Slow loading of Oolite

[pepak]

I have decided to upgrade my Oolite to the newest versions (1.71) and include more OXPs. Done that, but the loading times increased dramatically and I even experience serious slowdowns during the gameplay. I suspect some of the OXPs is the cause - but how do I find it? Is there a better way that removing OXPs one by one until I find the culprit?

[Lestradae]

Which oxps do you have installed?

[pepak]

Assassins v1.3.oxp
Asteroid Storm v3.45.oxp
Bank of the Black Monks v1.1.oxp
Beacon Launcher.oxp
Behemoth.oxp
Black Baron v1.70.oxp
Cargo Wrecks v1.31.oxp
Clear Skies.oxp
Commies v2.07.oxp
Custom Sounds.oxp
Deposed v1.32.oxp
Dictators v1.2.oxp
Dredger.oxp
Freaky Thargoids v3.oxp
Free Trade Zone v0.13.oxp
Fuel Tank v2.0.oxp
Galactic Navy v4.0.oxp
Gritty Coriolis.oxp
Hoopy Casino.oxp
Illicit Unlock Fix v1.56.oxp
Ionics v1.21.oxp
Lave v1.70.oxp
Local Hero v1.05.oxp
Long Way Around.oxp
Lovecats v1.1.oxp
Marett's Pack Vol.1.oxp
Military Fiasco v2.23.oxp
Morrigan.oxp
Murgh X-Ships.oxp
Ore Processor v1.52.oxp
Outrider.oxp
Planet Express.oxp
PTI.oxp
Random Hits v1.2.oxp
Rock Hermit Locator v1.21.oxp
Spy Hunter.oxp
Sung's Detailed Textures v1.0.oxp
Supercobra.oxp
Taranis Headquarters.oxp
Thargoid Carrier v1.2.oxp
Thargoid Wars v4.2.oxp
Thorgorn Threat v1.1.oxp
Tiger.oxp
Trident Down v0.6.oxp
UPS Courier v1.40.oxp
Velocity.oxp
Your Ad Here v3.0
Zzzz Realistic Shipyards v3.01

[Commander Mysenses]

Getting rid of Realistic Shipyards did it for me.... it's a big ol' unit that one. You might be better off just installing the few extra ships you like.

[pepak]

Getting rid of Realistic Shipyards did it for me.... it's a big ol' unit that one. You might be better off just installing the few extra ships you like.

I couldn't care less about the extra ships, but I liked the balance enhancements of the OXP.

[Commander Mysenses]

And you can get rid of some of those missions (or at least put them aside). Some missions are galaxy specific (assassins, Black Baron, long way round etc), so you only need to include them when you arrive in that galaxy (check their documentation for specifics).

If you really want to keep the shipyards OXP in, you don't need the ship OXPs as well. But if your system can't cope with such a big OXP, ditch RS and cherrypick the ship OXPs you really want to see.

[pepak]

If you really want to keep the shipyards OXP in, you don't need the ship OXPs as well. But if your system can't cope with such a big OXP, ditch RS and cherrypick the ship OXPs you really want to see.

To be honest, I am surprised my system can't handle it. Sure, it's a lot of OXPs, but still, I would have thought my machine is equipped better than many (Core 2 Duo E6550, 3 GB RAM, SSD drive...; the only thing that is nothing to speak of is the graphics card, but no matter that Geforce 8500 is a low end, I would expect it to handle Oolite well enough :-( ).

[another_commander]

Suggestion: Try to see if you get any better performance by removing the Bank of the Black Monks OXP. I have witnessed inexplicable slowdowns with this OXP in.

[Lestradae]

If you have the Realistic Shipyards in, you can remove a list of your other oxps, which are already included.

