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2024-11-02 Sea Power War Story
2024-11-02T14:57:13Z New Sea Power naval warfare day has started. Well I have been suffering from irregular sleeping schedule, meaning I woke up today, ate days first meal and no later than one or two hours had to go take a over three hours nap so it wasn't a nap exactly it was continuation for nightly sleep, then I upgraded PMC DevSurf Sea Power, chatted with Martin of Triassic Games on discord, edited some missions. Now booted up PMC Gaming computer, copied those new missions here, upgraded Sea Power to stable #70 and now I'm ready to start playing.
Mission in question is "PMC NACV Last Stretch" mission which I just created today, its just another version of the earlier reuben james nacv mission, yes its a brand new mission with brand new units, but "the story line" and objective is exactly the same; Reuben James, Pharris and umm err what was the new ship I added, are escorting 4 cargo ships to iceland coast, its 1030nm away and area is filled with soviet submarines.
Soviet sub groups are with 25% chance of appearing and they all now have 2 subs, mostly SSGN with an escort, but there are few other combinations as well like two diesel boats, also SSBN's are featured, delta 3 and yankee. I mean guess those SSBN's are there "just because", kind of like targets, variation if you will, they don't pose a threat to convoy, SSBN's would not be attacking convoys.
I'm looking forward for this naval warfare session but unfortunately I'm expecting the RAM, VRAM and GPU utilization maxed out issue to raise its ugly head again after 5+ or so gaming hours when I spam those sonobuoys in constant stream. But who knows, parhaps I'm already tired at that point and need to get some sleep, I have no idea, I'm hoping to play many many hours, I would really like it to be over 8hrs gaming session.
2024-11-02T15:07:00Z Sea Power booted up, just edited settings for more details hehe. I noticed that it was using "quality very high" setting and that had 4x anti-aliasing, vegetation detail high and ocean quality high, so I disabled anti-aliasing (should not be needed in 4k res) and turned vege to ultra and ocean quality to extreme, whoah! 
But oops, had to turn back the defails as that resulted in 20FPS performance, yikes! 
So now disabled anti-aliasing, turned vegetation to medium (not that I see trees in north atlantic), ocean to medium and autogeneration to medium as well, now performance is 45FPS which is in fact much better than previously in my PMC Gaming sessions, hmm I had the very high quality setting on, hmm either its bugged or its not even an preset, hmm. Learning as I go. Anyways I love 45FPS performance now. Edit 2024-11-04T14:31:17Z, there are no such thing as "very high quality" video preset, its a "base unity quality" setting instead. My bad.
Ocean quality extreme was truly as the name says, extreme quality, whoah dude it looked so sweet, but no graphics justifies 20FPS performance, no way, no how.
Changed ocean detail back to high, it gives me now 40-42FPS performance which is fine, it looks one nudge better than medium.
2024-11-02T15:31:35Z Mission is underway now, SH-2F sea sprites are deploying sonobuoys for two 15nm circles. Windows 10 task manager shows on the side as I'm typing this, CPU 22%, RAM 60%, GPU utilization 100% and dedicated GPU memory 4.6/12gb. So far so good.
Oh and I'm running three things, Sea Power, Notepad++ and task manager. Well OK four things, steam client is running in console/silent mode in the background so I cannot see it or ALT-TAB to it, just the way I like it.
Hmm I'm flying helo in open ocean and now performance peaked to 60FPS, whoah cool dude! 
In-game 1985-06-26T13:21:00Z new passive contact! The game is on!
Detected by AN/SSQ-53 sonobuoy, cant tell which one but assuming the closest. From the closest buoy distance to the contact is 10.61nm, distance to reuben james (closest ship) 35.82nm. Now... depending who this boogoo-bad-guy is, my convoy could already be well within firing range, it most certainly is if its one of those nasty SSGN's.
Now things got exciting 
Unknown contact data is speed 3kts, course 174 and depth 32ft, oh its on periscope depth, interesting.
BTW regular users at Sea Power discord talked about this recently that sonobuoys shouldn't get you depth info like that, hmm I didn't pay attention if devs said anything about that topic.
Set my convoy to ahead 1/3 speed, just in case the sub hasn't heard them yet.
In-game 13:22:56Z got more confidence on the contact, now its classified as either foxtrot or tango, so its a diesel boat. Most likely its snorkeling, hmm wonder if I should fire up a surface search radar on my helo a bit, hmm hmm.
Did a quick scan with SH-2F surface radar but nothing got picked up, turned it off, EMCON. At this time contact was classified as fortrot soviet submarine.
