soo 0.15.

[Sparkysam]

As soon as I saw multithreading on the news I was soo happy but I have heard nothing about it and it seems the devs and the team are more interested in the graphics so the game can hog more resources it does not have...
I am all for nice graphics as long as it does not do a watch_dogs... which the way this is going it is going to be because nobody is seeing the long-term perspective of the need for good performance of a game, at this rate this game is going to become another performance like Minecraft, might as well have coded this game is java...

Why are we hearing nothing about how more threads as being used, how server performance is become better and making it better for clients and servers to talk and perform at higher clock speeds 3.9Ghz+ about performance of robots and entities, e.g. running a decently modded game and being able to leverage all my 12 threads on my 6 core machine which still only uses one core at a time... (are we still in the 90's where they only had 1 core?? No) I understand coding for more cores is not easy but with engines like DX12 and Vulcan it is made easier for devs, yes this is not built on that platform but still why are we still on 1 core for this game when it was known it was becoming a mods haven, but it is actually turning into a players nightmare; there is a player base with decent PC's with more thatn1 cores with people with i5's and i7's or i7E's like me so come on devs concentrate on what is needed not what is wanted.

Side note - playing a game at half speed is horrible because the server can only leverage 1 core and struggles if you go any faster even at 4.2, same on the client side. Is this the game you really want to release where it becomes something awesome like sins of a solar empire but struggles because of its performance? I hope not.

[impetus maximus]

resources they do not have? i play on toaster graphics (HD 3000) and get solid 60FPS

smoke disabled

factorio devs are the best i've seen as far as optimizing code. i have faith the update will be wonderful.

[SaintFlow]

The only thing I see is that you did not do your homework before ranting. You can say all you want about the devs, but saying bad optimization is pretty much blasphemy. This is not ARK. Far from it IMHO. However, if it was true, you would be right. But I think frankly, you are not.

[LotA]

/bashing on
Sparkysam, sorry to say that but this post, and others, are plain bullshit.

- While Rseding91 has spent most of his time on 0.15 doing (multicore) optimization, its pretty cool that other Wube developer are not twiddling their thumbs and actually do interesting things like HD graphics or even the speaker you seem to dislike already.. But we were legion to be craving for it.

- Comparing factorio's performance to minecraft is simply an insult as factorio is already incredibly efficient and smooth, even before the last big optimization milestone it was good enough, (i discovered and finished factorio on 0.9.10, never had to complain about performances and i'm on a laptop)
FFF-148, FFF-165 and this topic

- DX12 and Vulcan have absolutely nothing to do with multicore/multithread, it's a GPU thing and will simply not affect the UPS. Saying such crap shows how little you know about computer programming/technologies. It's ok not to be a computer engineer but just don't try to teach the it-guys their job.

- HD graphics is a GPU thing, you won't feel the slightest impact on the CPU and so on the UPS. and regarding to this post from posila, HD will take 2-4GB Vram which a 1050ti or any 1060 (basically any brand new graphic card from low+/mid tier) provide already.

- On the hardware matter : new hardware is supposed to be faster/more powerful (i'll admit it's not that true lately) so the game performances should "naturally" increase over time. Point is : Every "big" games, meaning long to develop are build ahead of time regarding hardware specs (like every AAA games and so). factorio is still early access so you might consider it's supposed to run on the next gen of cpus.

- On another topic, you ask for the server to run at the speed on the slowest peer... that is actually how it worked before the multiplayer code rework and its was such a pain that you'd never bear playing with more than 3 people... Now we can have like 500 players simultaneously.. How dare you complain about the new system? FFF-147, FFF-156

Once again, I've never seen a program run this smoothly considering the amount of entities being refreshed/processed everywhere everytime. So far I've been enchanted by how wube worked things out so maybe you could just cut them some slack and try to provide some constructive criticism once the update is out?

