FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Some might remember that I have been struggling for months now with my game running way too slow where everything abm related and even day/night cycle runs only at about 30% speed that it should run. But all digging
and building is fine with no lag whatsoever. I can build or dig as fast as my fingers can click.

So after trying and testing everything there is to try , I finally bit the bullet and started a new world.
On the new world everything ran at normal speed , yay , no more waiting long for furnaces and other machines
to complete their work.

BUT , barely 5 days into the new world , bam !! Slow motion mode AGAIN !!!
Once again everything is at about 30% speed. Needless to say this new world doesn't even have much in
it yet. After every single thing I build , I first looked at the speed of the game if it's still ok.
It was fine until I build the centrifuge system of technic for uranium processing. Then the game suddenly went
into slow mo. So I though ok , there is the problem and I removed that system. Didn't help.
Game is stuck in 30% speed with very few things in the world yet.

Needless to say I am now very fedup that not even a new world can solve this problem and very fedup to be stuck in slow game speed. I don't even want to play anymore :(

minetest 0.4.12-dev 201502281032 64bit
Kubuntu 64bit
CPU: i7 , RAM: 4gig ( also tried on a i5 with 16gig RAM and had no improvement)
Server runs dedicated in console mode
Subgame : Dreambuilder latest
Server runs in console mode , not GUI mode ( Start server in cli with minetestserver --worldname worldname &)

What I already tried :

- Server step is 0.1 in conf like it should be
- Different pc
- Different OS
- Server in gui mode
- Server in console mode
- Single player mode only
- 0.4.11 stable
- 0.4.12 stabe ( for Win as Ubuntu doesn't have one)
- Correct shutdown as to not corrupt the world
- Completely new world
- CPU usage between 20% and 28%
- RAM usage at 30%
- Disabled swap , slight improvement , but not corrected fully

None of that works. Game runs with zero lag , but everything ( all machines , plant life , day/night cycle ) all active things are running at only 30% speed.

What else can I try ? This is getting infuriating now !!!

Try any of these:

- disable everything in settings tab
- tweak the minetest.conf settings by adding these lines:

enable_3d_clouds = false
enable_clouds = false
menu_clouds = false
disable_fire = true
debug_log_level = 0
item_entity_ttl = 120
vsync = true

- make sure your graphics drivers are installed and up to date
- personally for ubuntu I disable swap partition for server use
- check mods in use to see if those are causing slowdown

This is on loaded MapBlocks?
Did you try restarting the server to see if it is a memory leak thing?

@tenplus1 : Will try those settings , although it runs in console mode and not in gui mode and most of those is for gui.

@rubenwardy: The server is reset 3 times a days for backups , and yes I checked immediately after restart and it is immediately in slow mo. Map blocks are loaded yes.

EDIT: Tried the settings suggested by TenPlus1 , made no difference. Current minetest.conf: http://pastebin.com/cYYtuLGu

@rubenwardy , memory usage is only about 30% used. CPU usage jumps between 20% and 28%

I doupt this is the soulation but - did you enable the cinematic mode with F8?

Could you record a video to demonstrate how that slow motion mode looks like?

Krock wrote:I doupt this is the soulation but - did you enable the cinematic mode with F8?

On server running in console mode ? Does that exist in console mode ?

Guys let me just be clear again , my problem is neither FPS nor Lag related.
It's the server running only in 30% game speed.

Clients FPS and Lag is fine , no issues there. The problem is the server running the game at 30% game speed.

@Krock: I don't know how to record a video of it. But like I explained , all "active" stuff runs slow. For example , furnaces takes longer to process lumps , grinder takes longer , alloy machines takes longer , plants takes longer to grow. The whole game runs at a slow speed and everything in the game processes slowly.
But I have no lag issues at all , no FPS issues at all. I have stable 50fps and no lag when digging or placing stuff. I don't know how to better explain it. What I did to get an actual number of how slow it runs was to use the quarry 1 second per node digging rate. You can visually see it digs only 1 node per 3 seconds. And when I calculate after an hour how far it dug it is only about 30% of what it normally does at normal game speed. Everything "active" in the game runs that slowly.

