[MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

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thereaverofdarkness
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by thereaverofdarkness »

npuldon wrote:MORE IMPORTANTLY, however, is the crazy FPS drop issue when zoomed out :/ If it were not for that I would probably still use this mod, as would many others.

Cheers
I have also experienced this with the high-res terrain. I had to switch it off because it was making Factorio unplayable. It appears to mesh poorly with radar vision coverage, and gets progressively worse as you perform the following actions:
1.) place more radars
2.) place radars with a larger vision area
3.) explore more terrain gradually throughout the game
4.) zoom your view out
5.) zoom in on radar vision area
6.) move fast--ex. riding in a train

The issue appears suddenly as VRAM runs out, and without warning it can cripple your machine, requiring whole minutes just to load the task manager to quit the game.

My recommendation, as painful as I'm sure it will be to you, is to remove about half of the terrain tiles. You have several gradients to each terrain type, and they look simply amazing. But I'd bet there would be a pretty substantial performance increase if some of the in-between tile types were removed, and there were fewer total gradients. It would also solve tile limit issues with other mods.

Zyrconia
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by Zyrconia »

Hi!

Great mod! Helps a lot after hundreds of hours of Factorio.

But could we have an option to disable terrain speed penalties in the mod options dialog?

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by PeteTheLich »

Zyrconia wrote:
But could we have an option to disable terrain speed penalties in the mod options dialog?
+1

I use this mod but I started in a sort of moon regolith area and oh my god doing angel bobs with what feels like -1000% running speed is agony i could only play around 30 minutes to an hour before taking a break the speed penalty is brutal for starting off.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by Earendel »

Zyrconia wrote:Hi!

Great mod! Helps a lot after hundreds of hours of Factorio.

But could we have an option to disable terrain speed penalties in the mod options dialog?
Yeah, I'll add an option for that. I'll make it a multiplier so you can reduce the penalties to 50%, 0% or whatever you want.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by Earendel »

The latest version has settings to control biomes, so you can remove unwanted tiles.

There's a setting for the walking speed penalty multiplier.

The version also has most decoratives using the 'tinting' system so there are hundreds less textures used. That might improve the FPS problems some people were having but since I can't recreate the issue myself I can't check.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by yghgdzs »

Can we have a setting to diaable/control the amount of "dead trees" and "dry trees"? The reason is, that they are nice decorations but make it very difficult to drive around with vehicles like cars.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by neoc »

No reply to the performance issues? So are these known issues that can't be fixed?

I have a lot of RAM (12GB) and my GPU is still fine for most things GTX750, 2GB VRAM, just the CPU is not that beefy anymore (1st gen i7 from 2008 or something). Are people complaining rather those who use something like notebook or buildin graphics or those who don't have top tier GPUs?

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by Arch666Angel »

neoc wrote:
Sat Oct 13, 2018 7:58 am
No reply to the performance issues? So are these known issues that can't be fixed?

I have a lot of RAM (12GB) and my GPU is still fine for most things GTX750, 2GB VRAM, just the CPU is not that beefy anymore (1st gen i7 from 2008 or something). Are people complaining rather those who use something like notebook or buildin graphics or those who don't have top tier GPUs?
The problem is with the VRAM, specially if you are using HR gfx as well, the you need at least 4 GB and in some cases (more mods to add stuff) even this can be a shortfall, the GPU itself is hardly touched at all.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by neoc »

Arch666Angel wrote:
Sat Oct 13, 2018 8:04 am
The problem is with the VRAM, specially if you are using HR gfx as well, the you need at least 4 GB and in some cases (more mods to add stuff) even this can be a shortfall, the GPU itself is hardly touched at all.
Thanks for the insight! I guess Factorio doesn't have a sophisticated handling of VRAM resources because that's not necessary for the base game (not a lot of assets), and so everything is just loaded at once. And then it's the job of the lower level APIs to handle bottlenecks in VRAM, and they - of course - are not very efficient at this and just constantly swap in and out stuff regardless whether it is already needed again in the next frame.

Oh well, I have to upgrade my system, but I hate that I would need to upgrade to Win10 then. Maybe some time in 2019...

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by npuldon »

So I just upgraded my video card to a GTX 1070ti 8GB from a AMD r9 27 2GB. The large drops in FPS are still prevalent at game start with this mod. The FPS drops happen and are worse when when I head diagonally into unexplored terrain, the more trees/doodas there are present on the screen, and lastly the more zoomed out I am.

My UPS is also going down when I perform the above actions but by a smaller amount just running around in the beginning of the game. I have an AMD-FX8350, 8GB DDR3. Without this mod, my UPS never drops below 60 until I get pretty into the late game (past multiple rocket launches). Graphics card vRam utilization is about 4GB/50% with this mod on.

Is there anything that can be done outside of upgrading the rest of my system? At this point, I'm not even sure if that would help.


Update: Did some more testing. Without all my exoskeletons on the FPS drop while moving diagonally through unexplored terrain is 0-10, with my 9 exoskeletons on the FPS drop is 30-40FPS + major stuttering while moving diagonally through unexplored terrain. Interesting that the speed boost from the exoskeletons affects the performance so much while moving diagonally through unexplored terrain.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by npuldon »

Does the HR res terrain mod do anything? It already looks like there are high res textures in the main alien biomes mod.