/bashing off

[hoho]

Why are we hearing nothing about how more threads as being used, how server performance is become better and making it better for clients and servers to talk and perform at higher clock speeds 3.9Ghz+ about performance of robots and entities, e.g. running a decently modded game and being able to leverage all my 12 threads on my 6 core machine which still only uses one core at a time... (are we still in the 90's where they only had 1 core?? No)

Factorio has doubled the size of bases one can build every version for at least last 3 big upgrades and with 0.15, they've said they also have huge performance increases. All that without even poking at multithreading all that much.

They first have to get other optimizations in place before multithreading even makes much sense. Currently one of the biggest problems is that their data is scattered in RAM so that the efficiency of how it's accessed isn't quite optimal. If you were to multithread such a thing, you won't get all that much benefits as you're not CPU bound, you're memory bandwith/latency bound.

Btw, are you aware they just because your task manager is showing in some games that your CPU is using more than one core it doesn't mean it's using it in any way effectively? Extremely few games scale linearly with adding more cores to your machine. In most you're lucky to get 2x speedup with 1->4 cores.

[hansinator]

Let's try sarcasm: Dear Sparkysam, you've bought that expensive CPU with so many cores and Factorio just won't make use of all the dollars you've paid. What a pity! The devs just ignore your right to performance that comes boxed with these kind of CPUs. You've got my sympathy to the fullest!

Okay, enough exclamation marks. You could've searched the forum first before unloading your frustration into this thread. There is a vital discussion about multi-threading in another thread (although it has turned a little into a public dispute between the different churches of CPU architecture).

I must agree with the posts above that it looks like you seem to not really understand what you are talking about. The devs have already made their point that multi-threading is not the shiny golden key to more performance. If you actively read the forum and the FFFs you would notice that the devs are pursuing a multitude of possibilities to improve the game in many aspects. I'd also like to add that it is still an early release title, so don't expect a finished game. It is surely a good thing to point out weaknesses so the devs can consider improvements, but I honestly believe another discussion about multi-threading brings us no further. Especially not on this low level.

[Xeanoa]

The only thing that really bugs me about performance is the autosave.

With RAM speeds exceeding 50 GiB/s nowadays, why does it take several seconds to make a copy of the game-state to calculate a save from?

From what I understand, autosave
-pauses the game
-creates a copy of the game-state
-resumes the game
-calculates save-date in the background

[hansinator]

The only thing that really bugs me about performance is the autosave.

With RAM speeds exceeding 50 GiB/s nowadays, why does it take several seconds to make a copy of the game-state to calculate a save from?

From what I understand, autosave
-pauses the game
-creates a copy of the game-state
-resumes the game
-calculates save-date in the background

Yeah it bugs me, too. There will be an improvement in 0.15, because of changes to the way that decorative entities on the map are represented. There's tons of resources about the topic here viewtopic.php?f=80&t=21367
Your understanding seems to be right. One of the devs, Rseding91, says he has measured stuff and the game spends the most time to copy data in RAM and serialize it.

Now my guess to why it takes so long to copy the game state is because there are many, many accesses to non-contiguous regions of memory. Doing so dramatically reduces the usable memory bandwidth. That is something that can not easily be fixed without heavy refactoring. But as far as I know the devs are aware of such things already.

[Sparkysam]

/bashing on
Sparkysam, sorry to say that but this post, and others, are plain bullshit.

- While Rseding91 has spent most of his time on 0.15 doing (multicore) optimisation, it's pretty cool that other Wube developer is not twiddling their thumbs and actually do interesting things like HD graphics or even the speaker you seem to dislike already. But we were legion to be craving for it.

Maybe so, but from every other game I have played like sins of a solar empire, Supreme commander, Minecraft, Command and conquer etc.. HD graphics are cool in all and yes will use more VRAM fine no grudges there but it should and again no problems for my 780, maybe every is craving better graphics but I have enough problems with my modded games keeping them above 20fps before the update with this update I feel I will get less than 10.

- Comparing factory's performance to Minecraft is simply an insult as factorio is already incredibly efficient and smooth, even before the last big optimisation milestone it was good enough, (i discovered and finished factorio on 0.9.10, never had to complain about performances and I'm on a laptop)
FFF-148, FFF-165 and this topic

If your version of smooth for the game which I bet is vanilla is glorious but is not my cup of tea which is expected because everyone is different.
Okay, would you like me to compare this game to sins of a solar empire then??

