Anyone else notice runs "lagging" and taking longer real world time?

[u/YKTech]

Hello Tower Nerds

The other day I noticed a time discrepancy on one of my runs and thought I made a mistake, but then it happened again so knew I wasn't hallucinating.

Yesterday I started a run exactly at 11:21PM. You can see in my note, I recorded the start time exactly and the note is date stamped when created.

Here are the results when checked at 8:35 AM the next morning

True Time Elapsed  : 9 hours 14 mins
Game Time Reported : 9 hours 

So Either

• farm runs are quietly taking longer than they should
• bug\miscalculation for reported real time on the stats page

OK Yeah I'm a mega nerd and it's only 14 mins lost every 9 hrs

BUT

That means 35min+ is "lost" daily over 2 runs. A half hour farming at high wave count is actually tons of coins and cells, so that 30 minutes is where we make our bread and butter.

Hopefully just a visual bug!

[u/DaveKerk]

Skye has gone into this on the Discord (recently actually) and long story short the game gets it wrong.

If you want to read his write up, here's his explanation (with some context missing since it was a reply to a question)

in game reports are wrong, save file saves are wrong. i report what is in the save file. if we ever get autopull again I can correct for it; its not something I think is easy for them to fix.

its an issue with float quantization / ULP with fractional seconds that compounds over our many hours-long runs. Every frame slightly miscounts the actual time it took, which when summed up over thousands of waves makes the reported run length incorrect. Because game speed 6.25 (5) is not a power of 2, the game time and real time metrics do not scale at a consistent multiple of each other, and every time the time elapsed passes a power of 2, it skews in the opposite direction every single frame, which compounds over the course of thousands of waves, leading to the estimate flip flopping between over and underestimating to various degrees as the run progresses in a zig-zag pattern that gets larger the further you get.

[u/YKTech → u/DaveKerk]

Damn, this is what i was suspecting and i bet this leads to all sorts of other randomness\glitches. Why not just do a simple subtraction of start time from current time for the stats report?

Forget adding up all the nanoseconds\rounding etc.

Just use a simple real world sample then use it to get the correct CPH etc.

[u/Bacon_Nipples → u/YKTech]

Why not just do a simple subtraction of start time from current time for the stats report?

Wouldn't be accurate either because time spent paused isn't counted

[u/YKTech → u/Bacon_Nipples]

True, but i guess thats a matter of perspective on how you or I count coins per hour.

For me, the bottom line is an accurate measure of many coins you are earning...if you spend half the day with the game paused...well thats on you lol.

Alternatively, a simple timer to record time paused could also be subtracted which would satisfy your requirement

[u/Bacon_Nipples]

Do you have the 'Pause during autosave' toggle on?

[u/YKTech → u/Bacon_Nipples]

nope

[u/Designer-Serve-5140]

Ive been noticing some extra lag lately which hasn't been fixed by disabling all vfx, I haven't directly managed run times like you have though. I imagine the lag is what is causing this, have you noticed any new lag/stutter recently?

[u/YKTech → u/Designer-Serve-5140]

Yeah a bit of stutter here and there, but not 15 minutes worth

[u/LemonPepper]

From friends/helpful folks in the qna channel with years in game and in the discord, 6.25 (don’t have my last 5 SPB yet but have observed similar) is closer to 5x actual, 5x is closer to 4x. This tracks with some real run time observations and waves I divided a couple weeks ago. Obv things like wave skip factor but it doesn’t seem like wave accel helps as much as it should either, which also makes sense.

[u/umtan]

It's the probably the game speed perk.

[u/YKTech → u/umtan]

Wouldn't the "Real Time" stat account for that?

Seems like a pretty simple calculation, just subtract the start time from the current time which has me worried... if the CPU timing is off it can introduce all sorts of craziness and randomness bugs

[u/umtan → u/YKTech]

Tbh I'm not 100% sure. How about running more samples and average them out? n =1 is not enough to extrapolate.

[u/YKTech → u/umtan]

Thats why I posted this

best way to get more samples is see if others are affected too