[CWO333]

Updated the changelog to include a couple changes done previously.
Enable the CPU Limit by default.

Originally when implementing the CPU Limit option, we didn't have as many people with issues so the thought was, don't fix what isn't broken for a majority of our players. But lately, we have had numerous reports from new or returning players with issues. After being suggested a few times, I think it's time to enable the CPU Limit by default.

[KevinW1998]

What about existing clients with already a config in? Those who have it as false will stay as false?

[CWO333]

If they set it to false, it should remain false. I just made the default true.

[martinmine]

Thanks again for the PR.
If this was not a big issue in the past, we should do some investigation of how that is the case before we enable this by default. Has there been any changes lately we know of which may have impacted this?

[KevinW1998]

As far as I know this problem scales with the number of cores that is on a CPU. Given that the last years Intel and AMD has been trying to squeeze more and more CPU cores into a chipset, this could be the case why we have more and more people (especially with newer hardware) having these issues.

[CWO333]

I also have a suspicion that another cause is the Thread Director in Windows. It's the internal system within Windows that dictates which cores and threads each process thread is sent to. There have been documented problems with it in Windows 11 and with everyone being pressured to move to Windows 11, this issue also becomes more prevalent. So far, I believe Sonicflare and I agree that this issue doesn't exist with people running the game in Linux.

[sonicflare]

moreover, with the modern AMD cards without it, it just crash on loading to any city, making it unplayable.
Currently, it is setting affinity for 0-3, making it only use 4 CPUs. Maybe it could be a good default to enable it if you have more than 4 CPU

[CWO333]

If you have less than 4, enabling it will do nothing as it will already ignore anything higher than your system has. So in the very rare chance you have 1 or 2 threads, enabling it will have no effect.

[CWO333]

The only potential issue I see coming from this is if someone set Spartan.exe to run as Administrator in the Windows compatibility settings but not the Launcher. This will cause an Access Denied error when the Launcher tries to change the Affinity. I feel we can address this with those who have this case though since this is a specific outlier that has to manually be configured and there's no need for Spartan.exe to run as Administrator.

[sonicflare]

It seems that the CPU cores related crashes are the most common issue for a new players

[martinmine]

Spoke with @KevinW1998 and we wanted to give this a shot to see how it plays out now.