More variable radar ranges

[phrozen1]

I think Kadatherion is right on thisl
Most likely it's an root-issue thats causing problems with handling many dynamic objects.
In the long term egosoft needs to address this for upcoming games but for X4?
I wish there would be an easy fix but i'm afraid thats not the case...

[Kadatherion]

At this point I'd love to just have X4 map, but downgraded to full 2D.

3D is just a gimming that has almost no use on X4 map. I almost never use anything that default top-down view.

According to CBJ when we talked about it in a thread a few weeks ago, it being 3D has little to no part in its performance issues (and I'm prone to agree from my experience: it looks almost 100% CPU bound rather than GPU bottlenecked). The issue is how much crap it has to monitor and show at any one time, the whole galaxy, and everything updates in pretty much real time (instead than in full 2-3 seconds skips as it happened in X3): even if you make it 2D you wouldn't see much of a perfomance gain. Proof of it is the FPS can plummet simply by activating a filter (that just adds some fluffy text overlay, which is 2D by definition), or by opening a tab that lists all the visible stations: the issue lies with the raw data, not with how it's represented. Which is why radar ranges are an issue: the more radar coverage you have, the more raw data the map UI has to process.

What would have needed to be done was to make it so when you zoom out the map STOPS following what happens in each sector and only feeds you macro information. Which would basically be the same as X3, a sector by sector based map that you navigate with zoom rather than by clicking sectors, only "simulating" the seamless thing. A good compromise between how it feels and how it really works under the hood. They didn't go this way though, and everything else was designed to work with such a system, so it seems hardly feasible to go back to the drawing board now.

A possibility might be to lower the update rate down to X3 standards: the map would refresh at a second or two intervals, which would still... kind of work, I guess. There would still be a few things that would become a nuisance as they weren't designed with this in mind, though, like following a ship that's traveling on the highways: if it moves by "blinking" it's gonna be a nightmare to track and interact with it when it travels at such speeds, it could become a game of whack a mole.

[Falcrack]

I think a lot of the problems with map performance degrading, especially late game, is if egosoft changed their system to one closer in line with the sector satellite mod

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/4

In that mod, only a single satellite is required per sector in order to receive trade update data from all the stations in the sector. This was how it worked in X3, and it was fine, nobody had a problem with it. If it was that way again, then you would not need 10 satellites per sector, meaning you would not get nearly the amount of map vision, and thus you would get much better map performance.

[Kadatherion]

I think a lot of the problems with map performance degrading, especially late game, is if egosoft changed their system to one closer in line with the sector satellite mod

https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/4

In that mod, only a single satellite is required per sector in order to receive trade update data from all the stations in the sector. This was how it worked in X3, and it was fine, nobody had a problem with it. If it was that way again, then you would not need 10 satellites per sector, meaning you would not get nearly the amount of map vision, and thus you would get much better map performance.

Yeah, we know that mod, we were talking precisely about it - among other things. And yet satellites already aren't needed to get trade offers, you can buy subscriptions for them and not use a single satellite anymore: seriously, late game you are not supposed to have satellites anymore, not for trading, that is. And still map performance is a major issue for everybody. Because, you know, it's not just about that. It is with satellites if you place too many of them for whatever reason, it is with ships, as they are pretty much... moving satellites. We could get rid of autotraders, for instance, handling all trading with numbers only, that would help as well, wouldn't it?

BTW, in X3 we still placed satellites so that we could have radar coverage over the whole sector, from one corner to the opposite, on all 200 sectors in the galaxy, for several reasons other than trade offers visibility, and it didn't hurt perfomance. At all. Because that data wasn't always been processed, and it wasn't being processed in real time. Sector satellites - although a very smart and awesome mod - isn't the solution, it's a workaround, and only barely scratches the surface of the problem. Sure, it makes satellites playable. But they ain't satellites no more, they are cheaper trade subscriptions. And there's the entire rest of the game, with those dozens, hundreds of ships and stations we are supposed to have, still causing the very same problem.