Cinematic mode only effects the camera rotating, not the ABMs.
(Press F8 to enable/disable)

rubenwardy wrote:Cinematic mode only effects the camera rotating, not the ABMs.
(Press F8 to enable/disable)

Does nothing , no effect

Yeah, that's why I said it only affects the camera rotating. It was in response to Krock.

You should comb through your mods and look for conflicting ABMs

I had a similar issue with mine when I tried to implement seasonal change;
turns out I had several different mods each with an abm for grass nodes
and of all them trying to redifine grass/soil at the same time in different ways.

Napiophelios wrote:You should comb through your mods and look for conflicting ABMs

I had a similar issue with mine when I tried to implement seasonal change;
turns out I had several different mods each with an abm for grass nodes
and of all them trying to redifine grass/soil at the same time in different ways.

I only use the subgame mentioned and don't add any other mods.
Shouldn't everyone using that subgame then have this problem. But it seems it's only me.
Or am I the only one picking it up and others don't notice.

Either way I don't know how to do that. I don't have knowledge of lua and one would probably have to
go through all the mods code ?

My bad, I thought you were using a custom game.
Yeah thats what I did.

Can you fall back to a previous version of dreambuilder that did work for you?
Sounds like something may have changed in the game.

sorry I couldnt help

Napiophelios wrote:My bad, I thought you were using a custom game.
Yeah thats what I did.

Can you fall back to a previous version of dreambuilder that did work for you?
Sounds like something may have changed in the game.

sorry I couldnt help

Well this problem has exist for about 6 months now. I don't have that old version anymore.

If mods have duplicate nodes , won't the duplicate show then in unified inventory ? Two things with same name ?

Duplicates nodes yeah,but some mods will redifine a node or introduce an ABM;
it could be anything...most of my "problems" arise from my love of editing other peoples work;
other peoples that generally know what they were doing when they wrote it..where as I do not.

If you are the only one with the problem tho,thats not good.

I dont know if its far enough back,but I have 2 copies from August of last year if you want to try them out

http://www.mediafire.com/download/s9c6p ... 062014.zip

http://www.mediafire.com/download/x73im ... 252014.zip

UPDATE: Ok this morning things was even worse. Game speed even slower at a dreadful plus minus 20%

I started to test what TenPlus1 mentioned the he doesn't use swap on his server on ubuntu. ( Currently mine has a swap partition ).
I disabled swap manually with sudo swapoff -a. Started the server and tested. Seen defnite improvement. Game speed up to about 50%.

Because that showed and improvement I am going to do the next test. Gonna re-install the OS completely without a swap partition and test again. Will give feedback after that.

Marshall_maz wrote:What I did to get an actual number of how slow it runs was to use the quarry 1 second per node digging rate. You can visually see it digs only 1 node per 3 seconds. And when I calculate after an hour how far it dug it is only about 30% of what it normally does at normal game speed. Everything "active" in the game runs that slowly.

This is going to be purely anecdotal, but I have seen this on VanessaE's Survival server from time to time. Sometimes my quarries dig 1 node per second as expected, and sometimes slower. I never counted, but 1 node quarried every 3 seconds sounds like it could be around what I saw.

ThatGraemeGuy wrote:

Marshall_maz wrote:What I did to get an actual number of how slow it runs was to use the quarry 1 second per node digging rate. You can visually see it digs only 1 node per 3 seconds. And when I calculate after an hour how far it dug it is only about 30% of what it normally does at normal game speed. Everything "active" in the game runs that slowly.

This is going to be purely anecdotal, but I have seen this on VanessaE's Survival server from time to time. Sometimes my quarries dig 1 node per second as expected, and sometimes slower. I never counted, but 1 node quarried every 3 seconds sounds like it could be around what I saw.

Thank you ThatGraemeGuy , I knew I couldn't be the only getting this. The quarry is the best and quickest way to see and calculate it as that is the only thing I know that one knows an actual node/per second rate.

Feedback on the "no swap partition test" : I re-installed the OS , no swap partition at all. Same result as manually disabling . Game speed varies between 40% and 50%. So it's a slight improvement , but not fixed at all.

What specification is your computer ?

TenPlus1 wrote:What specification is your computer ?

CPU: i7 (3rd gen) , RAM: 4gig

During testing I did run it on a i5 (3rd gen) with 16gig RAM also , made no difference

If using Windows, disable virus checking in minetest program folder... does that help ?

