Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

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tid242
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Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby tid242 » Thu Aug 25, 2016 5:00 pm

Hey there,

1st off - great game, I've put in about 100h in the v2.0 beta (and maybe 10 way back when a few years ago), and I have to say that I absolutely love the game. It's really been a while since I've come across a game where I really lose track of time, so I think you've really done a fab job.

Having said that, I know that the v2.0 release will be the "final" release features wise - but I hope you continue to bug-quash periodically, and also streamline resource utilization.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/761 ... _01.prison

The above link is to a prison save game file that I've been experiencing significant lag/slowdown issues. It persists after quit/restarts and consists of a several second freeze every 5-10 seconds or so fairly consistently (I've mostly been placing objects/building so this seems to be definitely an activity where this slowdown/freezing happens). The resource utilization for the game is fairly intense, but still only maxing out at about 25% of my clock and 1 gig of ram. This is on a desktop system that I built about 2 years ago with the top-of-the-line hardware that was a notch below the uber-rediculous level: 4790k, gtx970, with 16g ram on a msi gaming 7 mobo. I run win 8.1 and the steam directory runs on a dedicated SSD (the OS and everything else is on a different SSD, there are no spinners on the system).

Since my prison is not "large" by any standards, considering one could buy an unlimited amount of land, is this level of resource-bog-down on my system expected or unusual? Will it be streamlined more or whatever subroutines are spamming up the system fixed?

Also, if you were to load up the prison I feel like some of the events are "bugged", I have 2 Kaiser Soze's, the 'agitating radio broadcast' even has been ongoing forever (is it like Rush Limbagh where the radio personality never dies?), the religiousity event has happened twice - not sure if the 1st time ever went away, as well as the federal court case witness event (actually I think this may have happened 3 times) - which is fine, except the last federal witness event spawned no witnesses - not sure if a bunch of my snitches and the like in protected custody became all of the fed witnesses too? But my criticism of the events is that some of them never seem to end (the radio, religiousity??) moreso than that they happen more than once. Although I would tend to think that the universe would only be big enough for a single Kaiser Soze..

Anyway, hoping the non-beta v2.0 release cleans up whatever subroutines are bogging down my shit since it seems like I can't really play it again until they are cleaned up..

Here's to a great game tho!

-tid242
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xander
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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby xander » Tue Aug 30, 2016 11:47 pm

tid242 wrote:...The resource utilization for the game is fairly intense, but still only maxing out at about 25% of my clock...

The largest bottleneck in the game is almost certainly the path-finding algorithm. Unless things have changed recently, path-finding runs in a single thread, hence running balls-out, path-finding should fully utilize one core. If you have a 4-core system, it would make sense that CPU utilization would hit 25%. As to the rest of your top-of-the-line system, HDD/SSD speed, RAM quantity and speed, bus speed, graphics card(s) etc. are not going to provide much benefit with regard to playing Prison Architect. Note that this is in contrast to most AAA games, which tend to load large quantities of data into RAM and hit the GPU hard, but tend to require somewhat less raw processing power.

tid242 wrote:Since my prison is not "large" by any standards, considering one could buy an unlimited amount of land, is this level of resource-bog-down on my system expected or unusual?

If I am reading your save file correctly, your prison is 200x320 squares in size, which is actually rather large. It is not unusual for a system to choke on such a large map, especially if it is moderately densely populated (e.g. more than a couple of hundred prisoners with concomitant workers, guards, cooks, and other staff).

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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby yuk » Wed Aug 31, 2016 4:20 am

That explains a lot actually. I have hundreds of workmen often walk towards the same thing, only to turn around when someone beats them there....then turn back towards it...they're just fishtailing around not actually building things or what ever they need to do. It's REALLY annoying and I'd get video of it but my prison is MASSIVE and the timelapse function won't show what I need it to.
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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby xander » Wed Aug 31, 2016 11:55 pm

yuk wrote:That explains a lot actually. I have hundreds of workmen often walk towards the same thing, only to turn around when someone beats them there....then turn back towards it...they're just fishtailing around not actually building things or what ever they need to do. It's REALLY annoying and I'd get video of it but my prison is MASSIVE and the timelapse function won't show what I need it to.

