Hmm...(long)

[Drakencreuz]

This game is probably one of the more interesting games I have played as of recent, far better than Prison Tycoon 1-3 due to the possibilities within the game, although the game has some crippling issues in the current Alpha phase, there are still some positives within the game. The advantage to having an open Alpha phase is that you get ideas from actual players such as me. Within this post I will outline current issues and possible additions to make the game more seamless and more intricate and interesting. Also, I understand that Introversion is an Indie company so I am not trying to criticize them into submission, I am just trying to assist in the development of a game that I have actually come to enjoy quite a bit.
Before beginning, allow me to show links to several of my current prisons, ranging from minimum security to maximum, some of these do not actually have any prisoners but for the issues that are prisoner and staff related, those pictures will have prisoners in them.
Super Max (maximum security with execution capabilities): http://s6.postimg.org/ta8b6zjr5/Super_Max.png
Maximum: http://postimg.org/image/xs1xkgqil/
General Population: [img=http://s6.postimg.org/gg9unrdx9/General_Population.jpg]
Minimum: http://postimg.org/image/5dwi0l2yl/
Work farm: http://postimg.org/image/w1iwiz8zh/
As anyone who has played the game for more than one hour knows, the biggest issue within the game currently is the game crippling lag. I have noticed after much trial and error that this only actually occurs when you begin to increase your staff numbers and once you begin to add in prisoners. The game is fine for the most part until you increase to over 15 personnel within the prison. Also, if you save the game when the lag starts, then load the game, the lag recedes for a short time. Included in this is the fact that the larger build area you create, the more lag comes in within the spike, meaning that the more you queue to build at one time, the faster the game will lag out, sometimes this can be worked out by adding an accountant to access more staff at a time. As long as you pretty much stay within the "building phase," the game does not really lag at all, although this means no income at all. Also, the larger you make your prison, the worse it gets, so it may be prudent to not go outside the small building zone that you start with.
Other issues in the game are simpler and can easily be overcome, but still are quite annoying. One such issue is workers getting stuck on walls while attempting to build/install something you can see this here http://postimg.org/image/vkixv2unx/. Another issue is the CEO letter, every time you load a game, you have to read it, this makes no sense to me at all http://postimg.org/image/h55m9x70d/. Next is the cloning tool, which in itself is a wonderful idea, problem is, it is far too small of a cloning area http://postimg.org/image/ilh4s29x9/. Also, perhaps the ability to rotate a cloned area would be something to think about adding. There are also some small yet very annoying bugs within the game currently here are some links to some of them: http://s6.postimg.org/5576ze729/Guard_p ... _stuck.png
http://postimg.org/image/9yvy7vlbx/
http://postimg.org/image/qev804fr1/
http://postimg.org/image/88uu5zge5/
http://postimg.org/image/vkixv2unx/
Although there are small issues within the game, there are many things that can be developed further to create a more intricate gaming experience. For starters, perhaps a small, simple tutorial to impress onto new players the basics, although the grants screen does give you a tiny basis of which to learn, it simply is not enough. Another thing that should be considered in adding into the game is an alert system, for example, most people do not realize that there is actually a cap as to how much you delivery zone can handle. Most people build a large area at a time and see their workers sitting around diddling themselves and think there is something wrong with the sprite A.I., when the actual issue is that the delivery zone is full and nothing can be delivered, thus making the worker sprites sit around. And far more importantly than all of this is the possible addition of more information within the item build screen. What I mean by this is focused around the power aspect, perhaps add in the power usage of a particular item since basically right now it is a crap shoot figuring out exactly how much of a load the generators can actually handle before it overloads and then you have to spend a half hour figuring out what to remove.
Another thing that should really be added is the ability to assign specific cell block designators, for example, add in a zone/room type that allows you to designate a cell block, like cell block a, cell block b and so on. A good reason for this is that if you have interesting/complex prison plans sometimes your prisoners mess it all up. Me personally, I like to add in multiple showers and yards to distribute the prisoner capacity instead of having to create a large room. Being able to designate cell blocks could also add the ability to give cell blocks specific areas to go to, for instance a workshop that is specifically designated to a specific cell block http://postimg.org/image/98zw35m4d/. It just seems that you can create a much smoother working prison if you can designate a specific area for specific prisoners to go to instead of them meandering around going wherever they please which could also streamline the needs of prisoners. Another thing to consider could possibly be added into the previous idea in that maybe create specific regimes for specific cell blocks like real prisons do. This is done to alleviate the huge influx of prisoners coming in to the canteen which can create large riots as I have experienced where around 50 prisoners died and 7 guards died as well. Another thing that should be instituted into the game is more various types of rooms, I am not sure if anyone else has noticed, but even if you have metal detectors and guards nearby, some prisoners seem to manage to get a freaking shotgun into the prison, boggles my mind but something that might need to be added is an armory for the guards to really defend themselves, since 50 prisoners versus one guard is not really fair.
Although I know that this does not actually happen in the actual prison system, I think it would be rather interesting to be able to create a well flowing mixed population prison. Meaning Max, Gen Pop, and Min all within the same walls, which could be easily added in if the above feature would be added. Also, being able to expand to the other side of the road would be nice to fix since everything still is set to the base side, even if you expand it, the prisoners will still go to the left side canteen to eat, which always ends tragically with mass escapes.
I was thinking earlier, when I decided to produce a riot to check out the emergency unit A.I., that the riot police, should be able to enter the prison on their own, I am not sure if it is a bug but all of my riot police need to be let in by the guards, meaning that a guard has to leave the riot, to let the riot police in, also, the paramedics are blatantly retarded and never heal anyone, just like the doctors in the infirmary. Perhaps the addition of a mental ward could also be an interesting addition to the game as well as the ability to actually execute prisoners ranging from electric chair, to lethal injection, to firing squad and so on. Also, being able to add in a women’s prison I believe could add a bit of depth to the game, I am not sure how it would be done, but adding it in could be interesting.
Concurrent with all of the other things that I think should be added or developed further, perhaps adding in more complex bureaucracy chains would be interesting, I can admit that I cannot specifically think of anything more to add to it, but I am sure others can. Maybe higher trained guards or even on site riot police or the ability to learn how to build guard towers, I don’t know but seeing more would be interesting.
As stated earlier, this is actually a rather short description of the issues that I have found and some things that I believe should be instituted in order to make the game more complex and far more interesting to play. I am not in the business of insulting an Indie game company that has actually begun to create a game that I am rather addicted to, just trying a vain attempt to assist in the development.
I just want to conclude this with a simple yet true statement. I have been playing tycoon type games since the original SimCity, I have significant experience in this specific genre. That being said, this game has to ability to be one of the best games that I have ever played, it needs a lot more development and a lot more additions, which is understandable due to the fact that it is only in the Alpha testing. I sincerely hope that with upcoming updates and even Beta testing, that this game develops in to what I think it could very well be.

