Does any one get memory leak or lag in large prisons?

[adamwpe]

I have a prison with around 200 prisoners and 80 staff, and after i play it for around 30 minutes it necessary to reload the game to stop the game lagging.

But the most annoying thing is that we you reload a save it does not recover the number of prisoners coming to your prison so you need to wait for another day until the count down starts again.

Dose anyone have this issue, or is it my pc.

But i got a pretty good pc, with 8gb of ram.

[koshensky]

It's everybody, but only some people at the same time. That is to say, it's a universal problem with the game, but not everybody gets the memory leak all the time.

Given that the game monitors each member of staff and every single prisoner as an individual element - constantly updating their needs and positions, it eats up a lot of your processor. By the time that you get 200 prisoners, and the relevant amount of staff the game is going a bit overboard. It's more noticeable on a large map than it is on a smaller map. 200 is about the limit that you can get in prisoners at the minute before things start lagging to an unplayable level.

[adamwpe]

Do you think that they will improve the proforment? Issue or is the 200 limit forever

[PatrickV]

I have noticed some lagging. What is happening atm is that if you have continuous on which you keep getting prisoners, Unlike Prison Tycoon, prisoners get release after a certain time which Prison Architect doesn't have, unless they escape

[Brayden]

Do you think that they will improve the proforment? Issue or is the 200 limit forever

I'd be amazed if the developers wished to keep such an arbitrary limit forever.

Hopefully they will provide some optimisations in the future which will hopefully solve these issues however those will likely only come after much of the game is built.

[Amaroq]

Hello there! (My first post here ^^)

I have about the same problem, the game doesnt lag that hard for me, but crashes after about 1-2 hours of play. Also, when I start a "large" new world, the game is lagging already and my framerate slows down to about 10 fps if not less. Note that I havent built anything at that time, there is no fog of war, no prisoners, just the workers I start with. On Medium size it is a bit laggy, but playable. Crashes occur at every map size with any number of prisoners (tested with 20 to 100).

I'm running a laptop with

6GB RAM
Intel Core i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40 GHz 2.40GHz
Windows 7 64-bit
Nvidia Geforce GT520M

[Magius]

I haven't ironed out when or how, but my game does tend to freeze after a while. Like some of the other users i do notice a small amount of lag in the game when on a large map, but it's barely noticeable for me. I have noted that my freezing tends to happen after a few hours of gameplay. I'm playing on an Alienware M11x with Pentium i7-extreme and 16Gb Ram.

[Stromko]

The game will take a larger and larger memory footprint over time as it runs. If you only play for an hour or so at a time, you might never really notice this. In my experience once it is taking 1,000+ megs in memory it becomes increasingly unstable and prone to crashing.

Personally I just set it to windowed mode and have task manager open so I can monitor the game's memory usage all the time. When it gets in the 800 - 1,200 megabyte range I save it off and then restart the game.

Introversion are highly technical developers and they know how to properly utilize multiple cores, so I think the game will be able to manage a vast amount of elements when it is further along in development. Whether that will be more than 200 prisoners with little/no lag on a high spec system? I don't know, probably depends on how many extra features and details they add. More complex psychological modeling for inmates, for instance, or simply more options of things for the characters to do, could increase the necessary specs for a given population. On the other hand they do want to be compatible with the widest range of systems possible.

[Magius]

On the other hand they do want to be compatible with the widest range of systems possible.

You say that and I think, XBox!!!

[adamwpe]

i open task manager when playing this game, the cpu usage only went to 20% and ram went to 30%, this is when the game is laggy, why is the game not using all of my cpu?

[HerrJoebob]

i open task manager when playing this game, the cpu usage only went to 20% and ram went to 30%, this is when the game is laggy, why is the game not using all of my cpu?

You probably have a multi-core CPU - the game can only use one core. PA will max out at 25% on my 4-core system.

[adamwpe]

Do you think they will change it in a update (if it was in the update it will be near the end of the development)?

[xander]

Do you think they will change it in a update (if it was in the update it will be near the end of the development)?

Unlikely. Taking unthreaded code and changing it to multithreaded code is, in general, a non-trivial process.

xander

[adamwpe]

What the point of making it only a single core game if ever new cpu have more than one core.

[Bluewingsniper]

What the point of making it only a single core game if ever new cpu have more than one core.

coding with one thread is much easy to get up and running with an idea, rather than having to start with an new idea and figure out what components have to run on an extra thread, then having to figure out how to tie that component back into the the rest of the game. Running extra threads may result in game not maintaining state and then you have the errors or crashes from the game everywhere.

Simply it takes a lot longer to implement any new features into the game and updates take a lot longer. Optimizing should be in the late stages of alpha after all features are implemented so they can focus on how to implement multi-threading rather than core came changes like fog of war or new AI scripts.