What ever happened to game performance?

[Syzygy]

I bought StarMade way back in its alpha days when it was new and developing. I quit playing when the weapons update came out.

Back then I could get 60 fps near planets with good settings including maximum texture quality, high lighting settings, bumpmaps, and pretty good draw distance. Sure it had bad performance relative to its graphics quality, but I care more about gameplay. It started getting worse when spherical planets came and the weapon's update arrived, but was still fine when away from a planet and I expected it would get better once the new planets got ironed out a bit.

Now today I'm trying it again years later. I meet the system requirements and newer Java version and drivers than back then. Yet now I'm getting about 10 frames per second in the middle of nowhere with nothing around, and settings at the absolute lowest they can go on the same system. I've looked around the support form, but would have to increase in its performance by many magnitudes to be playable.

I would really like to play StarMade because it was very fun back then and was hoping things like the new weapon system would be ironed out. Is this just how the game is now? Should I continue to stay away from the game I bought? Is it time to finally remove StarMade from my hard-drive instead of having it sit there for years despite my desire to play it once again after all this time?

 

[Snowtiger256]

Well, "back in the Alpha days when it was still developing" sounds a bit odd to me, since the game is still in Aplha and still being developed.

As to what happened to the game, well it got a ton of new features and functions that weren't there before, and all those features need their chunk of processing power, some more than others. That said, the game has changed so much that it takes a lot more to run it. In exchange to the change in performance, the game now feels much richer and more interesting, in part due to the new features. It can still be fun to play, and I encourage you to try it once more, just to see if it still has that old magic that made you spend time with it and play it.

 

[kiddan]

The new planets are probably slower than those old cookie planets we had "back in the day". Though, compared to when the new planets were implemented for the first time, performance has relatively improved. Performance as a whole hasn't dropped, a few select features still need some optimizations. Thankfully there's been some performance updates for asteroids in the latest release, so maybe planets will be soontm!

 

[SmilingDemon]

Yet now I'm getting about 10 frames per second in the middle of nowhere with nothing around

that sounds like a problem ... because it shouldnt happen.
are you running singleplayer ?
did you assign enough memory in the launcher settings to run Starmade properly (around 4 GB should do for SP)
make sure there arnt any asteroids around that arnt being loaded for what ever reason (open nav menu and activate everything to see what is close)
make sure there arnt any overlapping big structures (open space station with a ship carring a lto of turrets and docks closeby)

 

[Syzygy]

"are you running singleplayer ?"
Yes

"did you assign enough memory in the launcher settings to run Starmade properly (around 4 GB should do for SP)"
I used the default which appears to only be about 1 GB. I tried 4 GB, and it must have been an issue because my FPS doubled to 20. It is still unplayable at 20, especially since it is stuttering like crazy regardless of the FPS, and would only get worse with things around.

"make sure there arnt any overlapping big structures"
It was a newly generated world, so this seems unlikely.


I stated in an old post "Shadows are a massive perfomance killer (and still don't look that great). I get 100 FPS no problem with turning everything else hardly making a hit." It is strange to see it have degraded so much. Playability has just been on the back-burner for a long time I guess. Maybe I'll try again in a few more years.

 

[SmilingDemon]

try to play on a MP server .. just to eliminated the load on your system from generation and simulation of the universe.
see if that works better then.
if it does give me a list of your used hardware (CPU and GPU and availabel RAM) and what OS you are running