[MOD] [TC/AP] X3 Rebalance Mod (XRM) - Total conversion - v1.30d (02.12.13)

[AcidWeb]

Changing pre-rendered frames not changed my FPS.

Fun fact. I can replace default AA with much more powerful one and my FPS don't change at all.

X3:AP have any debug log? I use many mods maybe something is flooding game with errors. In most modable games this kill fps

I need make separate installation only with XRM and check if FPS are the same.

[Kadatherion]

99% of the times, Acidweb, in X3 the bottleneck is the CPU anyway (because of the type of game, its old single threaded engine etc). This explains why even boosting your AA doesn't affect you: you have plenty of GPU power for the game, it's the CPU that can't keep up.

XRM does indeed add quite a bit of CPU load, thus an fps hit is pretty much inevitable. It does optimize other things though, and probably the only GPU related tweak you can do to have better fps in chaotic battles is removing the engine trails from fighters/m6 (it did help me a little bit).

In non busy instances the decrease in fps is mainly due to the amount of ships and tasks running around in the universe. Not much you can do without amputating relevant XRM features, but you can keep the issue at bay by being careful with other potentially heavy scripts you might be using. Don't use Smart Turrets/MARS for all npc ships or for ships you own that don't really benefit that much from it (ie: universal traders/ESTs/Ok Traders; they are meant to flee from the enemy anyway), if you use scripts such as the NPC bailing consider a lighter alternative that just spawns the odd shipwreck once in a while instead of monitoring in real time all the battles going on in the 'verse, et cetera.

In battles the big hit is all the collision detection from the thousands of bullets flying around (plus beam weapons are a bit nasty too: as they have a constant, superfast hit cycle, the engine tends to overload, as every time a ship takes one hit it has to calculate damage, reactions, racial standing and so on: with beam weapons multiple hits happen at the same time, and the engine slows down the game as it has to wait for all these calculations).
Again, not much you can do except trying to keep CPU intensive scripts running in the background as few as possible. Unless you go for the old approach of editing the laser files to reduce the number of bullets (for instance, halving the rate of fire of weapons while doubling their bullet damage), but I wouldn't advise it in XRM: the weapon balance has been carefully tailored, such an edit would easily break it.

Another thing you can try in the game is turning off post processing filters: they are CPU bound too, so it might help in battles.



Other than that, it's the same old "keep your OS clean" mantra: turn off your antivirus, windows aero, and any non vital background tasks (such as autoupdates, or indexing services), keep the disks well defragged and so on.
If you haven't more than 4GB RAM (and especially if you run on a 32 bit OS), try to make it so the page file is readable as fast as possible (it's still not real memory, but it's better than nothing). For instance, don't have your page file on your system HD: if you have multiple hard disks, keep it on a secondary data disk, so there's less chance of disk thrashing.

At the end of the day, AP is still running a 10 years old engine, major mods such as XRM are bound to take it to the limit.

[AcidWeb]

Thank you for detailed response.

I completely disabled vsync and started testing.
New game. Nostalgic Argon start. All graphic settings on maximum. Stock AA/AF.

Non-modded - 90-130fps
XRM only - 50-90fps
All my mods - 50-80fps

When I load my save and go to the same place (center of Argon Prime) I got there 25-30fps... And I have only 3 ships and one station in that game. So I'm starting to think that something is working really bad in that save

[Kadatherion]

Hmm, while it's not unusual to see a certain decrease in performance in a long term game, that does indeed seem a quite too extreme difference.

At the very beginning of the game there probably aren't any battles going around in the universe, as the jobs file (and XRM replacement war fleets) has just been initialized, so I'd seta at least an hour or two in to have a more realistic comparison, but still from the looks of it I'd say it might very well be that in your save some poorly optimized script has been building up trash. Lots of it.

What other mods/scripts are you using? AL plugins especially.

[Reido]

I'm trying to modify the TwareT.pck file as outlined in the FAQ for changing the jumpdrive to L size from XL. It's not working though. 2 things:

1. After opening up the TwareT.pck file in the X3 Editor 2, I can't find the jumpdrive in the list on the left. I see one called SS_WARE_GATELESSJUMP, and another SS_WARE_UNFOCUS_JUMP, but I don't think either one is the jumpdrive.
2. It says to change the size, but all I see in the size column is "String [1999.12] not found" for about every ware (with slight changes from one to the other). FYI, the name of each item is similar: "String [17.2354] not found".

What am I doing wrong?

You'll have to excuse me if I make some assumptions here as I don't know how familiar you are with X3 Editor 2.