- DX12 and Vulcan have absolutely nothing to do with multicore/multithread, it's a GPU thing and will simply not affect the UPS. Saying such crap shows how little you know about computer programming/technologies. It's ok not to be a computer engineer but just don't try to teach the it-guys their job.

Software no because that is not my interest, hardware, on the other hand, is my life, my hobby and did I also mention my job.

- On the hardware matter: new hardware is supposed to be faster/more powerful (I'll admit it's not that true lately) so the game performances should "naturally" increase over time. The point is: Every "big" game, meaning long to develop are build ahead of time regarding hardware specs (like every AAA games and so). factorio is still early access so you might consider it's supposed to run on the next gen of CPUs.

I don't expect it to run on next generation of hardware, most older hardware such as mine or yours or someone else needs to be utilised we've had 4 core CPU's for around 8 years now and yet the fashion of 1 core is still here.
From what I know from testing in this game is faster hardware helps and overclocking in this game is a must, but the fact that I might as well turn off all but maybe 2 cores of my CPU ( 1 for factorio and 1 for my computer) and then just max my overclock as much as I can.

- On another topic, you ask for the server to run at the speed on the slowest peer... that is actually how it worked before the multiplayer code rework and its was such a pain that you'd never bear playing with more than 3 people... Now we can have like 500 players simultaneously... How dare you complain about the new system? FFF-147, FFF-156

How dare I complain are you my mother???
500 people where everyone is slowed down by the slowest client... Yeah, that's fantastic so if I play on my laptop everyone else gets screwed, which means playing this game on the go is but impossible.


Once again, I've never seen a program run this smoothly considering a number of entities being refreshed/processed everywhere every time. So far I've been enchanted by how wube worked things out so maybe you could just cut them some slack and try to provide some constructive criticism once the update is out?[/quote]

Okay I shall :
1) Modding is the future of this game and most update come from it, if anything is to be done make it better for mods to perform.
2) Add a check box for turning off catchup feature on servers.
3) make it so my game is not like this everytime i play [img=cpuusage]https://i.imgur.com/XGtbqeJ.png[/img]
/bashing off

[Sparkysam]

Let's try sarcasm: Dear Sparkysam, you've bought that expensive CPU with so many cores and Factorio just won't make use of all the dollars you've paid. What a pity! The devs just ignore your right to performance that comes boxed with this kind of CPUs. You've got my sympathy to the fullest!

Actually, i bought it for 3D modelling for my job so no problem, but

Okay, enough exclamation marks. You could've searched the forum first before unloading your frustration into this thread. There is a vital discussion about multi-threading in another thread (although it has turned a little into a public dispute between the different churches of CPU architecture).

Yes, CPU architecture changes many things but in this case, I am talking about raw performance.

I must agree with the posts above that it looks like you seem to not really understand what you are talking about. The devs have already made their point that multi-threading is not the shiny golden key to more performance. If you actively read the forum and the FFFs you would notice that the devs are pursuing a multitude of possibilities to improve the game in many aspects. I'd also like to add that it is still an early release title, so don't expect a finished game. It is surely a good thing to point out weaknesses so the devs can consider improvements, but I honestly believe another discussion about multi-threading brings us no further. Especially not on this low level.

Maybe they should keep us updating on how that front is going then and maybe less of these topics might spring up
Yes and not to you saying it's not a golden key, can I ask you if you've ever played games like sins of a solar empire or supreme commander forged alliance??
we have more cores in computers so that more tasks can be done simultanisouly, that the whole point instead of asking one of my cores of my 4.4 Ghz CPU to get everything done; asking a computer to do everything through one core is like saying to a team of workers hey all of you rest expect one of you which will do all of their work and expect the same speed to that if a whole team did it.

[hansinator]

Sorry my inner voice keeps repeating "don't feed the troll!".

[Arch666Angel]

Sorry my inner voice keeps repeating "don't feed the troll!".

