Curious performance

[Alenerel]

I hope the devs read this posts and the other one. I think that the game should be comfortable to play up to 20 people in the biggest map.

[Litcube]

I started another game, this time without modifying factions.

Same situation erupted.  WorldPawns explodes, and you dump FPS like mad.  What we need is an app that safely purges the worldpawns.  Or better yet, a mod that skips this entire process.

[lc-soz]

Man! I was searching things about perfomace and did this, delete a lot of wordPawns, my FPS triple in 3x speed!

Could you write a few pointers on how to purge the savefile? I've gotten as far as opening the savefile in notepad++ and finding the worldpawn header but there are so many lines.

Step by step in NOTEPAD++:

If you delete <pawnsalive> it will be impossible to talk to others factions via comms console and probably they will never visit or attack again. I test force raid via developer tools and works, but still not sure if it would naturally come sometime soon.

0.MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SAVE.
1.Open your save file
2.Press Alt + 0
- This will fold all levels
3.Search for <worldPawns>
4.Click on the plus in the right side of it
5.You will see, folded, <pawnsAlive> and <pawnsDead>
6.Select from </worldPawns> to before <pawnsAlive> [Only delete this, pawnsAlive, if you don't care about others factions!!!]
7.Paste this:
<pawnsAlive /> [Only use this, pawnsAlive, if you don't care about others factions!!!]
<pawnsDead />
8.Save file and enjoy a playable rimworld

Doing that, my save went from 20 MB to 5 MB.

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[Litcube]

I just purged my worldpawns alive only.  ooohhh.  sooo good.  so many frames...

[Zhentar]

Would you mind posting a save? Looking at my longest A15 save I have fewer than a hundred pawnsAlive, I'm curious about what's different with your games.

[lc-soz]

I think it's because I edit the Randy Random so I can get raid every 5 days or less (having tons of fun in end game with Turret Collection and Remote Explosives). I don't have my biggest save, but this one is the biggest I still have and I've already deleted all my dead pawns in worldPawns. Original was 21 MB or something.

[Litcube]

Here's my save before the purge:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/pwem0ri1voot8qj/Kolta.rws?dl=0

I'm with ic-soz, I upped my raid frequency.

[lc-soz]

WARNING ABOUT DELETING PAWNSALIVE FROM WORLDPAWNS

If you delete <pawnsalive> it will be impossible to talk to others factions via comms console and probably they will never visit or attack again. I test force raid via developer tools and works, but still not sure if it would naturally come sometime soon.

Sorry for not saying that before, noticed this (that should be obvious...) now...

I will create other save (backup it) and when the game start to lag will paste the original "<pawnsalive>" to see if it helps or crash something in the game too.

For now will try to find the chef of thoses factions and trying only letting them live, the game lags too much if with all<pawnsalive>.

[lc-soz]

For now will try to find the chef of those factions and trying only letting them live, the game lags too much if with all <pawnsalive>.

I'm still not sure about how this affect the game as a whole but I did some tests:

First: Raids can happen without <pawnsalive>?

They can!

I made raids the only possible threat, and after a few game hours in Randy Random Extreme a raid happened, so even though I can't talk to factions via Comms Console it's indeed possible for "humans" raids happen, not only from mechanoids.

Second: It's possible to erase a part of <pawnsalive> and still communicate with others factions?

YES!!

I went to the backup save I had, deleted all <pawnsdead> and almost all <pawnsalve>, except the first five pawns (because I have five factions excluding mine). Now I can talk to them via Comms console but still waiting for a random raid from my two hostile factions.

Other test:

I forced raids in both situations, with only the first five <pawnsalive> not deleted and with all of them erased. The only difference that I found was in "Raid (3000 pts)", the others were possible somehow.

But, like I said before, I still don't know how this affect others parts of the game, so be careful and ALWAYS do a backup!

[Thyme]

I just experienced severe lag with my 2 year old colony out of a sudden. I admit that I'm breeding chicken (yes, breeding) and I added Blow Guns mod and Hauling Hysteresis this week. I don't have any fancy xml editor, and didn't want to look manually through pawns-dead-or-alive so I just deleted all pawnsdead. It solved the lag problem. For 1-2 hours. And deleted all the corpses in my freezer too!

I will repeat deleting all pawnsdead after this post, trying not to delete the dead Megatherium. Is there a quicker way to edit save files? Excel doesn't let me open it as text file, which would accelerate the process a lot.

Edit: file size went from 13mb to 10mb after first wipe
Edit2: deleting pawnsalive removed another 1mb, now testing

[Alenerel]

You said "suddenly". You dont get tons of pawns alive or death suddenly. Maybe you are using the "better pathfinding" mod? It sometimes get a pawn stuck and causes massive lag which gets fixed if you save/load the game.

[Thyme]

I don't use Zhentars pathfinding mod (yet). I already saved and loaded a dozen times now. Here's what I've tried so far:
+blew the dust out of my cooler
+rebooted my laptop (Sony Vaio SVP1321S1E, W8.1)
+messed around with rearranging my mods, deactivated hauling hysteresis (looked suspicious in the output.log)
+tried installing a "new" graphics driver, I think it didn't work (actually have a long history of graphics driver updates not working or not finding my laptop on the sony homepage; anyway, it should be up to date)
+unzipped the game anew, added the mods again, loaded safegame
+started new colony from freshly unzipped directory - lagging persists, but is only noticeable when looking for it
+started new colony with all the mods disabled - same as above

More detailed description: Pawns move normally most of the time, but freeze for short periods in short, but irregular intervals. All pawns are affected, it's like time itself was freezing ^^

I appreciate your efforts.

Here's my modlist (in that order):
Fluffy's Medical Tab
QualityBuilder
Medical Training
RimFridge
PractiseTarget
StonecuttingTweak
Chemicals & Neutroamine
CraftingHysterersis
TimerSwitches
IncreasedTraders (self written mod that doubles rates of traders & visitors)
Miniaturisation
MadSkills
HaulingHysteresis
BlowGun

current savegame: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9smh92hcq6opf78/Autosave-3.rws?dl=0
savegame before I started deleting pawns: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fpzziz5kr05g6dj/Malaria.rws?dl=0
output_log.txt is from my current safegame (autosave-3.rws)
output_log2.txt is from freshly unzipped game I think

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[Bozobub]

@Thyme:  When was the last time you defragged the drive in question (if not AN SSD)?  And how much free space is left?

[Thyme]

it's an SSD. 57gb free of 103gb

computer says last defrag was at 9. Nov, but the task took like 5 seconds x) well, defrag is kinda useless for SSDs, no?

[Diviance]

it's an SSD. 57gb free of 103gb

computer says last defrag was at 9. Nov, but the task took like 5 seconds x) well, defrag is kinda useless for SSDs, no?

If you are running a relatively modern OS (Windows 7+) it won't actually defrag an SSD, even if you tell it to.  Unless, of course, you have Volume Snapshots (or whatever they may be called, like Volume Shadow Copy) enabled, then it actually will (to prevent hitting the fragment metadata limit and the like).

It isn't exactly useless, persay, on SSD's... it just isn't useful like it was on magnetic drives and you generally won't even notice a performance degradation or improvement by running it in most situations.