Takes ages to save distant world (Full Version)

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janamdo -> Takes ages to save distant world (7/12/2014 5:00:35 PM)

I am trying to find out some numbers for the objects in distant world and automate a lot for that purpose.
I takes now probably 10 to 15 minutes to save ..too long
The money went from 1.2 million to now minus 0.6 million [;)]..the game must keep on running to see later the figures of the designed ships and other parts
I must get rid of the fleets .. i do have 8 now .. one button to scrap or retire the fleet?
Well to solve this..to reduce the fleet.. i try to attack... perhaps on the weakest neighbour to claim his territority
Multiple targets for the fleet to destroy all in the starsystem?
Fleetmanagement ... what is possible with a fleet(s) ?

Takes now 20 minutes to save..game is unplayable ( i must automatic save set off )what CPU (computerprocessor) i do need and how much memory.. i know this processor in my computer (AMD 4 core) is not strong in calculations
Perhaps a AMD upgrade ? .. motherboard is stiil capable for a stronger CPU, but i think i must be the newest motherboard with a fast chipset
Idea..maybe a sdd to store the game on too.



janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/12/2014 9:02:53 PM)

space port automation .. is this colony facility building?



Bingeling -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/12/2014 10:20:08 PM)

For me saving becomes very slow when the galaxy is rather full. That is, fully colonized, full colonies, lots of civilian ships all around.

To scrap many ships, use the ship list. Sort military ships by fleet. Click the first, and shift-flick the last to select all the fleet members, and use the scrap button that should be there.

The automation symbol on spaceports can safely be ignored.



Unforeseen -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/13/2014 5:28:45 PM)

This is nothing :P, in MOO3 changing turns took over an hour by the time the game got to around turn 4OO to 5OO.



Tehlongone -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/13/2014 9:05:10 PM)

It started happening when pirates were introduced, I find it doesn't happen if I make pirates non-respawnable and take an active effort in eradicating them. I think it's because each faction has thousands of ships it barely uses and there are, what, 50+ factions? It's less of a problem with civilizations at least.



Unforeseen -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 2:15:00 AM)

When the galaxy has a lot of things in it to save, it's going to take awhile to copy everything accurately and safely unfortunately. Also, I hate to say it but AMD is pretty poor overall. I think they finally came up with some kind of new technology that is improving their ability but Intel was working on their own better version of it. I'd say, as a rule of thumb if you plan on doing a lot of gaming that requires good processing speeds spend the extra money to get an intel processor and make sure your MB can handle it. AMD's are good for entertainment/work computers since they are cheaper generally.

Also, another note. ATI GFX...are really really terrible. I have used an ATI card in all but two of my computers and every single one of them over the last 1O or so years have been a huge disappointment. Very choppy graphics, terrible update system and the program that comes with it is unintuitive and buggy.

Ram...the absolute most you would need is 8. I wouldn't dare go below 4. I personally use 16 and will never go back.



radwyn -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 10:20:38 AM)

On my intel i7 system save times are only measured in seconds



Gilmer -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 11:58:11 AM)

How long into the game in game years are you janamdo. This concerns me, since I am about 10 years in but my saves are fairly quick.



aaatoysandmore -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 12:03:57 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Tehlongone

It started happening when pirates were introduced, I find it doesn't happen if I make pirates non-respawnable and take an active effort in eradicating them. I think it's because each faction has thousands of ships it barely uses and there are, what, 50+ factions? It's less of a problem with civilizations at least.


Depends on how many you select for the game. I just select 8 or 9 and play in a large or huge galaxy and I don't have any problems saving. But, I'm using quad core 64 bit OS and lotsa ram.



janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 12:27:42 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: H Gilmer

How long into the game in game years are you janamdo. This concerns me, since I am about 10 years in but my saves are fairly quick.