That is a different,largely unrelated issue. The problem is that workers have no way of calling ``dibs'' on particular material, hence they might be tasked with picking up an object only to get to that object to find that someone else grabbed it first. In the case of workers, having a way to call ``dibs'' might make sense (the workers are all on the same ``team'' and could theoretically communicate via radio or some such) and might not be that difficult to implement (maybe). On the other hand, it makes sense for prisoners not to be able to call ``dibs'' (or to yield to scarier prisoners)---first come, first served, if the resource (food, showers, etc) runs out, you are SOL. This may be bad from a performance standpoint, but kind of makes sense from a gameplay point of view.

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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby yuk » Thu Sep 01, 2016 3:05 am

It would be nicer if the closer guy would call dibs, I'm not joking the thing I was building was not getting built because they were all fishtailing for half a freaking day. I couldn't stop it it was AWFUL.

And what's happening when it circles them and selects a guy when I hover over the thing? That's dibs is it not? :)
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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby asdfdasfdfs » Sun Sep 04, 2016 1:19 pm

It doesn't seem like things has changed fundamentally from version 1. 1st Campaign 500 prisoners with 2 land expansion, AI starts to break. NPCs getting stuck at doors or running around not doing anything... I would say stay under 400 prisoners to make sure the game is playable
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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby tid242 » Mon Sep 05, 2016 9:50 pm

xander wrote:The largest bottleneck in the game is almost certainly the path-finding algorithm. Unless things have changed recently, path-finding runs in a single thread, hence running balls-out, path-finding should fully utilize one core. If you have a 4-core system, it would make sense that CPU utilization would hit 25%. As to the rest of your top-of-the-line system, HDD/SSD speed, RAM quantity and speed, bus speed, graphics card(s) etc. are not going to provide much benefit with regard to playing Prison Architect. Note that this is in contrast to most AAA games, which tend to load large quantities of data into RAM and hit the GPU hard, but tend to require somewhat less raw processing power.


Thanks Xander, that's a useful bit if info..

Also a bit of a bummer... it would be really nice to be able to designate a "crit path" whereby you just draw a patrol-like path through the main throughfare of your prison and all of the pathing clockcycles could just work to get from point A to 'crit path' and then from 'crit path' to point B. Although, it probably already does something like this at some basic level.

Since we can already assign guard patrols it wouldn't be too odd to assign 'guest path', 'worker path,' etc.. Additionally separate paths could run on separate threads on diff cores - prisoners, guards, etc. meh, but I digress..

anyway, hopefully it gets streamlined some yet but we'll see. Or I can just wait for cpu's to get better I suppose..

cheers

-tid242
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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby relix92 » Tue Sep 06, 2016 4:54 am


Also a bit of a bummer... it would be really nice to be able to designate a "crit path" whereby you just draw a patrol-like path through the main throughfare of your prison and all of the pathing clockcycles could just work to get from point A to 'crit path' and then from 'crit path' to point B. Although, it probably already does something like this at some basic level.

Since we can already assign guard patrols it wouldn't be too odd to assign 'guest path', 'worker path,' etc.. Additionally separate paths could run on separate threads on diff cores - prisoners, guards, etc. meh, but I digress..

anyway, hopefully it gets streamlined some yet but we'll see. Or I can just wait for cpu's to get better I suppose..

-tid242


I'm sure you already know, but Introversion dropped all efforts with this game, and those wonderful ideas you have will never be added.

I have to admit - it would have been a perfectly sound idea to assign "guest" walkzones, much like the deployment option for gaurds.
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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby xander » Tue Sep 06, 2016 5:01 pm

relix92 wrote:I'm sure you already know, but Introversion dropped all efforts with this game, and those wonderful ideas you have will never be added.

On the other hand, IV have a history of releasing source code for their games a few years after release. So there is still a sliver of hope. ;)

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Re: Slowdowns With Big Prisons?

Postby cheshire_chick » Mon Jan 30, 2017 4:52 am

This would be one of my all time favorite games --- if it wasn't so limited. If it's just going to lag once I reach around 500 prisoners, no matter what I do, then what's the point of playing? There's almost no replayability for me, and I certainly won't recommend that anyone spend money on it (unless it goes on sale super cheap). Seems like a game breaking issue to me. Like if you were to play Roller Coaster Tycoon or something, but not matter what you did, only ten roller coasters max or it lags out.

:/

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