Check the 'Configuration' tab and under 'Profiles' make sure that it's setup to look at the proper game folder i.e. TC or AP. It looks like X3 Editor 2 is not picking up the right files it needs. Also make sure that you open the TwareT file by using the 'Open Using VFS' option (Vitual File System), that will ensure that you're opening the TwareT.pck file that has the highest precedence as there are multiple TwareT.pck files but the game engine only 'sees' the files in the highest numbered Cat/Dat or even higher precedent files that are 'loose' such as the ones in the 'Types' folder (the 'real' folders outside the CAT/DAT's).

The Jumpdrive should be item ID 36 in the TwareT.pck file.

When you save your edited version of a file from a CAT/DAT it's always a good idea to save it as a 'loose' file so you can always go back to the original if you need to and the loose file will have a higher precedence and therefore be the one that the game now uses.

Use 'Save As' and then click on the 'Switch to System Dialog' option at the top of the window, now your out of the VFS system and can save you new file as a loose version in the appropriate folder. If you somehow mess up the game it's now easy to check if your new file is to blame by just renaming it and have the game use the original one in the CAT/DAT.

Some changes to files will require a new game start to see the results, but I think the simple change to the Jumpdrive size will work OK in a running game. If you make a change to a file and don't see the results then try starting a new game.

HTH

Reido

[klaatu]

Walk me through what youre doing. If youre seeing what youre seeing then you are looking at the wrong TwareT or something.

Thanks for the reply. While typing up the steps I followed I must have done something different this time (I think it was opening up the TwareT file from the t folder instead of the addon/t folder), because this time it worked! Thanks anyway, but problem solved. Also, the ware wasn't called jumpdrive, but something else, like warpdrive or somethingwarp, but at least this time the ware name was displayed instead of string not found so it was easy to spot.

[Nick 031287]

i cant download this..... is there an Alternative?


the download wont go any faster then 20 kb/s and then after a few hours of waiting the network fails completly an wastes all my time waiting....

my internet isnt great but it can download up to 600kb/s speeds. so why wont this file go faster??? i just wanna play XRM to tie me over till X rebirth is fixed up.....

[klaatu]

You'll have to excuse me if I make some assumptions here as I don't know how familiar you are with X3 Editor 2.

[snip]

Yes, that information would have help tremendously. Too bad it wasn't included in the XRM FAQ. I'll be sure to follow your advise next time (unfortunately I read it a little too late this time ).

[AcidWeb]

Hmm, while it's not unusual to see a certain decrease in performance in a long term game, that does indeed seem a quite too extreme difference.

At the very beginning of the game there probably aren't any battles going around in the universe, as the jobs file (and XRM replacement war fleets) has just been initialized, so I'd seta at least an hour or two in to have a more realistic comparison, but still from the looks of it I'd say it might very well be that in your save some poorly optimized script has been building up trash. Lots of it.

What other mods/scripts are you using? AL plugins especially.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 25#4263525

[Kadatherion]

Doesn't seem there's any known offender in that list.

If MARS isn't set up to be applied to all NPCs in your save, then it shouldn't have any real performance impact.

The NPC Bailing addon might build up way too many wrecks around but I see you are aware of it and as such you are keeping it at minimum settings. It will still take its toll once in the universe there are several battles going on (aka from a couple hours in onwards), but I doubt it can have such a detrimental impact: I did myself switch to a lighter and simpler script to reduce CPU load just the other day, but I've got a prehistoric dual core so every little bit counts in my case.
Its salvaging npcs are a bit bugged in AP though, I've seen several stop dead in space at times (this probably happens when their target for salvaging is claimed by someone else or otherwise removed), so it might have been building them up, but it shouldn't spawn that many anyway. Try to destroy all npc salvagers from its config menu though, you never know.

The old version of Marine Repairs by Tatakau was known to seriously affect performance as the game went on, because of AL pileups (it surely ruined a couple saves of mine back in TC). Bullwinkle's new version should have addressed that, and while it's still a bit heavy (it's the first AL plugin that my system begins to skip when under stress), it shouldn't have any permanent impact anymore.

Truth be told, apart from FDN and different trader/miner plugins, I'm using the same scripts as you without issues. I'd suggest you to avoid using the official bonus pack, though: grab their standalone versions, the bonus pack is very outdated (but still it can't be the cause of your slowdown, it has been thoroughly tested).

[Nick 031287]

does anyone have any Alternative download? i cant download from the link on this. its too slow and then fails completly

[Reido]

does anyone have any Alternative download? i cant download from the link on this. its too slow and then fails completly

I just tried to download it and it works fine at my end @ ~ 300 kb/s.

It must be an Internet routing problem at your end, just keep trying, it should clear up eventually.

I don't have a place to share it from and I'm not sure Paul would approve of that anyway.


Reido

[AcidWeb]

MARS - Only on player ship.
Balling - is set to minimum. Default settings are crazy high. Every combat created 3+ wrecks.
Marine Repairs - Using newest version.

