[2022] Urban Expanses

The recent updates, and the latest one in particular, did unfortunately cause quite a bit of performance issues for a lot of people, which we've been trying hard to diagnose and fix. We've done a bunch of optimizations for the last few unstable builds and they seem to have noticeably improved the situation.

To quote a comment I wrote on our issue tracker:

We are indeed investigating the performance issues, and actually already have some optimizations lined up for the next release. These won't fully solve the problems, but address some specific things that were causing heavy lag spikes (for example, AI pathfinding in colonies and the watcher's acid mist).

What makes these problems hard to address is that we still haven't been able to find a clear cause to them, and in fact it could even be that there isn't a clear cause: there's just so much more content and stuff for the CPU to calculate in the game nowadays, that all of it adds up to so much load that it can kill the performance on some systems. We've also been adding new content at quite a fast pace, possibly too fast to the point that we haven't had the time to optimize all of it thoroughly enough. That being said, it's still something we're constantly working on, measuring the game's performance and gradually improving all the small parts that add to the performance usage.

Based on the reports and screenshots of the performance overlay we've gotten, it does seem that there is no single clear cause to the problems, but it appears to be caused by item and character updates taking a long time in total.

It could be that the issues become more severe when using mods or custom subs, or at later stages of the campaign when there's more items and characters around in the sub. If anyone happens to notice that the problems tend to appear when using certain mods or subs, please let us know so we can give those a test and see if there's some specific things causing problems there. Or if you have a campaign save file where the problems are especially severe, sending it to us might also help us. It'd also be useful to know if there's any difference in performance between multiplayer and singleplayer - does the input lag for example occur in both, or just multiplayer?

In any case, I'm sorry for the trouble these performance problems are causing. Looking at the results of the optimizations in the unstable branch though, I'm confident that the next update (which isn't that far away) will significantly improve the performance. But for the time being, the performance fix mod and perhaps switching to the unstable version can hopefully alleviate the problems to some degree. Thank you for your patience!