Prison size (in real life)/Character speed

[ForbiddenOne]

After playing Prison Architect for more than 130 hours (I really like it), I realized hat there's a problem that can become pretty annoying sometimes (skip the first paragraph if TL:DR)

When the last alpha came out, I quickly decided to sell my old prison and start a new one in order to see the what's new for myself. I started on a small map because I know the game can become really slow if you start with a medium/big one and extend your land. I now have a maximum security only prison with capacity for about 200 prisoners and 100 staff. I only built one canteen on the top of the map (I now understand it maybe wasn't one of my brightest ideas) and proceeded to build all the other rooms where prisoners can work (workshops, laundry, chapel, mail room, etc) on the bottom. After a while I noticed that after work, prisoners should go eating but even with a 2 hour long eating time only 40% of them would eat, as the other ones couldn't even reach the canteen in time, they would start walking there but they would "die on the beach" as when they were arriving sleeping time would start.

TL:DR
As a sciences (physics) student I felt the need to the calculate how big a small (and I repeat small) prison was (or to put things in another perspective how slow the character were). I proceeded to send one of my guards to the far top of my prison (where the canteen is located) and then moved him to the far bottom (where the workshop is located) to simulate the route my prisoners make from work to eating and counted how much time passed which were 45 in-game minutes.

When moving a guard he always runs (I used 12 km/h which is a little over the average jogging speed) hence knowing that velocity = distance / time, I easily calculated the distance between the poles of my prison to be 9km.

Baring in mind that prisoners don't run from place to place, they basically needed a whole in-game hour (or even more) just to go from the workshop to the canteen.

In reality, as far as my knowledge goes, a 9km prison (and it was a small one without any land expansion purchases) does not exist so it is a minor fail on a game I think is really accurate, as far as I'm concerned.

I would like to know what are your thought about this

[blackdwarf]

I've always considered the time element in PA to be different from ordinary time, even though PA uses regular time terminology.

For example, Solitary Confinement uses "hours" instead of "days". Would a 2-hour solitary confinement really have any impact on a prisoner in real life? Or even an 8 hour? I'm pretty sure in real life prisoners go to Solitary for days, weeks, or even months (years?).

Or just sentences in general. I don't know the exact conversion, but a prisoner with a 10-year sentence will be ready for parole after tens of "days" in PA.

You just can't think about the passage of time in PA to be equivalent, or even proportional to time in reality. I would call it "representational". The passage of time in PA allows/forces the player to encounter challenges and events that otherwise would require extremely long playtime or huge prisons (tens of thousands of prisoners).

As you admitted, putting the canteen in a non-central location may not have been the best choice. I think a key game element in PA is being careful in how everything is laid out. Can you keep your canteen in a central location, not too far from deliveries, etc? If prisoners were to move as fast as in reality, how big of a prison would you need to have before canteen placement was something to care about?

[Trixi]

First: the prison day - sentenced year: this is okay,, as you cant simulate life sentences of 50 years. it would be 50x365.25 days = 18,262.5 simulated game days (would be a bit much).

Then in refer to solitary: 1game hour solitary is equavalent to 1/24 sentence years for your prisoner. so 2 game hour solitary is equavalent to 1 month solitary.


Therefore the devs have build in a timewarp-factor if you start on big prisons. The problem about that is, that the needs already run normal speed, while movement and reform programs runs at the the timewarpfactor. Somewhere there is a bug report in the Mantis Bug Tracker,

[blackdwarf]

Trixi, thanks for the information relating sentences and solitary time to game time. I've always wondered about that. I had also read about time warp issues but never had them explained so clearly.

I don't think these will help ForbiddenOne much, who was talking about a small prison, where the time warp doesn't apply. He's really talking about inconsistent scaling. If you assume that the prisoners (in a small prison) walk at a typical human walking speed, then you work out the distance between say the prisoner's cell and the canteen based on how long it takes for a prisoner to walk that distance, you end up with a massively huge prison size for holding a small number of prisoners.

Or, if you assume that a PA square side is 1 meter, figure out the distance by counting squares, then see how long (game time) it takes for a prisoner to walk that distance, the resulting walking speed is ridiculously slow. Again, in a small prison.

As I see it, the problem lies with expecting consistent/sensible/realistic scaling. I suspect that a game like PA with realistic scaling throughout would be virtually unplayable. I also suspect that prison simulations have been created that use consistent scaling. But they aren't games. If they exist, they're used by real prison designers to study things like traffic flow and actual prison logistics.

[ForbiddenOne]

First of all, thanks for commenting. I understand and I must agree with you, in PA time can't flow like in reality otherwise the game would become basically unplayable as you would be stuck with the same prisoner for 30+ in-game year which would be a lot of playing time and, as you said, things like solitary wouldn't have a great impact on prisoners if it only lasted for a couple of hours. After all, I think it makes sense to mess up with time in order to keep game the game interesting and playable. Prison area/character speed is just a consequence that comes with it but PA is a game (not a real prison simulator) so obviously its main objective is to be entertaining and interesting and I think it achieves it pretty well after all