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Every Biome Screenshot Gallery

Post by Twisted6 »

I've made a screenshot gallery of every biome for anyone who wants a list.
https://imgur.com/gallery/P3FIk1v

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by neoc »

npuldon wrote:
Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:35 am
So I just upgraded my video card to a GTX 1070ti 8GB from a AMD r9 27 2GB. The large drops in FPS are still prevalent at game start with this mod. The FPS drops happen and are worse when when I head diagonally into unexplored terrain, the more trees/doodas there are present on the screen, and lastly the more zoomed out I am.

My UPS is also going down when I perform the above actions but by a smaller amount just running around in the beginning of the game. I have an AMD-FX8350, 8GB DDR3. Without this mod, my UPS never drops below 60 until I get pretty into the late game (past multiple rocket launches). Graphics card vRam utilization is about 4GB/50% with this mod on.

Is there anything that can be done outside of upgrading the rest of my system? At this point, I'm not even sure if that would help.


Update: Did some more testing. Without all my exoskeletons on the FPS drop while moving diagonally through unexplored terrain is 0-10, with my 9 exoskeletons on the FPS drop is 30-40FPS + major stuttering while moving diagonally through unexplored terrain. Interesting that the speed boost from the exoskeletons affects the performance so much while moving diagonally through unexplored terrain.
It doesn't matter how much the FPS/UPS drops when generating the world, what matters is the performance in already generated terrain.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by npuldon »

to you maybe

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by neoc »

npuldon wrote:
Fri Nov 30, 2018 10:23 am
to you maybe
The GPU isn't involved in generating terrain, that's solely done on the CPU. In part by Factorio core, in part by mods like Alien Biomes. So it doesn't make any sense to bring up GPU specs if you want to complain about map generation time. GPU is only relevant once terrain is generated and only needs to be rendered.

Also terrain generation has to be done only once. Even if it is painfully slow, you can end up with a perfectly enjoyable game.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by featherwinglove »

Public Service Announcement

I've hit the path tile ID limit by trying to install too many flooring mods at once, in my case Dectorio, Extra Floors, Alien Biomes, and several smaller mods which have paths (something Bio Industries, not Dp77's, Asphalt Roads, Inlaid Lamps (I think), etc.)

This is one of those big mods. I suspect (but not have rigorously tested) that Dectorio, Extra Floors, and Alien Biomes can't exist in the same installation, and that only two of the three are supported by core Factorio before blowing this limit.

(Alien Biomes reply) Unfortunately for my new modpack planet's variation and beauty, this was the one I ditched, so I probably enjoyed it for the shortest period, my ATLO for this modpack happened to be in alphabetical order, so of the tile mods, Alien Biomes was installed first and had the most starts during the build phase (which isn't done yet). Then came Dectorio (which I haven't used much) and then came Extra Floors, and Factorio started packing up. Unfortunately, Dectorio and Extra Floors both have functionality I want in my new base, so the environment got sacrificed (oh, the irony :lol: ) I had not yet read about the lag spikes at the top of this page, but had before posting this reply. I have only 2GB of VRAM, so I'm glad I had. This mod pack is so complicated that a mid-to-late game crash is probably inevitable as it is.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by RocketManChronicles »

@Earendel
In light of the recent few FFF posts on terrain generation, will you be adding in options to control biter spawning in certain biomes? Ideas I have are that biters stay near water or in grassland areas, and also stay out of hostile environments like volcanic or desert; or maybe vice versa. My imagination ran wild reading that and wondered if you were going to play with any of it?

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by LUXIIUS »

Updating to 0.17 has made me realize how boring the vanilla game world is. Alien biomes should honestly be part of the vanilla experience, and I can't wait for it to get updated for 0.17!

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by BlueTemplar »

featherwinglove wrote:
Thu Dec 27, 2018 4:52 pm
I've hit the path tile ID limit by trying to install too many flooring mods at once, in my case Dectorio, Extra Floors, Alien Biomes, and several smaller mods which have paths (something Bio Industries, not Dp77's, Asphalt Roads, Inlaid Lamps (I think), etc.)

This is one of those big mods. I suspect (but not have rigorously tested) that Dectorio, Extra Floors, and Alien Biomes can't exist in the same installation, and that only two of the three are supported by core Factorio before blowing this limit.
I've had this happen "solely" with AngelBobs and Alien Biomes + Dectorio, while adding Asphalt Roads.
(I decided to ditch Asphalt Roads.)
IIRC there's a setting available removing unused (vanilla?) terrain that should help with that ?
(I haven't tried it as it was an ongoing game, and I din't care about Asphalt Roads that much anyway...)

Also, IIRC this limit will be gone in 0.17...
BobDiggity (mod-scenario-pack)

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steinio
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

Post by steinio »

BlueTemplar wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:59 pm
Also, IIRC this limit will be gone in 0.17...
No, it's fixed forever with this limit.
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