People with slow Computers

[SkylordLuke]

ok ,i see that there is a lot of people around with slow computers,so i will give you everything that will make your pc run this game better..a lot better :p

first the same old,same old,advanced options in starmade launcher:

• Antialiasing samples - 0
• bloom - off
• normal/bump maping - off
• VBO bulk mode - on
• VBO bulk mode size - 8
• Vertical Sync - off
• max segments - 1500
• lighting quality - 16
• high res background - off
• enable background - off
• enable shieldhit graphics - off
• shadows - off
• use array textures - off

now the good stuff,open your server.cfg in starmade folder
and change the following to this: [singleplayer]

• CONCURRENT_SIMULATION = 90
  
• SECTOR_SIZE = 4000 [the bigger,the better,more empty space around]
  
• FLOATING_ITEM_LIFETIME_SECS = 20
• SECTOR_INACTIVE_TIMEOUT = 5
  
• SECTOR_INACTIVE_CLEANUP_TIMEOUT = 5
  
• UNIVERSE_DAY_IN_MS = -1 [removes stuttering]
  
• ASTEROIDS_ENABLE_DYNAMIC_PHYSICS = false
  
• COLLISION_DAMAGE = false
  
• ENABLE_BREAK_OFF = false
  
• SECTOR_AUTOSAVE_SEC = 1500 [no need to save every 10 sec. :p ]
  
• PLANET_SIZE_MEAN = 90.0
  
• PLANET_SIZE_DEVIATION = 50.0

and finally,setting.cfg in the starmade folder:

• G_DAMAGE_DISPLAY = 100
  
• G_STAR_COUNT = 0
  
• G_DRAW_FOG = false
  
• G_DRAW_EXHAUST_PLUMS = false
  
• D_INFO_DRAW_SPACE_PARTICLE = false
• G_DRAW_EFFECTS = false
  
• G_BONE_ANIMATION = false
  
• G_SMOKE_QUALITY = false

But,if this doesnt help,buy a new pc,today you can buy a pc that can run this game pretty much at medium settings for 390$,i would suggest a 600$ one, and you can run this game full ultra mode

 

[coldbeer72]

Looks good. AM only running a i5 laptop with a geforce gt 630m 1G and she is starting to show signs of sluggishness the bigger my ship gets.
Only question is how do you get into the .cfg files? Tried once before and couldn't. Kept getting the"windows needs to find the programme that created it" pop up.

 

[SkylordLuke]

Looks good. AM only running a i5 laptop with a geforce gt 630m 1G and she is starting to show signs of sluggishness the bigger my ship gets.
Only question is how do you get into the .cfg files? Tried once before and couldn't. Kept getting the"windows needs to find the programme that created it" pop up.

open them with notepad,or microsoft word,or any word program :P

 

[Krazykat]

I've got an end of the line $1000 computer I use for everything possible, but with mostly low end settings for this game it still runs like a snail through molasses when I try to load any larger ships.

 

[SkylordLuke]

I've got an end of the line $1000 computer I use for everything possible, but with mostly low end settings for this game it still runs like a snail through molasses when I try to load any larger ships.

well thats the thing,if you bought that 1000$ pc 2 years ago,there is now 4 times faster one for half the price
i have 400$ one (bought 4 years ago) ,and i can load 5+ mil block ship with 25 fps,medium settings

 

[Krazykat]

I understand that, been upgrading parts for the past 3 years but it can run Battlefield 4, Witcher Assassin of Kings, Borderlands 2, Minecraft, etc. on all of the Highest/cinematic settings with full 60 fps and without any hiccup, but can barely chug along this without extreme stuttering and FPS drops. The ship I'm trying to load is also around 5 million blocks currently, but it's still in progress and only about 15% completed, I can't imagine how long and grueling it would take to load the final version.

I know it's an alpha, I just want to enjoy this game to its full potential. So I anxiously await any and all engine optimizations.
This is good advice though, thanks for the post.

 

[SkylordLuke]

I understand that, been upgrading parts for the past 3 years but it can run Battlefield 4, Witcher Assassin of Kings, Borderlands 2, Minecraft, etc. on all of the Highest/cinematic settings with full 60 fps and without any hiccup, but can barely chug along this without extreme stuttering and FPS drops. The ship I'm trying to load is also around 5 million blocks currently, but it's still in progress and only about 15% completed, I can't imagine how long and grueling it would take to load the final version.

