Recently GSB has had a massively laggy UI - blocking for 5 seconds at a time each time I deploy a single ship, blocking for minutes at a time when deleting several ships. Feels like the game is blocking for disk/network access - although that makes no sense since there’s no reason to be using that.
The battles themselves run smoothly with how ever many ships you feel like having.
Haven’t had this problem before, but this is a new install of Windows, and this time the game is from Steam (I own it twice ).
I’m only using the little Microsoft one, ‘Microsoft Security Essentials’, I suppose I can give it a go with it turned off, but it hasn’t affected any other game so far.
Edit: It’s not doing it today - perhaps it was doing it yesterday because my backup was running during the day (rather than at 3am daily). Does anyone know where the temp/scratch files for this game are written, I’d love to put them on a separate drive so this annoying bug doesn’t resurface. The UI seems to be REALLY sensitive to any disk accesses - even just copying some files or watching a movie from the same drive causes the UI to slow to a crawl.
I doubt any large changes/fixes will be forthcoming since Cliffski is already working on a new game, but if there’s time I’d really appreciate it if all the disk-IO was removed (what can it be for?) or at least threaded, so the UI remains responsive.
There shouldnt be much in the way of disk I/O at all. I suspect something else in the background. Is this a fresh vista install? if so turn off indexing, it is a nightmare and causes issues like this.
To double check, if you run the game windowed, then run task manager, then on performance tab launch the resource monitor, you can isolate gsb.exe and see every file access it does, to see if that is the problem. It really doesn’t do very much. You can also see what disk access everything else is doing, which might point out who is responsible.
I hope it’s not me
It’s a new install of Windows 7 (We just had a big earthquake where I am, killed my old install!), so we’ve got backups running, things indexing, Visual Studio taking its 12 years to install etc. Pretty taxing circumstances, I was just surprised that disk activity would be needed at all!
I’ll do a defrag or something else disk intensive tonight to try and recreate it, and see if GSB has any file handles open. According to your blog you seem to take great professional pride in carefully coding your games, so maybe something else was at fault (i.e. some windows/virus-scanning/process-inspecting process interfering, and then itself waiting on IO).
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