Where so I allocate more memory?

[ToyotaSupra]

The game runs very smoothly until it decides halfway it has no memory left. I'd like to allocate more but I can't find it in the settings. This is making building a chore, the game freezes for 2 seconds after EACH BLOCK PLACEMENT.

Of note, the game ran fine with a solid 100+FPS until the recent 'Security Update'

 

[MrTargareyan]

It is in the top left corner of the first screen that loads up when you click starmade_starter.exe. The button will say options, and i think it is somewehere in that menu I have allocated 4gb of ram to SM though, and Im still getting this problem though :3

 

[marcus87]

I had the Problem that I can\'t give more than 1024 mb ram. But I have 64 bit os and java. Can anyone give me hint how to solve this problem.

 

[Captain Fortius]

It doesn\'t matter how much memory you give it though;

The game keeps spawning and tracking AI ships, even where you don\'t see them. Over time, there\'ll be enough to cause a slowdown, and make that message pop up on any system.

To make it worse, if by accident or purpose, the traders and pirates have access to bigger ships than the basic isanth, it\'ll take far less of them to break your game.

For example; I was super careful, and made sure npcs can\'t spawn any of my blueprints, only the isanth. After a week of playing in that same universe, my game started slowing down, badly.

Temporary fix;

I opened up the server_database folder in SM\'s install directory, and manually deleted several hundred AI ships, both from there and one folder deeper in \"DATA\". It\'s an incredible waste of computing power; for all those hundreds of ships, I\'m sure I haven\'t met more than 20 traders, and always made sure to find and completely destroy any and all pirates.

You don\'t need to worry about accidentally deleting your own ships by the way; Any AI ship\'s name starts with \"ai_ship\" + blueprint name + ID number. They\'re easily recognisable.

Lo and behold, on the next startup the game booted swiftly and there was no lag.

So I decided to disable pirates and traders completely. I\'ll turn them on if I want to go hunting, then delete the database again, because far more will spawn than you\'ll see.

But it wasn\'t over yet. Some time later I accidentally left one of my partially done backup-blueprints available for traders. It\'s a hollow hull of a 600 blocks long battleship. I have played perhaps for half an hour when the game became unplayable and the message about memory popped up. I shut down the game, checked the database, and there was SIX ai ships with it\'s name. That was enough to kill the game, even though they weren\'t even in radar distance.

And that is our mysterious slowdown over time bug.



The game must be made to;

-Stop spawning AI ships where nobody sees them.

-Delete those that were seen but flew far enough away from players.

-Only be able to spawn one or two of the larger blueprints, instead of the usual fleet of 4-8.

-Disable AI spawning by deafult over a certain blueprint mass.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

I\'ll try this, thanks. There must be some sort of command to stop NPC spawining altogether? I dislike NPC ships in general.

 

[Kael]

Thanks for the fix, Captain! Works pretty decently. I\'m wondering if scripts can be used with this game cause if they can I may find a way to make a script to despawn ships that are too far away. If I can and i\'m able to implement it i\'ll post the script up.



What I find hilarious though is i\'ve downloaded a few ships but they came as .zip files not the .sment files. I extracted them into the proper place and got .smdph files. What I find funny though is the ships don\'t show up in the import screen or the in-game catalogue, yet I was sitting at my star station building a new ship and the USS enterprise attacked me...

 

[KingofDarkness]

It should be so that the system tracks were the distant ships are, but dont load them. Each ship should have 2 things, the data of the actual ship, like there already is, and the ships location. Then when the ship goes a certain distance away, maybe 3 sectors, it stops loading the ship data and just loads its location to save memory

 

[NeonSturm]

A game should only calculate what the user can see.

If a user sees an object in state A and then, later, sees a similar - or same - object in state B, he has to think that it is possible, fair and reasonable that A earlier is now B.

It doesn\'t matter what happens inbetween, nor does it matter how it happens. The system just has to make users think \"it could be calculated all the way and the changes could also be the results of other players, random NPC-NPC interactions\".

Everything inbetween is free for optimisation.