You can (and should!) remove:

Dredger.oxp
Fuel Tank v2.0.oxp
Illicit Unlock Fix v1.56.oxp
Marett's Pack Vol.1.oxp
Morrigan.oxp
Murgh X-Ships.oxp
Outrider.oxp
PTI.oxp
Sung's Detailed Textures v1.0.oxp
Supercobra.oxp
Tiger.oxp
Velocity.oxp

The Realistic Shipyards is a very resource-heavy oxp, it is by far the biggest one around. But I think the performance problem can come from you having the oxps above installed also - that means that the system is using them double!

For example Sung`s textures alone have 10MB and are already included in the Realistic Shipyards - your system will load them twice! Read the Read Me`s people, all in there ...

If you happen to have below 2GB RAM, 2GHz processor speed and a mediocre graphics card, the Realistic Shipyards are not for you ... otherwise they should work without a hiccup, after you took the doubled oxps out.

[JensAyton]

For example Sung`s textures alone have 10MB and are already included in the Realistic Shipyards - your system will load them twice! Read the Read Me`s people, all in there ...

No. The game only loads textures which are actually used. If textures with the same name exist in multiple places, only one will ever be loaded. If ships of the same name exist in multiple places, only one will ever be loaded, and therefore only its textures will ever be loaded.

However, textures for all the ships in visual range will be used every frame (currently even for ships behind you), which means that having a large variety of ships taxes your video memory and bus bandwidth heavily.

[Lestradae]

@Ahruman:

But that doesn`t mean that having the same thing double installed doesn`t slow the game down, or does it?

[pepak]

If you have the Realistic Shipyards in, you can remove a list of your other oxps, which are already included.

I actually left them in on purpose - so that I can remove the Realistic Shipyards if I need to.

However, textures for all the ships in visual range will be used every frame (currently even for ships behind you), which means that having a large variety of ships taxes your video memory and bus bandwidth heavily.

My card has either 256 or 512 MB of dedicated RAM, so that should not be a problem. I hope.

---

Looking at Filemon log it seems that Oolite has quite a few problems with read-only directories: I only allowed write access to oolite.app\oolite-saves. Should I have added some more? Or even better, should I perhaps move some of the paths from RunOolite.bat to a ramdisk? Only I don't know which paths are intended for temps:
OOLITE_USER_ROOT, GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT, GNUSTEP_NETWORK_ROOT, GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, HOMEPATH

[LittleBear]

Black Monks has a very detailed station (although the slow down should only usually occour when you one is actually present). You could delete the Model and Texture files from Realistic Shipyards. This is a "dirty hack" but it would take out all the ships and just leave the rebalancing. That OXP contains about 500 ships and they have multiple roles. I think its probabley the ammount of textures that have to be loaded into memory. Oolite automatically populates systems with a certain number of ships (randomised but weighted for more pirates in anarchys, more cops in corperate states etc). If Oolite adds (say) 8 traders, 6 pirates, 2 hunters, 3 miners and 6 police ships, that can easily involve loading 20 extra textures with Relistic Shipyards installed, but only a few without it. As realistic shipyards contains so many ships and gives them so many different roles it puts a lot of load on Oolite.

[another_commander]

Looking at Filemon log it seems that Oolite has quite a few problems with read-only directories: I only allowed write access to oolite.app\oolite-saves. Should I have added some more? Or even better, should I perhaps move some of the paths from RunOolite.bat to a ramdisk? Only I don't know which paths are intended for temps:
OOLITE_USER_ROOT, GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT, GNUSTEP_NETWORK_ROOT, GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, HOMEPATH

Why do you have to set permissions to Oolite? The game will not write anything outside its own root directory, unless you are on Vista, in which case it will write certain files in VirtualStore. This would be normal behavior anyway.

I suggest you let Oolite have full write access to its entire directory structure. For reference, apart from oolite-saves, the game writes files also inside <OOlite Install Directory>\oolite.app\GNUstep, <OOlite Install Directory>\oolite.app\Library\Caches and OOlite Install Directory>\oolite.app itself (the location of stderr.txt).

[pepak]

Why do you have to set permissions to Oolite?

Security. It is not safe to allow write access to executable files, for example.