The reason this game is so slow

[kestasjk]

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Crazy levels of detail are impressive when walking around a ship, but when you're hovering way away do you really need that level of detail? Do you really need to be able to see the trackball of a computer in a tug from the deck of the ship that it's towing?

(These shots were all taken with graphics settings on their lowest)

[ThaSchaap]

None of these details should make a difference. But in this game it does.

A couple of reasons;

a) Most of the game is programmed in a proprietary scripting language. When you tend to simulate things in a interpreter they tend to bog down performance. This is why essential code should be in low-level language (C or C++ nowadays, assembly when Doom came out). I guess PHYSX is only used for the gas exhaust funnels.

b) Try searching for .DLL files in the installation folder. There are a lot. They probably liked it this way because VSTEP (their engine) is more suited to 'serious games' and wanted to keep it modular. The result is insane stack sizes and no compiler optimization whatsoever.

I bought this game because it made the impression that it was akind to Flight Simulator with a continuous world. Yet even it fails in the restricted sandboxes it offers.

One last thing; on my two disk RAID 0 stripe it take minutes to load with full disk activity. Pretty sad.

kestasjk has a point in that there is NO level-of-detail system in place. They probably have visibility determination problems too.

p.s. to the devs; get your texture loading right and precompile your shaders to a cache!

[kestasjk]

None of these details should make a difference. But in this game it does.
Polygon count makes a big difference, that's why most game companies have a polygon budget

a) Most of the game is programmed in a proprietary scripting language. When you tend to simulate things in a interpreter they tend to bog down performance. This is why essential code should be in low-level language (C or C++ nowadays, assembly when Doom came out). I guess PHYSX is only used for the gas exhaust funnels.
It is?

b) Try searching for .DLL files in the installation folder. There are a lot. They probably liked it this way because VSTEP (their engine) is more suited to 'serious games' and wanted to keep it modular. The result is insane stack sizes and no compiler optimization whatsoever.
Lots of DLLs results in insane stack sizes and no compiler optimization? Hm.
Are you saying the stack would make up a large part of memory in a game that loads such huge 3D models, or that code compiled into DLLs isn't optimized for some reason (or that it makes a difference whether you load the same code from many files or from a few)?