[Rycr]

Holy wall of text! Try spacing out your paragraphs a bit. Makes it a lot less painful to read.

I've played this game for 7 hours, have a prison with 50+ inmates and around 20 staff. No lag at all other than the momentary freeze when autosaving. What are your system's specs?

The tutorial doesn't exist beyond the bare-bones one already in-game because this is an alpha. Tutorials, instruction manuals, and things like that won't be created until the game is in a more complete state, probably once they move on to beta testing.

With some creative use of permanently-locked doors, you could section off your prison in the way you describe.

An armory might be a good idea, but of course it just adds one more place that prisoners could go to smuggle weapons. And if they make guard AI more complex (as I believe they're planning to do) then it may be possible for sympathetic guards to smuggle weapons to prisoners, which would be BAD.

I've never experienced "blatantly retarded" doctors. With my previously-mentioned prison, I have only three doctors and a large-ish infirmary, and they keep up with injuries fairly well (although I've yet to have a full-scale riot, so I don't know whether I have enough doctors for that or not).

I'm fairly certain the bureaucracy system is going to get a fair bit more complicated, given how the Lawyer chain hasn't even been implemented yet.

[dc4bs]

Some of the issues like stuck guards are easy to fix.

Just left-click the stuck guard and right click in a nearby open square. He'll drop what he's doing and step over there. Either he or another guard will then restart the task he was doing (escorting or searching prisoners, etc...).

The above method works for stuck workmen and other staff as well.

The only REALLY frustrating one is stuck prisoners. When they are delivering laundry or working in the workshop and get stuck it can really slow down the job. Prisoners cannot be directly ordered to move off a wall but sometimes searching them will get them unstuck.