In-game 13:26:02Z foxtrot has now visible in my 3D game world, she is snorkeling. Hello there, I got two friends of mine who I'd like to introduce you to, they are called MK-46 torpedoes 
In-game 13:32:10Z SH-2F dropped sonobuoy next to the snorkeling foxtrot, that immediately gave a new passive sonar contact, speed 3kts, course 241 and depth 230ft, shes above thermocline thermal layer, checked one of my ships and termal layer is at 359ft.
In-game 13:39:01Z second contact got classified as kilo class B-260 soviet submarine. Okay now its time to shoot.
2024-11-02T16:27:13Z But uh oh! I ordered SH-2F to drop one MK-46 on the kilo and when I did the same for foxtrot... game froze, it brought up that windows loading rotating circle animation mouse pointer and GPU utilization went to 1-2% in task manager, yikes!
Game was "(Not Responding)" status in taskbar. Once the current music track stopped playing, no new track started playing. I can still hear SH-2F engine/rotor sound, but game is frozen. Uh oh, this might be a task manager kill process for the first time with Sea Power
Going to take a restroom break, then if its still frozen I'm going to make a test by targeting my own sonobuoy with torpedo, perhaps there is no auto ignore for that type, I doubt it but dunno what else could have it been, I have successfully killed several soviet subs with torpedoes in the past days, now it froze, in tactical display sonobuoy text was on top of the foxtrot icon I RMB clicked.
2024-11-02T16:35:51Z Back, still forzen, OK going to screenshot if steam client can take a screenshot from this moment, then kill sea power.exe process and try to reproduce this same bug by attacking my own sonobuoy after restarting the game.
Well F12 steam overlay screenshot was not working, it brought up the "program is not responding" dialog, oh well.
2024-11-02T17:19:15Z Chatted for a while with Sea Power devs on discord, got myself into development branch of the beta, now I have hmm dunno which version number but the latest dev branch version of the game from mere minutes ago and apparently it gets updated every 15min IF there are committed changes, cool stuff, bleeding edge of development, I love it!
Okay time to launch dev branch and see how it runs.
2024-11-02T17:28:53Z It runs, has new main menu intro animation, more options in... err, options. Good stuff, okay time to restart PMC NACV Last Stretch mission again, I got soviets to kill
Got mission started, its now in-game 1985-06-26T10:42:12Z, sonobuoys are being deployed, things are looking good. I'm loving the new weapon names, and weapon type names in GUI as well, excellent.
TheHappyYachter in Microprose Sea Power discord #sp-beta-team channel explained that ... aaand I forgot what was it that I mean to say, been chatting a lot with the devs, got so much new information like that beta dev branch, mission editor bug fixes which I reported mere hours earlier today, etc. Just excellent Sea Power day today. Yeah mission editor name, mission difficulty and mission description have now been fixed, its so great for mission making that such basic functionality is now done, cant wait to do more missions tomorrow.
Oh now I remember, TheHappyYachter told me that options menu "Quality" is not a video preset for like low, medium, high and very high, but its instead some "base Unity quality" setting, I have no idea what that means though. He said:
TheHappyYachter (Triassic Games): It has a lot to do with shadows and lighting
So I now set it to medium, v-sync off, anti-aliasing off, vegetation detail medium, ocean detail high, autogen detail medium and I'm getting 43-45FPS performance. Cant tell much difference how the ocean surface looks though compared to my previous potato setting. Good stuff.
Sea Power 0.1.0.14105 (#3148), that's the current version and build from game Player.log file.
2024-11-02T19:32:02Z Not much happening, just working hard deploying sonobuoys while convoy traverses north atlantic at 12kts speed towards iceland. This is the life of convoy escort in duty.
2024-11-02T19:34:43Z Unfortunately looks like the stutters, small freezes, have begun. Yes I have played a while now and they are not very bad, but after previous timestamp I saw two freezes (and as I'm typing this I just saw another one), win task manager still doesn't show anything bad, Task manager CPU 19%, RAM 61%, GPU utilization 99% and dedicated GPU memory 7.9/12gb
Edit 2024-11-04T15:14:09Z, this is good data to have, looks like I played around 2hrs before these freezes started here, I documented this down now for my own notes so I can better update devs about the issue when time comes. Also its good for mission design, IF and I do emphasize IF, this unity engine bug is not fixed then at least any mission design should focus on the first ONE hour of game-play, no longer than 2hrs as then the lag hell begins. Its not a show stopper yet at 2hrs mark but it starts around there, assuming it depends on mission and gaming style of course, but a ballbark number is now written down. Good stuff. BTW this is very surprising, I previously thought that its at least FOUR (4) hours of game-play before performance issues begin, but yeah my previous game start was 1728hrs so only just about two hours ago, two hours is... nothing, very sad.