I know it's an alpha, I just want to enjoy this game to its full potential. So I anxiously await any and all engine optimizations.
This is good advice though, thanks for the post.

yeah,if you have mix of amd and nvidia,it can derp out,we need more optimization with all kinds of cards.
i only have AMD stuff in my pc,so it ties everything better

 

[NeonSturm]

Has your computer a DDR3 controller directly inbuilt into the processor? (afaik it removes a bottleneck between ram<->cpu which is also used for cpu<->gpu.

Computers are specialized. A good graphic processor does not help with Java-calculations, neither does a multi-core help with single-thread code (though dual core can run your system and firefox on a different processor than the game).

Has the cpu more cache or more processors?
How does the operating system manage processor->software assignments?​

do you see the point?

 

[SkylordLuke]

Has your computer a DDR3 controller directly inbuilt into the processor? (afaik it removes a bottleneck between ram<->cpu which is also used for cpu<->gpu.

Computers are specialized. A good graphic processor does not help with Java-calculations, neither does a multi-core help with single-thread code (though dual core can run your system and firefox on a different processor than the game).

Has the cpu more cache or more processors?
How does the operating system manage processor->software assignments?​

do you see the point?

yeah,you just need to know what are you doing when buying a new pc,or building one yourself,or just have luck hahaha

 

[Planr]

I understand that, been upgrading parts for the past 3 years but it can run Battlefield 4, Witcher Assassin of Kings, Borderlands 2, Minecraft, etc. on all of the Highest/cinematic settings with full 60 fps and without any hiccup, but can barely chug along this without extreme stuttering and FPS drops.

Based on the fact that after this you mentioned engine optimizations, I'm assuming you have a basic understanding of the reasons why those games run well and Starmade doesn't.

Just in case you wanted to know more, it's also because the companies backing those games like Battlefield and Borderlands make millions/billions of dollars a year. They can afford to hire as many guys as they need to figure out how to make those high-end games run on your poor computer. There's 99% of the time nothing stopping them from getting such a job done in a matter of weeks.

Schema is just one guy who (based on an educated guess) makes just enough money from Starmade account registration sales to get by financially (he has confirmed Starmade is his full-time job, so this is highly likely as being his only source of income). He does not have it easy like those multi-million-dollar corporations do. He doesn't have the time nor resources to do all those hundreds of work hours of optimizations needed to make your highly-specific hardware setup run the game good all by himself, and he doesn't have the ease of simply hiring people to do it for him.

Schema relies on volunteers like us to make the game better and to seek out bugs and game-breaking issues. We all work together. It's especially more heartwarming because we are a small community, and so most of us know each other, and are in a way, like one big family.

If you ask me, I like the friendliness and sense of belonging that a smaller game community brings, because people know each other by name, and if somebody dissapears, everyone usually eventually notices. On games like TF2, Battlefield or CoD, you're simply another numbered cattle animal in the herd, and you could up-and-quit the game and nobody would care except maybe 1 or 2 people in your steam/xbox live/playstation network friendlist.

Another fundamental way in how games like Starmade differ from other games is that unlike games like TF2 and CoD, the mechanics of the game make it easy to pick up and leave a server and hop to the next one in an instant without a trace or a significant loss of assets. As a result you're kind of like a nomadic traveler, never really settling down or getting involved beyond a kill assist with another player who you don't even know.
On Starmade, when you go to a server, you 99% of the time stick with it and settle down, becoming a part of the server's community, building a home for yourself, be it your own station or with your own faction at their homebase. So there's a real sense of belonging. The sense of relationship this game has to it is one of the most valuable things of all.

That's what sets us apart as an indie game, and it's also something that helps really bring us together as a community, because we all play a meaningful part in the development of this game, as where cliche game giants like the latest cliche Call of Duty game is made by a team of hired people working on their own, standing above a large community of people who contribute absolutely nothing except game sales. It's an incredible difference...

 

[Krazykat]

I totally see that, and love what schema has created for us. This community and this game I believe will be better than the cookie cutter mainstream FPS

I kinda expected the lag to happen when I started planning my ship, it was meant to be my largest ship I'll ever build.

(also, does anyone know how to import an edited block list; I turned off animations on all ship components to see if it'll reduce resource usage but I can't figure out how to get it to work)

 

[XxDanclarke96xX]

I've got an end of the line $1000 computer I use for everything possible, but with mostly low end settings for this game it still runs like a snail through molasses when I try to load any larger ships.

Really? i've built my own PC for about £500 and it runs starmade on near full settings without any issues... at least until there is a large planet near by.