Making sure there is plenty of room for sprites to maneuver around in helps too. Double wide doors and hallways are MUCH less likely to produce stuck prisoners than single wide doors that more than one sprite wants to use at the same time.

[Pogo]

Some of the issues like stuck guards are easy to fix.

Just left-click the stuck guard and right click in a nearby open square. He'll drop what he's doing and step over there. Either he or another guard will then restart the task he was doing (escorting or searching prisoners, etc...).

The above method works for stuck workmen and other staff as well.

The only REALLY frustrating one is stuck prisoners. When they are delivering laundry or working in the workshop and get stuck it can really slow down the job. Prisoners cannot be directly ordered to move off a wall but sometimes searching them will get them unstuck.

Making sure there is plenty of room for sprites to maneuver around in helps too. Double wide doors and hallways are MUCH less likely to produce stuck prisoners than single wide doors that more than one sprite wants to use at the same time.

While these are pretty easy temporary solutions, they shouldn't be regarded as permanent fixes.

[dc4bs]

While these are pretty easy temporary solutions, they shouldn't be regarded as permanent fixes.

I agree. Just sayin... Not as bad as the OP made it sound.

[Jagji56]

For those who can't read the wall, I have spaced it out a bit....

This game is probably one of the more interesting games I have played as of recent, far better than Prison Tycoon 1-3 due to the possibilities within the game, although the game has some crippling issues in the current Alpha phase, there are still some positives within the game.

The advantage to having an open Alpha phase is that you get ideas from actual players such as me. Within this post I will outline current issues and possible additions to make the game more seamless and more intricate and interesting.

Also, I understand that Introversion is an Indie company so I am not trying to criticize them into submission, I am just trying to assist in the development of a game that I have actually come to enjoy quite a bit.

Before beginning, allow me to show links to several of my current prisons, ranging from minimum security to maximum, some of these do not actually have any prisoners but for the issues that are prisoner and staff related, those pictures will have prisoners in them.

Super Max (maximum security with execution capabilities): http://s6.postimg.org/ta8b6zjr5/Super_Max.png
Maximum: http://postimg.org/image/xs1xkgqil/
General Population: [img=http://s6.postimg.org/gg9unrdx9/General_Population.jpg]
Minimum: http://postimg.org/image/5dwi0l2yl/
Work farm: http://postimg.org/image/w1iwiz8zh/

As anyone who has played the game for more than one hour knows, the biggest issue within the game currently is the game crippling lag. I have noticed after much trial and error that this only actually occurs when you begin to increase your staff numbers and once you begin to add in prisoners. The game is fine for the most part until you increase to over 15 personnel within the prison. Also, if you save the game when the lag starts, then load the game, the lag recedes for a short time. Included in this is the fact that the larger build area you create, the more lag comes in within the spike, meaning that the more you queue to build at one time, the faster the game will lag out, sometimes this can be worked out by adding an accountant to access more staff at a time. As long as you pretty much stay within the "building phase," the game does not really lag at all, although this means no income at all. Also, the larger you make your prison, the worse it gets, so it may be prudent to not go outside the small building zone that you start with.


Other issues in the game are simpler and can easily be overcome, but still are quite annoying. One such issue is workers getting stuck on walls while attempting to build/install something you can see this here http://postimg.org/image/vkixv2unx/. Another issue is the CEO letter, every time you load a game, you have to read it, this makes no sense to me at all http://postimg.org/image/h55m9x70d/. Next is the cloning tool, which in itself is a wonderful idea, problem is, it is far too small of a cloning area http://postimg.org/image/ilh4s29x9/. Also, perhaps the ability to rotate a cloned area would be something to think about adding.

There are also some small yet very annoying bugs within the game currently here are some links to some of them:
http://s6.postimg.org/5576ze729/Guard_p ... _stuck.png
http://postimg.org/image/9yvy7vlbx/
http://postimg.org/image/qev804fr1/
http://postimg.org/image/88uu5zge5/
http://postimg.org/image/vkixv2unx/

Although there are small issues within the game, there are many things that can be developed further to create a more intricate gaming experience. For starters, perhaps a small, simple tutorial to impress onto new players the basics, although the grants screen does give you a tiny basis of which to learn, it simply is not enough. Another thing that should be considered in adding into the game is an alert system, for example, most people do not realize that there is actually a cap as to how much you delivery zone can handle. Most people build a large area at a time and see their workers sitting around diddling themselves and think there is something wrong with the sprite A.I., when the actual issue is that the delivery zone is full and nothing can be delivered, thus making the worker sprites sit around. And far more importantly than all of this is the possible addition of more information within the item build screen. What I mean by this is focused around the power aspect, perhaps add in the power usage of a particular item since basically right now it is a crap shoot figuring out exactly how much of a load the generators can actually handle before it overloads and then you have to spend a half hour figuring out what to remove.


