Kilometers per Second

[Winterhome]

Unless there are only 1/6 the planets.

Not correct.

You load blocks that are nearby into RAM. You do not load extremely distant blocks.

The only way more than one planet would be loaded as any more than a circle in the sky is if it were within two sectors.

 

[Vyor]

The only way more than one planet would be loaded as any more than a circle in the sky is if it were within two sectors.

You mean like they are right now?

 

[Winterhome]

You mean like they are right now?

Not really.
I hardly ever see planets that close, and if they are, it's a lagfest and I leave immediately.

They're usually three to five sectors apart it seems.

 

[Vyor]

Not really.
I hardly ever see planets that close, and if they are, it's a lagfest and I leave immediately.

They're usually three to five sectors apart it seems.

Ok... However, considering that minecraft can have a world that is 7 times the earth's surface, can have massive amounts of entities(both tile and not), all doing things... I think that an increase in planet size won't impact the performance too much(schema is trying to figure out a good way to do this according to the Q/A...

 

[Winterhome]

Ok... However, considering that minecraft can have a world that is 7 times the earth's surface, can have massive amounts of entities(both tile and not), all doing things... I think that an increase in planet size won't impact the performance too much(schema is trying to figure out a good way to do this according to the Q/A...

Also consider that Minecraft unloads chunks beyond 256 meters, and entities beyond that "Stop existing" until loaded by the game engine again.
The unloaded data goes straight to the harddrive and the harddrive's swap space.

The equivalence is there already. We do that already, and we load more than Minecraft has by default, with less lag to boot. However, it doesn't appear so because of the scale of the game.

 

[Ithirahad]

Second.

Although, I want to add, if they're going to make the planets bigger, I think they should also make them farther apart.

Third. There really only need to be 2 to 5 planets per system, and planets and systems need to be further apart... The result being less loaded (and rendered) entities, and less lag... right? I'd think that loading one (err, twelve, with the new dodecahedron planets) large entity (entities, now) would be far better than loading 2-3 smaller ones (or, as it is in the dev build, about 24-36 planet segments)

...Also, the maximum number of at least partially loaded planet-discs I've seen at once is no less than 3; somehow I didn't get lag.

 

[Vyor]

Also consider that Minecraft unloads chunks beyond 256 meters, and entities beyond that "Stop existing" until loaded by the game engine again.
The unloaded data goes straight to the harddrive and the harddrive's swap space.

The equivalence is there already. We do that already, and we load more than Minecraft has by default, with less lag to boot. However, it doesn't appear so because of the scale of the game.

I had 1k mobs in 1 chunk in minecraft... no lag... that game isn't as well optimised as this one...

 

[CyberTao]

To be fair, I honestly dont see how you can compare Minecraft and Starmade all that much - 3- they are both Java, but they run in different engines. SO mleh~

 

[Winterhome]

I had 1k mobs in 1 chunk in minecraft... no lag... that game isn't as well optimised as this one...

Mobs aren't blocks.

 

[Vyor]

Mobs aren't blocks.

No, they are far laggier...

 

[Winterhome]

No, they are far laggier...

Mobs do not take much RAM.
A mob takes far less RAM than a single chunk of blocks.

Mobs are only "Laggy" when you consider that they're basically 90% CPU and GPU calculations, and you have so many that the computer can't keep up with the queued calculations.

A powerful computer may have very little RAM, and a computer with a lot of RAM may not be very powerful, one could be both, and one could be neither. RAM is a completely separate issue from CPU, GPU, and motherboard/bus speeds.



In Minecraft, get Optifine for the enhanced view distance, graphics options, and overall performance boost. Spawn 2,000 mobs in a chunk, check your frame rate. Should be smooth. Keep adding more until the game bugs out or crashed. Frame rate should still be relatively high, or at least as high as it can get with that many polygons on screen (or still being rendered offscreen). If your graphics card is powerful, and your view distance is set to Short, then you could probably keep adding them until the computer itself starts chugging.

Get rid of the mobs.

Now, set the view distance slider to Extreme+1024. You will NOT get that much loaded, unless you have a lot more RAM than anybody has any business having. Walk in a straight line. It'll take a while to load the chunks in the direction that you're walking, while chunks from the area you're leaving will be unloaded pretty quickly, since you're trying to load so many at once (due to your view radius choice). You'll also see a massive framerate drop because the GPU is trying to render a few million blocks.