Now its only matter of time until the freezes get so bad that its not enjoyable to play anymore, although one could argue that even a few freezes is already unacceptable.
2024-11-02T20:31:17Z Just set another SH-2F sea sprite to sonobuoy dropping pattern, alarm went off moments ago, its time for a lunch break...
2024-11-02T21:00:20Z Feeding time is over, back to Sea Power.
During eating I was watching SH-2F fly and occasionally drop a sonobuoy, so cool.
2024-11-02T21:45:18Z I am not bored, absolutely not, however I have to admit that after all these hours of playing I would love to get the first sonar contact, I want to kill soviets. I am constantly running SH-2F's to deploy sonobuoys and what ALT-TAB time I have left I'll chat or well chatted in microprose sea power discord with devs, seems like most of them went to bed/away now, its saturday night in EU/UTC time so kind of looks like discord is getting more quiet. But yeah I would love get some sub tracking and killing action going on right now. I feel like the soviet sub group percentage chance of appearance has left one empty circle/area here, its been so long time without contact now that this has to be one empty "slot" in the enemy forces I created.
I honestly don't have a sense how many hours have I played and feel too lazy to start browsing this war story page up to find the timestamp, it doesn't matter to me that much, needless to say this has been several hours now, as can be seen from Sea Power game occassional freezes. They aren't too bad but clearly tell the tale of multiple hour gaming session (with sonobuoys).
2024-11-02T21:50:26Z Task manager CPU 20%, RAM 93%, GPU utilization 99% and dedicated GPU memory 8.9/12gb.
So looks like VRAM is still quite OK, yeah its high but nothing like maxing out yet, however RAM usage is scary, 93% is so close of being maxed out that its very scary, hmm. Right now sea power.exe uses 10.4gb of RAM.
2024-11-02T22:15:44Z Now Sea Power.exe uses 11.7gb RAM, it was already 12gb moment ago when I started to type this timestamp. Freezes are quite bad now, I don't think this game runtime has much life left anymore, soon it will be simply unplayable.
Was thinking of shutting firefox off as discord has quieted down so much, but it only uses 500mb RAM now so yeah dunno if its worth it.
Checked this war story for timestamps when did I start this mission, it was "2024-11-02T17:28:53Z" so that was hmm pretty much exactly 5 hours ago as I'm typing this (2227hrs). So five hours of game-play and 16gb RAM is maxed out and almost 12gb VRAM too. I was thinking of trying this same mission with all details low/disabled on PMC DevSurf, maybe even leave it running overnight when I go to sleep tonight, but hmm dunno as its only got nvidia GTX 1060 3gb card which is so awfully low spec for this 2024 game. But guess I could at least give it a try, its just not very pleasant if its below 30FPS even with everything turned down on video settings. Edit: 2024-11-04T15:24:51Z, correction 20FPS, with every single video option turned as low as it goes I get barely 20-25FPS depending on the scene, often times dropping to teen numbers, so nope you don't want to even do rudimentary mission testing with such performance, it feels like a torture.
But for now, I'll continue as long as these freezes let me, most likely soon I'll shut off firefox, it would save me half a gig of RAM.
Man its crazy to think that PMC Gaming computer's 16gb RAM is not enough for Sea Power hehe, that is the reason I'd like to try this long ass mission on PMC DevSurf as its got 64gb, should be plenty enough.
In-game 21:47:05Z night is falling, I can see the lighting coming down almost in real time, which obviously is not good if you notice it that easily, but yeah its soon going to be dark, or well darker.
In-game 23:43:50Z night time music soundtrack is playing... Creeepy!
In-game 1985-06-27T00:05:40Z good night north atlantic, its midnight ZULU time
2024-11-03T00:40:55Z RAM is maxed out and also VRAM peaked over 11gb, so system is under quite some load, ugh
Decided to turn all video options to low, not sure if it outright crash the game at this point or could it actually help some memory usage.
It helped, VRAM usage dropped probably over 1gb immediately, good stuff.
2024-11-03T00:50:03Z Now I'm yawning so much that unfortunately it looks like I'm on my way out to sleep quite soon.
2024-11-03T01:00:36Z Yeah I'm combat ineffective, yawning just uncontrollably and I believe I just fell asleep for an half a minute or few who knows, I'm just so out of it, in full zombi mode, have to call it a night. Its now in-game 04:27:12Z dawn is about to break within half an hour, but unfortunately I have to exit now. Tomorrow will be mission editor tutorial writing for sure, but who knows how quickly I can get that wrapped up so maybe I could get some naval warfare done as well.
But for now, good night.