Another thing that should really be added is the ability to assign specific cell block designators, for example, add in a zone/room type that allows you to designate a cell block, like cell block a, cell block b and so on. A good reason for this is that if you have interesting/complex prison plans sometimes your prisoners mess it all up. Me personally, I like to add in multiple showers and yards to distribute the prisoner capacity instead of having to create a large room. Being able to designate cell blocks could also add the ability to give cell blocks specific areas to go to, for instance a workshop that is specifically designated to a specific cell block http://postimg.org/image/98zw35m4d/. It just seems that you can create a much smoother working prison if you can designate a specific area for specific prisoners to go to instead of them meandering around going wherever they please which could also streamline the needs of prisoners. Another thing to consider could possibly be added into the previous idea in that maybe create specific regimes for specific cell blocks like real prisons do. This is done to alleviate the huge influx of prisoners coming in to the canteen which can create large riots as I have experienced where around 50 prisoners died and 7 guards died as well. Another thing that should be instituted into the game is more various types of rooms, I am not sure if anyone else has noticed, but even if you have metal detectors and guards nearby, some prisoners seem to manage to get a freaking shotgun into the prison, boggles my mind but something that might need to be added is an armory for the guards to really defend themselves, since 50 prisoners versus one guard is not really fair.


Although I know that this does not actually happen in the actual prison system, I think it would be rather interesting to be able to create a well flowing mixed population prison. Meaning Max, Gen Pop, and Min all within the same walls, which could be easily added in if the above feature would be added. Also, being able to expand to the other side of the road would be nice to fix since everything still is set to the base side, even if you expand it, the prisoners will still go to the left side canteen to eat, which always ends tragically with mass escapes.

I was thinking earlier, when I decided to produce a riot to check out the emergency unit A.I., that the riot police, should be able to enter the prison on their own, I am not sure if it is a bug but all of my riot police need to be let in by the guards, meaning that a guard has to leave the riot, to let the riot police in, also, the paramedics are blatantly retarded and never heal anyone, just like the doctors in the infirmary. Perhaps the addition of a mental ward could also be an interesting addition to the game as well as the ability to actually execute prisoners ranging from electric chair, to lethal injection, to firing squad and so on. Also, being able to add in a women’s prison I believe could add a bit of depth to the game, I am not sure how it would be done, but adding it in could be interesting.
Concurrent with all of the other things that I think should be added or developed further, perhaps adding in more complex bureaucracy chains would be interesting, I can admit that I cannot specifically think of anything more to add to it, but I am sure others can. Maybe higher trained guards or even on site riot police or the ability to learn how to build guard towers, I don’t know but seeing more would be interesting.

As stated earlier, this is actually a rather short description of the issues that I have found and some things that I believe should be instituted in order to make the game more complex and far more interesting to play. I am not in the business of insulting an Indie game company that has actually begun to create a game that I am rather addicted to, just trying a vain attempt to assist in the development.

I just want to conclude this with a simple yet true statement. I have been playing tycoon type games since the original SimCity, I have significant experience in this specific genre. That being said, this game has to ability to be one of the best games that I have ever played, it needs a lot more development and a lot more additions, which is understandable due to the fact that it is only in the Alpha testing. I sincerely hope that with upcoming updates and even Beta testing, that this game develops in to what I think it could very well be.

[Pogo]

Clicking the edit button and spacing that out would have been the far better option.


I will address the slow-down issue as well.

First of all, it's not really related to how good your computer is. The game is prone to slowdowns even on best of the best computers. But the slowdown is related to map size, number of inmates, number of guards, etc, moreso than it is related to hardware or running time of the program. There may be a memory leak, but even that isn't what most of us suspect to be the biggest problem.

The game is prone to slowdowns even without using a very large amount of the available resources. If it had a memory leak, the game wouldn't just slowdown without taking up more memory and processing power. No, the game would begin to use increasingly more memory until it ran out, and only then would it begin to slowdown.