Hi H Gilmer,
When i finally stopped playing it was 2278.01.28 and started in 2100.01.06
I use also 64 bit windows professional and quad core (can overclock it : turbo ) and 4 ram ( way too little )?
The graphic card is from ati, but a gamerscard (overclocking possible)..works great on the highest resolution.
Gives 7.8 (max index for graphics), but 7,3 for the processor, and memory ,yes

Still a AMD CPU mark for AMD FX-8350 gives for my CPU 2,831 and for amd fx-8350 9,0333 it has the best CPU Mark/$price
It is 4 times faster .. and the ranking is under intel core i7-3770@3,40 Ghz 9,33
Perhaps upgrade to this processor and more ram and the motherboard must support this



Jeeves -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 1:21:34 PM)

I'll make a bet. It isn't your processor or memory that is causing the long time to save. It's your DISK DRIVE. You need a Terabyte disk drive with at least a gig of ram for buffering, which costs under $100 now. Saving with tens of thousands of ships at year 14 takes me under 30 seconds once I got a good disk drive...

Lonnie Courtney Clay

Looks like I'm a bit off on price, but here's an example...

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/desktop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/




janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 3:47:17 PM)

Thanks! for the link to this new harddrive technology for me
Strange enough i did not read in my magazines, about this hybrid drive ..SSHD
Yes , you are right i forget the harddrive ..7.3 as benchmark, but its old
Windows, the operating sytem residu on a sdd drive luckily.

I found a link to the store for a hybrid drive hybrid drive



mxmissile -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 5:02:10 PM)

Can't express how important it is to run this game off a SSD. However, it is a shame the game requires this.



janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 6:00:15 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: mxmissile

it is a shame the game requires this.

Are the algorithms not efficient enough ?
Now i am forced to buy a sshd when i play on large scale, but i am a starter so there is no direct need to buy this hybrid drive and i can save a little money now and then for a new sshd drive.



Bingeling -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 6:19:13 PM)

From what I have seen, saving can take quite a while even on an SSD. It could be a mix of computation power and hd-speed.

Also, when watching it save the 200MB size games, it takes a long while at the end without the file size showing much development. It could be file allocation or something confusing things, though.



janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 6:34:30 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

From what I have seen, saving can take quite a while even on an SSD. It could be a mix of computation power and hd-speed.



You are completely right..exactly.
My computersystem is rather slow ( i use now the turbo power ..overclocking gives at least 20 % more clockspeed? ..i noticed no improvement on the windows index [:)])
So i must upgrade the whole system than, to get those figures as @Lonnie described and he is a powerplayer with probably a powercomputer.




Bingeling -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 7:32:31 PM)

One issue comparing save times, is that we are comparing apples and oranges. We should use the same game to get some meaningful comparisons going.

I tested two save games on my computer. The save folder is on an SSD, the game is on a slower plate drive. It is a i5-3470 with 16MB of memory, running at default speeds. 64 bit windows 7.

The smallish game tried had a 55MB save file. It is the end save of my Universe AAR played with the first patch after release. Loading it took 1 minute 5 seconds, saving it took 30 seconds. The in game year is 2193.

I restarted distant worlds afterwards.

The other is from a beta version of Universe, it was an automated game with some moderately successful Gizureans. The save file is 137 MB. The year in teh game is 2403, it has run three times as many years as my manual game. The moderately sized mepire has 1300 ships and bases, and several are the same size, a couple are larger.

Load time? 2 minutes 52 seconds.
Save time? 10 minutes 25 seconds.

During saving my task manager reported 50% CPU usage the entire time (with some small drops into the high 40s). Writing a 137MB file is no huge task on an SSD, DW must do a whole lot of calculations while saving. Memory usage rose to 1.5GB and stayed there.

I would of course never, ever, play a game for 300 years, even if it did not take 10 minutes to save.

It is worth noticing that the smaller game was much faster to save than to load. The "giant" game was the opposite.



johanwanderer -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 8:06:01 PM)

I like to compare to with printing. Let's say if you want to print a 100-page document 5 times, you have two options, with and without collating. Without collating, the printer will print the 1st page 5 times, then the 2nd page 5 times, etc. while only incur the printing setup for each page once. With collating, the printer will print the enter document once, then go back and print it again, incurring the setup penalty at every page.

