Running through biters degrades performance permanently
Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2017 7:24 am
I tried the following thing to scout the area and ended up with a performance problem:
I wanted to scout a huge area for new resources (I play with all settings set to low/small, so sometimes resources are really scarse), so I just loaded a ton of exoskeletons into my armor to outrun every biter and added enough shields so I won't die. Then I just ran through the biter infested area (I have biter camp size on big, which means almost half the map is full of spawners). This worked great, I could explore a large area super quickly without having to kill the biter camps first.
However, more and more biters were chasing me and these got partly stuck between spawners and so on. In the end when I was back at my base behind my laser towers, my FPS had dropped from 60 to like 30 which remained like this for minutes, as most biters that chased me didn't come and die in the towers, as they were probably stuck somewhere or they would come if I waited much longer. I had small groups of biters dribbling in, but I guess this was only around 1% of all biters that followed me. When I checked the active tiles in the debug view, I saw that most tiles through which I had ran were still active, which would explain the slowdown. When showing paths with the debug view, I also saw many paths being calculated to me, which were super long (the biters were very far away, as I outran them so much and they got stuck so quickly. In the end, I had to reload an earlier save game, as the performance stayed low for at least 15 minutes (didn't want to wait longer).
So can you do anything to make such "biter chase runs" not kill FPS even after the run is finished? The simplest solution (if I understand the performance problem correctly) would surely be to let biters abort the chase once they are X chunks away (they won't get me anyway...). Or did I miss something and the performance degradation after this run came from something else?
I wanted to scout a huge area for new resources (I play with all settings set to low/small, so sometimes resources are really scarse), so I just loaded a ton of exoskeletons into my armor to outrun every biter and added enough shields so I won't die. Then I just ran through the biter infested area (I have biter camp size on big, which means almost half the map is full of spawners). This worked great, I could explore a large area super quickly without having to kill the biter camps first.
However, more and more biters were chasing me and these got partly stuck between spawners and so on. In the end when I was back at my base behind my laser towers, my FPS had dropped from 60 to like 30 which remained like this for minutes, as most biters that chased me didn't come and die in the towers, as they were probably stuck somewhere or they would come if I waited much longer. I had small groups of biters dribbling in, but I guess this was only around 1% of all biters that followed me. When I checked the active tiles in the debug view, I saw that most tiles through which I had ran were still active, which would explain the slowdown. When showing paths with the debug view, I also saw many paths being calculated to me, which were super long (the biters were very far away, as I outran them so much and they got stuck so quickly. In the end, I had to reload an earlier save game, as the performance stayed low for at least 15 minutes (didn't want to wait longer).
So can you do anything to make such "biter chase runs" not kill FPS even after the run is finished? The simplest solution (if I understand the performance problem correctly) would surely be to let biters abort the chase once they are X chunks away (they won't get me anyway...). Or did I miss something and the performance degradation after this run came from something else?