The problem is pathfinding. When you play on larger maps, the pathfinding distances tend to be longer. That means they take longer time to calculate.

When you have more prisoners, guards, and other employees, you have an increased number of paths to find.


And at a minumum, the game is at least finding a new path for every single prisoner each time the regime changes from one activity to another. And prisoners are what your prison is going to have more of than any other type of pathfinding object. And because the game isn't multithreaded yet (we're assuming it will be eventually), the graphical end of the game slows down because the single thread calculating all the pathfinding begins to take longer and longer as your prison gets bigger (longer paths) and you get more prisoners and employees (more paths).

More paths * longer paths = exponential increase in pathfinding calculation times.

Play on smaller maps with fewer prisoners and employees, and you'll barely even notice a slowdown (if at all). Play on larger maps with more prisoners and employees, and the slowdown because quite obvious, no matter how good your computer is.


In fact, in the current game state, the game would run better on an old single core 3.4Ghz processor than it would on say a quadcore 2Ghz processor, because even though that quadcore can do four times the calculations at 2Ghz then the single core can do at 3.4Ghz, Prison Architect isn't going to make use of any of the extra cores, so you're basically comparing a 3.4Ghz processor to a 2Ghz processor. And that 3.4Ghz processor is going to linearly calculate through Prison Architect's calculations a lot faster than a 2Ghz processor would.

If/when the game becomes multithreaded, then we avoid a lot of the slowdown because we're making use of the extra cores. Pathfinding is still a big complicated hairy nasty beast that the processor has to power through, but the rest of the game isn't going to be slowed down quite as much by the pathfinding.

[MAdMaN]

Clicking the edit button and spacing that out would have been the far better option.

The person who spaced it out isn't the person who originally posted it.

[Pogo]

Oh, you're right. I'm dumb.

[_alphaBeta_]

Clicking the edit button and spacing that out would have been the far better option.


I will address the slow-down issue as well.

First of all, it's not really related to how good your computer is. The game is prone to slowdowns even on best of the best computers. But the slowdown is related to map size, number of inmates, number of guards, etc, moreso than it is related to hardware or running time of the program. There may be a memory leak, but even that isn't what most of us suspect to be the biggest problem.

The game is prone to slowdowns even without using a very large amount of the available resources. If it had a memory leak, the game wouldn't just slowdown without taking up more memory and processing power. No, the game would begin to use increasingly more memory until it ran out, and only then would it begin to slowdown.



The problem is pathfinding. When you play on larger maps, the pathfinding distances tend to be longer. That means they take longer time to calculate.

When you have more prisoners, guards, and other employees, you have an increased number of paths to find.


And at a minumum, the game is at least finding a new path for every single prisoner each time the regime changes from one activity to another. And prisoners are what your prison is going to have more of than any other type of pathfinding object. And because the game isn't multithreaded yet (we're assuming it will be eventually), the graphical end of the game slows down because the single thread calculating all the pathfinding begins to take longer and longer as your prison gets bigger (longer paths) and you get more prisoners and employees (more paths).

More paths * longer paths = exponential increase in pathfinding calculation times.

Play on smaller maps with fewer prisoners and employees, and you'll barely even notice a slowdown (if at all). Play on larger maps with more prisoners and employees, and the slowdown because quite obvious, no matter how good your computer is.


In fact, in the current game state, the game would run better on an old single core 3.4Ghz processor than it would on say a quadcore 2Ghz processor, because even though that quadcore can do four times the calculations at 2Ghz then the single core can do at 3.4Ghz, Prison Architect isn't going to make use of any of the extra cores, so you're basically comparing a 3.4Ghz processor to a 2Ghz processor. And that 3.4Ghz processor is going to linearly calculate through Prison Architect's calculations a lot faster than a 2Ghz processor would.

If/when the game becomes multithreaded, then we avoid a lot of the slowdown because we're making use of the extra cores. Pathfinding is still a big complicated hairy nasty beast that the processor has to power through, but the rest of the game isn't going to be slowed down quite as much by the pathfinding.

Also to consider is that the units in the game, especially prisoners, have personal space awareness. I was impressed that this game actually prevented units from stacking on top of one another (although it does let them become VERY close). For computational purposes though, you're also requiring pathfinding units to be aware of other pathfinding units. Exponentially adds to the computations, especially once the number of prisoners increases into the 100 range.