I suspect something similar is happening in the Distant Worlds saving process. The game iterate through the whole graph of the galaxy, loading it (possibly incur a memory swap), then serialize/save it to the compressed save stream. There's probably some iteration code in there that uses a O(n2) (or worse) loop to pick through the game elements to save.

With my setup, (quad-core CPU, 6 GB RAM, 16TB game disk on a RAID-6) my current game (95+ years in, 700 stars galaxy, 140+MB save size) takes over 20 minutes to save now. While saving, the game uses 25% of CPU (or 100% on one core). I notice that the save time starts to get works after you get to about the 90MB mark. before that, I would happily leave it on 30-minutes autosave. Afterward, it gets progressively slower, and at this point I can no longer use autosave. All of this is to support my claim about the O(n2+) iteration above, and to say that the saving process is CPU-bound.

I listed my game setup to illustrate that it's not just the galaxy's size but also the complexity of it. I have over 500 mini-carriers in my game, so over 4000 fighters in my empire; all of which need saving.

Maybe the Devs can have an option to just create a memory-mapped save file, and basically dump the whole 1.5 GB to disk and copy it (for auto-save). That'll probably takes a whole lot less time for me :)



Lucian -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 8:54:04 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Unforeseen

This is nothing :P, in MOO3 changing turns took over an hour by the time the game got to around turn 4OO to 5OO.


I'm trying hard to pretend that MOO3 never existed and this isn't helping.



Unforeseen -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/14/2014 11:58:24 PM)

I'm running DW off a 10K RPM 3OO gb drive. I DO have an SSD but it is only 9O gb is only used to run windows and programs that need to be on the same drive as windows to function.

Edit: As an afterthought I DO have a 1TB drive in my computer that I converted from an external drive but I don't run anything other than movies on it.



Jeeves -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/16/2014 1:24:06 PM)

quote:

I listed my game setup to illustrate that it's not just the galaxy's size but also the complexity of it. I have over 500 mini-carriers in my game, so over 4000 fighters in my empire; all of which need saving.


AHA! There's your problem, different from me since I build few carriers. I've never had a save take more than two minutes as a consequence. But you can't do much about the carriers of AI empires, so you still need a memory buffered hard drive to reduce save time.


Lonnie Courtney Clay



Jeeves -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/16/2014 1:26:55 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Lucian


quote:

ORIGINAL: Unforeseen

This is nothing :P, in MOO3 changing turns took over an hour by the time the game got to around turn 4OO to 5OO.


I'm trying hard to pretend that MOO3 never existed and this isn't helping.


LOL, I played it for a couple of weeks and gave up due to the long time. I played Space Empires IV and V but gave them up too due to the long turn processing waits...


Lonnie Courtney Clay



janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (7/26/2014 9:01:46 AM)

Buying the a -hybride harddisk has reduced the save and loading times..definitely the best and rather cheap solution and other slow games are working better too.. and can be used for musiccomposing programs too ..i am happy with this performance improvement.



Jeeves -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (9/28/2014 12:09:59 PM)

I just got one of these on my computer :

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD256BW

Cut my save time for a 45 megabyte file from 85 to 60 seconds, but my real problem seems to be my four year old motherboard and processor. That'll cost a bundle to replace...

Lonnie Courtney Clay



janamdo -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (10/1/2014 9:51:34 PM)

Yes, four year old motherboard and processor.. it is too old now these days this, and i am in the similar situation with a motherboard and processor, but it is still acceptable that it delivers some needed performance.
It is rather easy to upgrade with a new motherboard and processor, but there is still no real neccessity, because i can do what i like.
For 3 years i am using this pc configuration and it i still acceptable: that new shdd drive as you adviced me to buy, this is a real improvement and Distant world is playable.
bye
Jan



Shark7 -> RE: Takes ages to save distant world (10/2/2014 3:38:20 AM)

Honestly, the last time I had to replace my PC, I just bought a pre-built. Anymore its just as cheap and a whole lot less of a headache for me.

I priced it out, the cost was the same if I did it myself or let someone else do it.



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