 

[kupu]

I totally see that, and love what schema has created for us. This community and this game I believe will be better than the cookie cutter mainstream FPS

I kinda expected the lag to happen when I started planning my ship, it was meant to be my largest ship I'll ever build.

(also, does anyone know how to import an edited block list; I turned off animations on all ship components to see if it'll reduce resource usage but I can't figure out how to get it to work)

Most user friendly way is probably this;

Open the Block Editor. (Launcher > Modding > Block Editor).
Select the blocks you wish to alter in the directory on the left window. (Plex Lift, power gen, power tank, shields, shield regens', docking enchancers, lava)
Now scroll down in the blocks options and set animated to false.
Once done, just click file > save. It will store the settings in your game by overwriting the previous config.

 

[hindos]

Personally I'm rather surprised how well Starmade runs at optimal configuration, I played around with the settings as well (bloom kills my fps), it runs very nicely even with giant builds. So I have to give a big old thumbs up for the already smooth engine to the Schine team, which based on evidence from the change-logs, appears to be continuously updated. Personally I do put my max segments pretty high as I like seeing stuff from far away, even if it means a bit more lag spikes.

 

[Krazykat]

Reading people's responses... maybe something's up with my java settings or RAM allocation. I'll look into that.

and kupu thanks for the response! I was just saving the edited list under a different name and couldn't find where to put it

 

[FourFire]

Hello, first post on this forum: I'd like to compare specs and relative slowness in order to determine what works and what doesn't

My computer is a laptop with 2x2GB 1066Mhz DDR3 Ram and an i5 460M (2C4T) @ 2.53 Ghz and a 7200RPM hardrive.
I noted that during the tutorial warning messages about "the server" being overloaded and I suspect this was to do with the relatively low speed of my RAM though I noticed that my processor utilization maxed out at times, and gameplay was unpleasantly choppy and unresponsive.

"
We all work together. It's especially more heartwarming because we are a small community, and so most of us know each other, and are in a
way, like one big family.

If you ask me, I like the friendliness and sense of belonging that a smaller game community brings, because people know each other by name,
and if somebody dissapears, everyone usually eventually notices.
"

I joined the minecraft community just a little too late to experience this phenomenon, I hope I can be part of it here, as opposed to being one of those unwanted lowest-common-denominator playerbase forumites who "ruined the community".

This game certainly looks fun enough that I'll consider it worthwhile to buy a whole new computer just to play it.

 

[Krazykat]

found out it's all in the rear of my ship. If I stay near the core and build around the front without letting it load the 5 million blocks in the rear then everything is butter smooth around 120 fps

 

[Commodore]

Hello, first post on this forum: I'd like to compare specs and relative slowness in order to determine what works and what doesn't

My computer is a laptop with 2x2GB 1066Mhz DDR3 Ram and an i5 460M (2C4T) @ 2.53 Ghz and a 7200RPM hardrive.
I noted that during the tutorial warning messages about "the server" being overloaded and I suspect this was to do with the relatively low speed of my RAM though I noticed that my processor utilization maxed out at times, and gameplay was unpleasantly choppy and unresponsive.

"
We all work together. It's especially more heartwarming because we are a small community, and so most of us know each other, and are in a
way, like one big family.

If you ask me, I like the friendliness and sense of belonging that a smaller game community brings, because people know each other by name,
and if somebody dissapears, everyone usually eventually notices.
"

I joined the minecraft community just a little too late to experience this phenomenon, I hope I can be part of it here, as opposed to being one of those unwanted lowest-common-denominator playerbase forumites who "ruined the community".

This game certainly looks fun enough that I'll consider it worthwhile to buy a whole new computer just to play it.

64 bit java makes a HUGE difference, and is basically required if you want to go to a planet. It doesn't install via the automatic installer though.

Increase the memory for Starmade on the first launcher screen (after getting 64 bit java) and make sure shadows are off, and try the lower resolution texture packs.

 

[Giegue]

I to am using an AMD card (Radeon HD 6450 just over 3 years old now...) and i average at about 60-70 fps with shaders off and textures on realistic (Everything else on default).
I have 8GB of ram and i find i usually start dropping frames like mad (6-7 fps) when i have some other kind of program up like a video.
So it seems to be more dependant on the amount of ram (or at least video ram) avalible at any given time.
(Also make sure you have the most up to date driver possible, leaving your driver outdated means you miss out of a considerable number of optimisations and video memory leak fixes).

 

[Grimson]

Just out of curiosity after the CPU and RAM have been ruled out what is the next item that will start to drag down the FPS and does the OS make a large difference. When I was running Windows and Linux Windows got better FPS than Linux.