I'm hopeful the developers will look at threading and/or optimization as mitigation. Let's hope they don't take the easier way out, like so many other games have done, where unit stacking is allowed to alleviate the pathfinding lag.

[dc4bs]

Path finding hammering a CPU does not seem to be the issue as far as I can tell... I'm still inclined to think it's a memory issue. PA is simply not requesting enough RAM from the OS.

I have dual monitors and if I leave a task manager running on screen 2 while I play, I see 3 cores at about 15-20% use and the 4th core (presumably where PA is running) at NO MORE than 55-65% use during the most aggressive/debilitating lag.

The bottleneck is not raw CPU power.

From the task manager output: once PA starts, memory usage climbs a bit and then stabilizes. No matter what happens after that, the memory use never goes any higher unless I open an additional program. So I'm looking at a screen showing that less then 25% of my physical RAM is in use by the OS and all it's sub processes and various services, firewall, virus checker, etc. _AND_ PA.

From this, I think that PA is only requesting a certain (medium/smallish) amount of memory from the OS. Once the number of objects and queued jobs, etc. in the game fills that limited RAM address space it then begins to lag from having to swap that memory around while calculating all the paths, and object placements. Smaller prisons that never go above a certain number of objects/prisoners don't have the issue. It's only once the wall is hit that things begin to break down rapidly...

In the workshop, I have noticed that some stacks of blanks and completed plates "flicker" back and forth between 2 different graphic sprites at times. The fewer blanks/plates in a stack the more likely it is to flicker (3 plate stacks being among the worst culprits for whatever reason). Is PA recalculating what sprite to use for any given stack with EACH game cycle or is this a graphics subsystem artifact?

The Most lag I see starts partway into the work period as plates begin to pile up and the number of objects increases greatly. The jobs queue for prisoners also increases greatly during work time. The number of INTERACTING paths of 100 or so workers moving around in a confined area is big even with some prisoners "locked in" at saws and presses.

At the end of work, I have noticed that the lag can become significantly less a few minutes after free time starts. As soon as all those active prisoner jobs finish changing from "active" to "queued".

Then the 2nd major lag reduction happens at midnight when the thousands of plates get sold and disappear from the map. It helps that most prisoners are sleeping (idle) then as well.

I think it's Significant that, once lag starts it never completely goes away until the object reduction at midnight.

I normally save, restart PA and reload at 5:55 AM game time (just before prisoners wake up for showers) to clear/reset for the next day. Then smooth running until a little while into the work period and the plates start to pile up again.

[HerrJoebob]

Path finding hammering a CPU does not seem to be the issue as far as I can tell... I'm still inclined to think it's a memory issue. PA is simply not requesting enough RAM from the OS.(snip)

I'm afraid nothing of what you wrote relates to the way things actually work...

[Daiky]

First of all, it's not really related to how good your computer is. The game is prone to slowdowns even on best of the best computers. But the slowdown is related to map size, number of inmates, number of guards, etc, moreso than it is related to hardware or running time of the program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJAi01Wn6Q - lady0sheep has a fast PC and is running a 300+ prisoners without slowdowns while even video capturing in HD. So hardware must have something to do with it.

[Pogo]

Small map size too. People are running into the issues on larger map sizes, not small maps.

And they're running into the issue despite their computer not being capped out on the resources they're using.



In fact, no matter when, where, or how they're running into the issue, if their processor or RAM are not capped out running at full capacity, then the problem almost explicitly has to do with how the game is programmed. I really don't see how you can say my computer which drops below 10 frames in X scenario is the culprit when PA is using less then half my processing power and less then half of my available RAM, etc.

[_alphaBeta_]

First of all, it's not really related to how good your computer is. The game is prone to slowdowns even on best of the best computers. But the slowdown is related to map size, number of inmates, number of guards, etc, moreso than it is related to hardware or running time of the program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJAi01Wn6Q - lady0sheep has a fast PC and is running a 300+ prisoners without slowdowns while even video capturing in HD. So hardware must have something to do with it.

I saw this the other day and remember thinking that you don't see the prison run continuously since the video is nicely edited. The author didn't address any questions about lag, other than posting her specs, but I wouldn't necessarily assume its runs perfectly on her PC either. It's possible she reloaded quite a bit between shots.

In any event, this video reminds me how awesome this game is going to be once this many prisoners can be supported by most peoples' PCs.