Formation freeze

[klod]

While I played vs AI, I tried to click on a formation while having a large number (~150) of units around the map selected, and all of those units got stuck in place and stopped responding completely. The rest of the units kept working. My FPS also dropped all the way to single digits, but the game didn't crash or freeze, I waited for around 20-30 seconds and then just hit menu and quit normally. If I had to guess, whatever algorithm the formations use isn't good at handling large numbers of units scattered around the map.

[Loki1950]

That would be the pathfinder it's in the process of being rewritten and if I remember correctly formations are still turned off because of the way they effect said pathfinder.

Enjoy the Choice

[wraitii]

That sounds catastrophically worse than what you should experience.

 

Can you provide us with the replay of that game?

[klod]

Oh yeah, I forgot that all replays are saved. I'll do that as soon as I can.

[klod]

It took me a while to figure out where the replays are and which is the one I'm looking for, but I think I got it

2016-06-26_0001.zip

[wraitii]

Were you playing SVN or Alpha 20?

edit: nevermind, Alpha 20 it is. This is going to be more difficult to debug, but at a glance to the commands file the odd thing is the walk command is repeated 3 times.

I'm guessing the slow framerate is because of the short-range pathfinder for 150 units running into each other. I'm assuming you did not use formations for this?

[klod]

I'm not sure what you're asking me. I hadn't used formations at all until that point, I just tried it that one time and it froze

[wraitii]

What I mean is that we have "formations". So either you put those 150 units in a formation then moved that formation, or you just selected 150 units and told them to move.

 

Either way this is probably the short range pathfinder and there's not much that can be done right now sadly :/

[klod]

I think I told them to move, and then clicked a formation while they were moving.

 

Edit:

Just out of curiosity, when you say there's not much to be done right now, what do you mean? When can it be fixed, what does that depend on?

Edited June 28, 2016 by klod

[sanderd17]

That's probably related to one of the formation bugs. If the formation entity spawns on something impassable, it can't move and gets stuck. And as the entity spawns just in the geometrical center of the units, this can happen randomly. The problem isn't in the spawning of the formation controller, but in the pathfinder that shouldn't care about the controller being on an impassable spot (as the old pathfinder didn't care about it).

The other possibility is that the units forget their tasks when put in a formation. This is because the formation controller remembers the tasks of all units, and formations were never designed to be optional (i.e. in the original design, units were always in formation). So when a formation controller gets created now, all tasks (also movement tasks) are forgotten.

Both issues should indeed be solved sometime.

Even with single-digit FPS, you should still be able to see units move after 20-30s, so the problem is likely one of the issues above, and not a strict performance problem.