Also try Starsiege: Tribes. 100megabytes, free download these days (technically - Dynamix/Sierra gave up enforcing anti piracy stuff after the Fox incident). Set it to software rendering. Join a ModX server. Set the object spawner to "newdam". Aim FAR FAR AWAY. Spam click to spawn this massive interior object until your graphics start dying - that is, you'll see every texture in the game get painted over the terrain, sky, objects, etc. and it'll flash as it attempts to keep all of the texture info loaded for each individual object, despite the software renderer's hard memory limit. OpenGL doesn't have this problem since it's basically got infinite scaling capabilities compared to older games, but it'll get the idea across.

 

[boxcartenant]

The issue isn't that StarMade is eating up all my RAM. My RAM is fine. My CPU is what's maxed out.

 

[Winterhome]

The issue isn't that StarMade is eating up all my RAM. My RAM is fine. My CPU is what's maxed out.

But that's not the situation with every player.

 

[scagjmboy45]

I definitely like the idea of re-scaling the universe to move it somewhat closer to reality. Maybe once Schema has optimized the efficiency of the game engine so things load quickly and the game as a whole is less taxing on hardware, he will increase the size of things. The only problem I see is that changing "kilometers per hour" to "kilometers per second" does nothing for the actual speed at which one is travelling, it just provides the illusion that one is travelling at a high speed, and it is a pretty transparent illusion at that.
Personally, I would love to see planets so large that they cannot be explored in less than a day. However, along with an increase in size comes an increase in travel time. With that in mind, I think it would be necessary to develop an auto-pilot system so that the player can get things done while he or she is between waypoints (such as talk, work on the ship, walk around in the ship, etc.).

 

[Zeveryn]

I dont care about the units the speed is showed in, but how about less, but bigger planets? My Base is eating up the Planet im on an i still have ideas for new buildings XD

Id like fewer But bigger planets.

 

[Fwyrl]

The problem with comparing Minecraft to Starmade is that the internal structure is so vastly different.

RAM:

Starmade blocks require 3 times more RAM per simple block. In addition, the rendering techniques that the engines use are vastly different. The optimizations that Minecraft uses to allow you to load in (25*25 chunks*(16*16 blocks*(256 blocks per column))) (40,960,000 blocks - about half air) are un-useable in Starmade. (Also there's the fact that most computers can't even do a 10-chunk radius above 30 FPS, let alone 12 chunks) Starmade planets are huge, but blocks require only 3 bytes of RAM now. That's impressive. There's no more optimization that can be done for RAM use of blocks. Larger planets would need to be hollow.

CPU:

Unlike Minecraft, Starmade needs to do lots of complex physics calculations to make sure your starship isn't hitting that planet. Starmade also needs to load in any nearby ships, the locations of nearby objects, and preform physics checks for all of them. Physics calculations can only be so streamlined, and planets are inherently laggy when it comes to physics, because they have complex physics casts.

If you would like to know more about either one, just ask - I code Java, and mod minecraft

 

[CodeBlack]

I'm making an attempt at understanding what you're referring to here.
I'm failing miserably.

Do you mean there would be less performance updates? I could see that because of, say, schema ragequitting because of community demanding conflicting ideas. Or are you thinking of something else that I cannot decipher?

what we meant is that the planets get bigger but there should be less of them...this way it wouldnt lagg more...

 

[Fwyrl]

what we meant is that the planets get bigger but there should be less of them...this way it wouldnt lagg more...

It doesn't matter how many there are, that only eats up disc space. Only the planet that you're on is loaded into RAM. The real problem is the physics calculations though. Planets are hard to calculate physics with. That's not something that can be fixed easily, if at all, sadly

 

[Winterhome]

what we meant is that the planets get bigger but there should be less of them...this way it wouldnt lagg more...

...Except you don't generally load more than one planet at once, and having to load a larger object causes more lag. >_>

 

[MrFURB]

To put what Azereiah and Fwyrl are saying into layman's terms, the problem with making planets bigger is the same problem that really big ships have; you're trying to view a ton of blocks at one time and not everyone's computer can handle so many blocks being nearby.