Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

Grotesque

±¼ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 16, 2012
Messages
8,986
Divinity: Original Sin Divinity: Original Sin 2
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
Furthermore pop growth is static across all planets for no good reason. 0% hab planets grow pops just as well as 100%, and lots of them will migrate to the 100% planet anyway where they perform better. The only downside is a very small initial investment in colony ships that is quickly paid back.
I tried to create a demon crime syndicate which started off in a tomb world (mod) and that abducted normies to work the mines offices of eternal internship but their poulation started declining immediately so I was sad.
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
A galaxy where lag and stuttering reigns
you don't understand. it's a real time strategy game. literally real time.
stellaris is a genius game that explores the themes of time dillation

when your empire is young and the future is bright, 50 years pass in a heartbeat

as the galaxy ages and you survive multiple crises though, your population of hedonists retreat into depressing utopian abundance -- time quite literally freezes in place

whoa
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
Utopia lets you build classic science fiction megastructures like ringworlds, Dyson spheres and hyperspace gateways, so it's pretty cool. At least you'll have something to do once you crush the galaxy and have oodles of resources to spare and keep waiting in vain for some kind of victory condition to trigger. (The victory condition is "I'm tired of this micro, time to start a new one.")

I dislike robots, and corporations are about as welcome in my gaming fantasy life as advertisements, so two of the DLCs were an easy pass for me.

I just bought Apocalypse and Distant Stars so no opinion on them yet. Apocalypse appears to let you actually blow shit up, which is unusual in a game where you can't even blow up enemy starbases, you can only capture them, like they are castles or something, and even then only if you have "claims" on them. One might almost think this is based on a medieval game system or something.

I have the other little DLCs but I had them from the start so not really sure what they have added.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell

LdrjHfO.gif
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
DD 64 master race
Hi everyone, this is Moah. I’m the tech lead on Stellaris and today I’m here to talk about the free 2.3 "Wolfe" update that will be arriving together with Ancient Relics, and what it brings to the table in terms of tech.

Stellaris is going 64 bits.
People have been clamoring for this for a while now, and various factors have led us to finally do this for this patch. I should temper your expectations though: while many have claimed that this would be a miracle cure for all their issues with Stellaris, the reality is somewhat more tame.

What does it mean?
The one solid benefit is that Stellaris is no longer limited to 4gb of memory, and won’t crash anymore in situations where it was reaching that limit. For people who play on huge galaxies, with many empires, many mods or well into 3000s, this will be a boon.

In terms of performance, though, it doesn’t change much. Without drowning you in technical details, let’s just say that some things go faster because you handle more data at once, some things go slower because you have more data to handle. In the end, our measurements have shown no perceptible difference.

Finally, the last effect of switching to 64 bits is that the game will no longer playable on 32 bits computers or OSes. We don’t think this will affect many people, but there you have it.


What about Performance?
I know that’s everyone’s favourite question, so let’s do our best to talk about it. First, let me dispel some notions floating around in various forums: Stellaris does use multithreading, and we’re always on the lookout for new things to thread. In fact between 2.2.0 and 2.2.7, a huge effort was made to thread jobs and pops, and it’s one of the main drivers of performance improvement between these version.

Pops and jobs are indeed what’s consuming most of our CPU time nowadays. We’ve improved on that by reducing the amount of jobs each pop evaluate. We’ve also found other areas where we were doing too much work, and cut on:
  • Ships calculating their daily regeneration when they’re at full health
  • Off-screen icons being updated
  • Uninhabitable planets doing the same evaluations as populated planets
Why do these seemingly pointless things happen? Well, we generally focus on getting gameplay up and working quickly so that our content designers can iterate quickly, and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Some of these systems are also quite complex and the scale of the new code is not so easily apparent. Sometimes, not limiting the number of targets is good enough because you’re not doing much but then, months later, someone adds more calculations or the number of objects explodes for unrelated reasons, and suddenly you’ve got a performance issue.

Modifiers
One thing that sets Stellaris apart from other PDS title is how much we use (or abuse) modifiers. Everything is a modifier. Modifiers are modified by other modifiers themselves modified by other modifiers, and sometimes by themselves. It’s quite hard to follow, and leads to every value being able to change at any time without your noticing.

“Why don’t you just compute jobs when a new one appears?” has often been asked around these parts. Well, a short answer to that is it’s really hard to know when a new job appears. You can get jobs from any modifier to: country, planet, pops. Each of these can get modifiers from ethics, traditions, perks, events, buildings, jobs, country, planets, pop, technology, etc.

Until now we were trying to calculate modifiers manually, forced to follow the chain in its entirety: when you recompute a country modifier, you then calculate their planets modifiers, and then each planet would recalculate their pops modifiers. Some of our freezes were just that tangled ball of yarn trying to sort itself out.

NexRiPkna2utTqAzF9H0DEjOCwHVsI4EejYO-vMQMh6QwUB-_uP7dXmpjkwXzOOKoiwDqkSzd9tlLmN3DlFN2R06A62od6XxWm8xh99XRDfRFRP3vVj42GBIaDaXSK7jjyKdS39b

This is our modifier flow charts. It’s not quite up to date, but gives you an idea of the complexity of the system (Unpolished because it’s a dev tool, and not made for the article).

No More!
For 2.3 “Wolfe” we have switched to a system of modifier nodes, where each node register what node they follow, and is recalculated when used, following the chain itself. We have modifiers that are more up to date, and calculated only when needed. This also reduces the number of pointless recalculations.

This system has shown remarkable promise, and cut the number of “big freezes” happening around the game (notably after loading, for example). It has some issues, but as we continue working with it, it’ll get better and help both with performance and our programmers’ sanity.

So, what’s the verdict?
In our tests, 2.3 “Wolfe” is between 10% and 30% faster than 2.2.7 right now. Hopefully it’ll stay that way until release, but the nature of the beast is that some of these optimizations break things and fixing the issues negate them, so we can’t promise anything.

IuIGuQ4cXPvjCEMWG_AowiNIFXhzpsPIcphmCVJD79vQqVMqUeZCqCoVfDlWDNZ3YNkAScYAJh2ebft947YsqoOhG7A_4pNBWxjZ6L9se5lkEEImNYZ4uOpTMWj-amEiwSYdirpd


Measurements provided by @sabrenity , using detailed info from the beta build. It’s worth noting the “SHIPS_SERIAL” purple line has since been eliminated.

AI
Another forum favorite, we have done some improvements to the AI. First, with @Glavius ’s permission, we’ve used his job weights to improve general AI job distribution. We’ve also done the usual pass of polish and improvements, and of course taught the AI how to use all our new features.


What else is new?
We’re also getting a new crash reporter that will send your crash report as soon as they happen rather than next time you start the game. We’ve improved our non-steam network stack for connectivity issues, etc.


All right, enough of my yammering. This has turned into a GRRM length novel, and even though there are many more areas we could cover, we’ll just turn this for your perusal.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
I wonder why it tookthem so long. Just grab the best parts from mods and shove it into main game - every mod would be honored to have their mods to see their creation added to the game they mod.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
My guess is that they tried to do it themselves, but their attempts failed and finally they gave up. If it had been arrogance, they probably wouldn't have given up and would have stuck to their guns and kept trying or otherwise never caved. So, just simple Not Invented Here.
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
Hmm, it seems that the "Prioritize Job" function now works instantly. In the past (by which I mean a couple weeks ago) it seemed to only work for new workers, or if you removed jobs to force pops into other ones. Do they roll out silent updates that fix things like this?
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom