Performance Options

[Harry_Dicks]

Would more performance options being available to the player be very difficult to implement, and would this work's value be worth it? I am curious if anyone knows the answers to this, because I have been thinking more about how I wish we had an "advanced options" page we could open up with a whole new slew of things to adjust performance wise.

I believe there are a lot of players who mostly only play one colony at a time, for maybe even a few weeks to over a few months. This means that early to mid game they might not have expanded too much and have a lot of things going on, and performance is still great. Once they expand quite a bit going from mid to late game, however, and they might not want to blast colonists off into space for another decade or two in game time, then the performance of the game can take some serious hits, especially with some mods thrown into the mix. This could also be considered one of the sort of content "climaxes" of the game you might experience. With mods in the mix, you will have virtually everything "unlocked" from research, work and time investments, or material investments. This is where a lot of these players goal is to get to and stay at, this late game period, and experience all of this new content available to them for a good amount of time. Unfortunately, this is also where a lot of player's game experience can take a turn for the worse, and their enjoyment can be mitigated from chronic performance issues.

This leads me to think that if we had the ability to alter performance variables, even if game restarts are required, would add a lot more value to the game for me than a new content system or combat revamp or whatever (which I don't think will happen before 1.0 anyway.) I am not in anyway disregarding Ludeon's future contributions of content of the game, but right now I have literally so much freaking extra content from so many mods it is honestly ridiculous. Mods can add so much content, but these core functions of the game are something entirely different.

It would be great if we had different pathfinding algorithms we could choose from, or maybe even more variables to adjust with pathfinding. Could we have something to where temperature checks for everything (rotting, growing, frozen, pawns' comfort, etc.) is only checked every 15* ticks instead of 3*? Make job checks not as often when a pawn is idling?

I'm sure there are a lot of other great examples for the internal workings that I am unaware of. But my point is that I think it would greatly increase the long term value of the game, if the player had the ability to access and alter these functions to suit their own performance tastes. Myself, I would be absolutely 100% completely fine (and beyond happy!) if I had the ability to give my pawns really crappy pathfinding to get better performance. Or change how often whatever checks whatever. Let me tinker with these things to the point that I end up borking the game for myself, and I then need to hit the "Defaults" button! (btw only little girls ever press that button)

*Those are made up numbers, and I am not sure of the actual values used in game, but they were used just to get a point across.