.

jooe wrote:

Earendel wrote:

jooe wrote:Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

No, all it does is add some textures in a graphics folder. If Alien Biomes is still installed then you shouldn't see a 255 error message, so maybe you uninstalled both somehow?

I can reproduce the issue with my currently active mods list. Using the mods-list.json attached to this post works fine, but when you change "enabled": true to "enabled": false for alien-biomes-hr-terrain factorio does not load because of the tile limit error. I could not reproduce the case where factorio loads but the save file doesn't, maybe it was because earlier I tried disabling other mods to get below the 255 tiles limit ...
btw what I say is for factorio 0.16.16 (0.16.18 has some new issues with my mods ...), version for linux x64, running in Fedora 27

I can't recreate the problem. I've checked the code and the only thing in data.raw that it changes with/without the hr mod is whether or not a high res texture file is specified, nothing else changes. I guess having the mod there might change the load order of something so maybe a different mod adds another tile in after the alien biomes final fixes tries to work around the 255 limit. The thing is, the workaround was made so people can get to the menu to disable some mods without hacking their files. Since you can do that anyway, you just need to disable mods that are adding too many tiles.

I can't recreate the problem. I've checked the code and the only thing in data.raw that it changes with/without the hr mod is whether or not a high res texture file is specified, nothing else changes. I guess having the mod there might change the load order of something so maybe a different mod adds another tile in after the alien biomes final fixes tries to work around the 255 limit. The thing is, the workaround was made so people can get to the menu to disable some mods without hacking their files. Since you can do that anyway, you just need to disable mods that are adding too many tiles.

Of course you're right, it doesn't matter that much and I can play the game (and even continue my save) if I just keep my settings - I was just curious about the strangeness of what happened. Thanks for trying to find out and for your great work on this mod

So despite significant performance increase since updating to the most recent iteration of this mod, I still get FPS/UPS drops when fully zoomed out. 60/60 to ~37/37. Not sure if this is a problem with Alien Biomes or factorio in general.

ALSO

A lot of the decoratives aren't removed by placing concrete over them. Which makes the concrete look very strange when it's all covered in craters and dirt. Is this planned to be fixed at some point?

I noticed that a lot of the terrain details, such as lava lakes, dirt patches, etc lay over the stone and concrete floor layers. Is this intended?

EDIT: Haha, see comment above mine.

using Alien Biomes 0.3.7 and (Alien Biomes HR 0.3.1), i just found different behavior depending on whether the HR textures are enabled or not.

when i tried last week with older versions, missing tiles crashed some other mods. thus i started a new map for some tests with no mods at all, and came back to a modded game only today after i had read that Alien Biomes did some "new tricks". but i still have problems:

after enabling a nice large collection of mods, including Alien Biomes (but not the HR textures), factorio no longer wanted to start because of the "255 limit", with options only to "disable ALL mods", "restart", or "exit", giving no option to use the internal mod handler to disable some specific mods or change their mod configuration. to not lose my selection of mods, i didn't "disable all mods", but had to "exit" and then manually find and edit the json file.
just out of curiosity, i did not disable any mods (neither Alien Biomes nor any others), and instead enabled the HR textures.

and now the surprise: factorio started with no single error or warning messages! to me it looks as if your solution with the reduction of tiles is only a "quick&dirty" hack. as long as it works it's fine, but it's very probable to hit situations where it no longer works and then i have to clean up mods myself without knowing which mods add how many tiles. in the long run, a more robust and permanent solution seems to be needed which solves the problem for all mods and similar conflicts. i am no modder and have no idea how to implement ID and tile management, maybe even some addition to the game itself (by the devs) is needed?

since Alien Biomes is a huge contributor to those IDs (>170 in the above list, next is Asphalt with >50 and then <30 for all others) and if you don't have a better idea yourself, another temporary solution might be to reduce the number of different biomes, either automatically reducing them so long until few enough remain, or disabling them all at first and letting the user select which ones he wants.
until then I'll try running a map with HR textures, and if that doesn't work perfectly then select the simplest solution for me, to remove the single mod which uses up more than 70% of the IDs :-(

The decals appearing over concrete problem should be fixed as of 0.3.8.

For people hitting the 255 tile limit, the best thing you can do is ask the Factorio devs to increase the 255 tile limit to something much larger. The problem is only going to get worse as people add more and more mods to their games.

Earendel wrote:For people hitting the 255 tile limit, the best thing you can do is ask the Factorio devs to increase the 255 tile limit to something much larger. The problem is only going to get worse as people add more and more mods to their games.

Here's an existing thread if people what to chime in on it, but the devs have already said "no".

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=56619

posila wrote:This limit won't be ever increased. I am sorry.

posila wrote:Anyway 255 is very reasonable maximum number of tile types. Vanilla uses just 31, so mods can still add more than 200 tile types. Go complain to the mod creators to keep their usage of tiles reasonable

This would be another solution: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=56680

There's also the possibility of having more of the terrain variation done using decals, but that would be a much bigger performance drain, plus a lot of people have them switched off.

Oh also, if the API command for surface.regenerate_decorative() worked the same way as initial spawning then I could do more on my terrain regeneration script, in which case adding and removing tiles would be less of an issue so I could add mod options to disable sets of tiles.

On the latest update 0.16.20, my game crashes when I try to place landfill. Doesn't happen if I toggle Alien Biomes off and toggling AB HD textures has no effect.

Save game file attached. Please let me know if there's any other information that could help.


Update
The crash doesn't happen if I remove the LandfillPainting mod. So, maybe there is some interaction between Alien Biomes and LandfillPainting?

DoxxMulder wrote:So I've been using the beta version the mod you've posted in here and I've noticed severe performance issues. I recently upgraded to a 1080ti so I was really blindsided when I can run Doom at 60fps but not factorio. I think it has to do with the sheer number of decoratives placed by this mod. I didn't have the same issues with my old card, but I also used to run sprite resolution at normal instead of high.

I don't really want to turn down the graphics options, does anyone have any tips to increase performance? I've been getting ~37fps/ups fully zoomed out.

EDIT: nevermind, didn't realize I was two versions behind, getting 60/60 now

I have similar issues with 0.3.8. Zooming out causes my FPS to very quickly drop to under 10, going all the way down to 5 at full view. I'm using a much older card though, a GTX 760, but I get a full 60 FPS when the mod is disabled, regardless of zoom.

EDIT: Tried to recreate the lag again today and it's fine all of a sudden.