I will update official plugins and run ~2h of seta in new game. We will see if slowdown will appear.

[Barleyman]

Depends on the start really. The ATF or Charlatan start give you very good ships for shooting stuff, as do others. The extra bounty system in XRM means even an easy level mission like defend the transport gives you somewhere around 300k credits when all said and done.

I don't like starting from a huge hole myself so I also use the NPC bail script, which sometimes feels like a cheat but it gets me going a bit faster. Once you have a JD ship things are less "oh crap I'm going to die".

Good tip about the escort jobs. That spoonfeeds you M4 and M5 attackers who are more interested in attacking the transports than gang-banging you. when I got over my aversion of auto-aim (playing with a joystic here) I also became several times more lethal.

I think XRM may be bit too generous about yaki ship salvage values, you can make a cool million even for one shot-up fuji raider. On the other hand repairing a shot up tenjin requires an eye-watering pile of cash.

So it's more like you take a few million to bank on escort jobs that spawn pirates as they will abandon ship unlike Kha'ak or xenon. Well, bail script could make both bail but I tune it to 20%, it should be a freak hit taking pilot out to make that happen. I think the bail script doesn't work properly right away or maybe the adjusted values only kick in when you reload. I had a lot of bails at "3" which should be ~10% bail rate but had bails popping left and right. Then it just went away and now I see one every once in a while.

Been years since I played X3, some re-learning curve here..

[Reido]

Balling - is set to minimum. Default settings are crazy high. Every combat created 3+ wrecks.

You can also reduce the 'destruct timer', if like me you still find that there's too many abandoned ships kicking around.

I usually set my timer to 10-20 minutes when I'm using the Advanced Universe and that gives me just enough time to jump to the nearest beacon and get to the ship when the SEWN goes off IF I'm not otherwise occupied with a mission or don't have access to a fast-ish ship.

You could set the timer even lower so that there's only enough time to get to ships in-sector after they've been abandoned, that sometimes makes for some interesting salvage opportunities as you see that juicy m3+ sitting at the other side of a sector with the clock ticking down but the baddies near it haven't all been eliminated yet and you're not sure you have the firepower to finish them off or the speed to grab the wreck and get it safely away, it feels like more of an accomplishment then just picking up easy credits.


Reido

[Kadatherion]

I will update official plugins and run ~2h of seta in new game. We will see if slowdown will appear.

Keep an eye on the script editor menu while at it: it indexes all the tasks running in the game, so you can compare the number of running tasks in a new game with that of your save. If the latter has many more running tasks than the fresh game, it'd be a symptom of something building up and not being correctly removed as time passes. With a bit of luck, comparing the two lists, you might even be able to recognize the culprit (if indeed there is a specific culprit at all).

[Reido]

I think the bail script doesn't work properly right away or maybe the adjusted values only kick in when you reload. I had a lot of bails at "3" which should be ~10% bail rate but had bails popping left and right. Then it just went away and now I see one every once in a while.

Whenever you change the bail rate settings in a running game the ships that were abandoned at that time with there timers running have there countdown timers shut off and remain there forever or until you find them and only newly bailed ships after you change the settings have countdown timers running so it seems like you run across a lot more ships for a while after making a change.

With the large increase in the number and size of the battle in XRM the default NPC Bailer settings can lead to a huge number of bailed ships. What I've done is edit the T file to change the defaults for the script so I don't have to remember to change the settings at the start of each new game, because if I forget and then make the change then my universe is littered with ships that bailed before the settings change with no countdown timers.


Reido

[Sairaf]

Which script/mod creates the Pirate Marine Training Barracks in a random sector and tons of Marine Base Mules?

[Phier]

I think the bail script doesn't work properly right away or maybe the adjusted values only kick in when you reload. I had a lot of bails at "3" which should be ~10% bail rate but had bails popping left and right. Then it just went away and now I see one every once in a while.

Whenever you change the bail rate settings in a running game the ships that were abandoned at that time with there timers running have there countdown timers shut off and remain there forever or until you find them and only newly bailed ships after you change the settings have countdown timers running so it seems like you run across a lot more ships for a while after making a change.

With the large increase in the number and size of the battle in XRM the default NPC Bailer settings can lead to a huge number of bailed ships. What I've done is edit the T file to change the defaults for the script so I don't have to remember to change the settings at the start of each new game, because if I forget and then make the change then my universe is littered with ships that bailed before the settings change with no countdown timers.


Reido

I run with NPC salvagers so they eventually all get claimed and go away.

[DrBullwinkle]

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 25#4263525

In SEWN, do you have satellites turned on in all sectors? That could clobber your fps. Turn on only the satellites that you really want to monitor.