You should see a doctor

[Linosaurus]

If your version of smooth for the game which I bet is vanilla is glorious but is not my cup of tea which is expected because everyone is different.

The thing is, the performance of the base game is one thing. Performance with a bunch of mods is a completely different thing. You cannot really compare them.

No matter how well the base game runs, too many mods or mods with complicated scripting, *will* tank your performance. There is nothing the devs can do about that. They speed it up a bit, you find a new cool mod, back to where we started.

Trying to add multi core support to mod scripting, while keeping multiplayer in sync, is *not* a good idea. Btw, one of the games you mentioned doesn't even have multi core support if my brief web search is correct: sins of a solar empire.

[LotA]

I have absolutely no specific knowledge about the factorio engine, but from everything i've read fff or forum, this is my believes :

The game engine has a few "flaws", i use quotes because in the end it's a matter of personal opinion and no one can blame the devs for creating this great game :d
The first one is the 45° camera with square tiles creating quite heavy distortions and some (lots?) of weird situations, the train rework period made it clear.
To me, the need to restart the whole game when you enable a mod also feels like a flaw.
And I believe the engine itself, by its architecture also has its defaults which en the end is why the multi-threading optimizations are hard/limited

These things are now there and the amount of code rework is just a joke, you'd better rewrite the game from scratch.
Conscious of this facts, the choice the devs made is to not to try to make things that lacks proper foundations and avoid to create a labyrinthine code mess
So they decided to do as much as they can on the current engine, not breaking everything and pushing it to its very limits.

Maybe one day factorio2 will address these flaws in better ways, but it will have its own flaws too because nothing is ever perfect.
So relax and enjoy this very enjoyable game.

I will mention Don't starve (together) which I believe have a really nice and comfortable engine, especially on the modding aspects. Great steamwork integration, surfaces are actually different server, etc. The map is not entirely calculated though
this game along with factorio made me forget any other survival/base building games and I don't see any other game lately that attracts me.

I guess the only games i could be willing to try are
a new minecraft (not in java :d) that would have a full map update and a deep eco-system with mobs... and conveyor belts !
a more friendly-use but not butchered dwarf fortress with multiplayer.

[Koub]

Yeah modded game should perform as well as vanilla. Mods making the game slow is obviously the game's fault.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lofQKlShPc

#Ohwait

[Sparkysam]

Yeah modded game should perform as well as vanilla. Mods making the game slow is obviously the game's fault.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lofQKlShPc

#Ohwait

Love it best use of that car I have ever seen, okay then let me take a different approach to this.
So I had a look this morning at updates for my game take into mine the game is 64MB in size compressed and uses angel ores and BOB's (will upload later if people want to see)
54-60% of my game is going to game update, another only 15% is entity and then the odd 1-2 % on mods depending on the mod, which I have been removing factorissimo as I believed that was an issue over time, and have been trying to find what might be the route cause of the issues for this map, as running at 0.5 game speed and an Avg fps of 17.6 is not exactly fun after a while for sure.

[ssilk]

I can recommend reading this very long post from Harkonnen (Factorio Dev) in the already mentioned thread about parallel processing:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=39893&start=60#p238247 Parrallel processing in games & applications

In my eyes this explains everything about parallel processing with Factorio you need to know.

[hoho]

So I had a look this morning at updates for my game take into mine the game is 64MB in size compressed

Size on disk has nothing to do with the performance in-game.

I have been removing factorissimo as I believed that was an issue over time

Yes, factorissimo doesn't scale well due to having to use Lua code to move items between outside and inside "worlds" of the factories. It's slooooow. Similarly, pretty much all of the automatic loot collecting mods create huge slowdowns.

running at 0.5 game speed and an Avg fps of 17.6 is not exactly fun after a while for sure.

In case you weren't aware, FPS will never be higher than UPS (updates per second).

How big is your base? What sort of production throughput does it have?

[Nexela]

Post your mod list and I can tell you which mods to shoot to gain some life back

[Arch666Angel]

Post your mod list and I can tell you which mods to shoot to gain some life back

#blameNexela