TenPlus1 wrote:If using Windows, disable virus checking in minetest program folder... does that help ?

I run the server and clients on Ubuntu , not windows.
Just ran it for a little while on Windows as part of testing to see if it is better on Windows. It wasn't
Went immediately back to ubuntu with it.

I really am very strongly suspecting that it's mods clashing. Almost everything else was tested.

Which mods are in use ???

TenPlus1 wrote:Which mods are in use ???

Subgame Dreambuilder , and no other mods.
So all the mods that sub game contains , which is a lot.
Mobs spawning is disabled for both friendly and hostile.

EDIT: Sorry forgot about 1 that I always add , Travelpoints is also in use.

I installed Dreambuilder[game] and Travelpoints to test it out and my own system ran at a crawl... Have you tried running a basic world to see if that has slowdown, plus the basic & travelpoints to test if that's the culprit...

I don't want to speak to soon ( as I got hope before only for the problem to return) , but I think the problem is found.
I disabled travelpoints. Everything running at normal speed now :) Quickly checked furnaces , grinder , quarry and general stuff running through pipes. All running at normal speed now :)

Will let it run for tonight and keep monitoring , but oh man I wish so much that was the problem and it's fixed now. ( Dreambuilder has travelnet build-in , so maybe adding travelpoints causes those two to clash )
Maybe after months of struggle I can finally have this solved. But too early to tell , let me not get ahead of myself. If it's still ok after 5 or 6 days then I'll believe :P

Will give feedback.

Update: Ya nee I thought it was to good to be true last night. Restarted this morning and is back in slow mow , again it's at a dreadful 30% speed about. :( Made sure and no other mods enabled. Only dreambuilder subgame.

This must be one of the mods in the sub game that causes this. I don't see any other thing it can be that haven't been tested.

Update: I checked on a server that I know runs the same sub game. The same thing there. Game speed also crawling.

Marshall_maz wrote:Will let it run for tonight and keep monitoring , but oh man I wish so much that was the problem and it's fixed now. ( Dreambuilder has travelnet build-in , so maybe adding travelpoints causes those two to clash )

No, there ought to be no clash in any way there except that you'd have two ways of more or less doing the same thing. Travelnets are written as passive nodes which only do something when you right-click them. I've added an abm later for updating travelnets that lost their configuration due to beeing saved with the map-saving function by the client, but that's disabled by default.

Dreambuilder is a game which contains quite a lot of mods. The plantlife is very wast and demanding on the hardware, but the game is also under constant development and is constantly improved. Are you sure there are no new mapchunks generated secretly while you're not looking? Else try to disable all mods except the ones you need to test performance and check how that runs. Hope you can solve your speed problem!

Sokomine wrote:

Marshall_maz wrote:Will let it run for tonight and keep monitoring , but oh man I wish so much that was the problem and it's fixed now. ( Dreambuilder has travelnet build-in , so maybe adding travelpoints causes those two to clash )

No, there ought to be no clash in any way there except that you'd have two ways of more or less doing the same thing. Travelnets are written as passive nodes which only do something when you right-click them. I've added an abm later for updating travelnets that lost their configuration due to beeing saved with the map-saving function by the client, but that's disabled by default.

Dreambuilder is a game which contains quite a lot of mods. The plantlife is very wast and demanding on the hardware, but the game is also under constant development and is constantly improved. Are you sure there are no new mapchunks generated secretly while you're not looking? Else try to disable all mods except the ones you need to test performance and check how that runs. Hope you can solve your speed problem!

It's just getting worse and worse. At times the game runs less than 10% speed. And the hardware is not strained at all. CPU never reaches past 30% and same with RAM. I disabled a few mods so far , but it didn't make a difference yet. My problem is that I don't know what I can really remove as lots of mods depends on each other and don't want to break one I use. I have no lua knowledge so don't know how to check what depends on what.

EDIT: I tried now without plantlife and moretrees ( removed them completely ). Made no difference. Still dragging in slow mo.

Tried now by removing all mods in subgame except the main ones ( Technic , pipeworks , mesecons , moreores , moreblocks , unified inventory )

Made no difference. So if it is a mod causing it then it is one of those main ones mentioned as that was the only ones running.

Those popular mods are known to be heavy. Just saying :)