Modding Stable?

[Heffernan]

Hello,

wonder if its possible to mod the game so it will be Stable?

as many people know this game is alot unstable and does not allow for large prisons or buildings without the game heavely lagging or crashing.

as the developers dont care would it be possible to mod it with the new modsystem?

[knoest26]

absolutely not

[mazetar]

Hello,
wonder if its possible to mod the game so it will be Stable?
as many people know this game is alot unstable and does not allow for large prisons or buildings without the game heavely lagging or crashing.
as the developers dont care would it be possible to mod it with the new modsystem?

Hi Heffernan,

Firstly I would like to remind you that the game is under development and therefore it would be POINTLESS to optimize the game to fix lagging on very large maps.
Secondly I'd like to point out that several improvements have been made to fix memory leaks and other lag issues in order to keep the alpha builds testable.

Now I'd be curious on what grounds you can state that the developers don't care about the issues which you mention?

[Heffernan]

Hello,
wonder if its possible to mod the game so it will be Stable?
as many people know this game is alot unstable and does not allow for large prisons or buildings without the game heavely lagging or crashing.
as the developers dont care would it be possible to mod it with the new modsystem?

Hi Heffernan,

Firstly I would like to remind you that the game is under development and therefore it would be POINTLESS to optimize the game to fix lagging on very large maps.
Secondly I'd like to point out that several improvements have been made to fix memory leaks and other lag issues in order to keep the alpha builds testable.

Now I'd be curious on what grounds you can state that the developers don't care about the issues which you mention?

keep reminding them every month, and the game hasnt been made more stable yet = more disappointment with every update since it only features content, but how do u play content when the whole game laggs...

[mazetar]

I'm not sure I can agree with you there, during the past three months there's been several crash fixes and mem leak fixes. The bug tracker shows a very different image than the one you are painting for yourself.

Also in terms of performance, are you aware of the fact that Optimization is super dangerous to do so early in the development of software? The game is in early development, and the game is stable for medium sized prisons which is sufficient to do alpha testing with.

[Phraxas]

They just did a bug bash which helped with a lot of annoying crap and stability.

I would like to see them make a 64 bit version that uses more than 1 core though.. but other than that, it seems like content is the thing 95% of the community wants. That or more modability which would in itself create more content.

[knoest26]

They just did a bug bash which helped with a lot of annoying crap and stability.

I would like to see them make a 64 bit version that uses more than 1 core though.. but other than that, it seems like content is the thing 95% of the community wants. That or more modability which would in itself create more content.

To be honest I did finally notice the ridiculous state PA is in lately. I bought a new overclocked hyperthreaded hexacore processor (3.9GHz), which basically means it's ridiculously overpowered, yet Prison Architect still isn't handling prisons over 500 prisoners very well (20fps). I know that Prison Architect only uses 2 cores (1 for pathfinding and another one for the other stuf I believe) but it would be nice for it use at least 4 but preferably as many as it could possibly use.

I agree that it's enough to test the alpha but it using a few more cores wouldn't hurt

[mazetar]

I believe the developers intent was to optimize so that small and medium sized prisons would run decently and not spend that much time optimizing for larger scale before the game was more complete. I can't find the source of that at the moment though.

It's not like this is the final state of the game, and a C++ program can be optimized to death

[St0l3n_ID]

I believe the developers intent was to optimize so that small and medium sized prisons would run decently and not spend that much time optimizing for larger scale before the game was more complete. I can't find the source of that at the moment though.

Sound unreasonable though, the games only inted is to have ppl build as big as they can, not optimizing that sounds terrible. Especially since most fixes applying to small stuff should very well be noticible especially in large scale. I personally didnt notice either...

[learn_more]

They just did a bug bash which helped with a lot of annoying crap and stability.

I would like to see them make a 64 bit version that uses more than 1 core though.. but other than that, it seems like content is the thing 95% of the community wants. That or more modability which would in itself create more content.

To be honest I did finally notice the ridiculous state PA is in lately. I bought a new overclocked hyperthreaded hexacore processor (3.9GHz), which basically means it's ridiculously overpowered, yet Prison Architect still isn't handling prisons over 500 prisoners very well (20fps). I know that Prison Architect only uses 2 cores (1 for pathfinding and another one for the other stuf I believe) but it would be nice for it use at least 4 but preferably as many as it could possibly use.

I agree that it's enough to test the alpha but it using a few more cores wouldn't hurt

It's not like they can slap 3 lines of code in and the game runs multithreaded on 4 cores...
Writing good threaded code is hard, and not without consequences.

As for the people calling it ridiculous: if you focus on performance all the time, new features take twice or 3 times as long to develop...
if the game is in beta you can whine about performance, but alpha is pre-release meaning the game is far from finished.

[xander]

It's not like they can slap 3 lines of code in and the game runs multithreaded on 4 cores...
Writing good threaded code is hard, and not without consequences.

This.

Also, the biggest problem that Prison Architect is trying to solve is path-finding, which grows geometrically with the size of the prison that you are trying to run, whereas the amount of computing power available only grows linearly with the number of processors available. Even assuming that IV write good parallel code, it is likely that throwing additionally processors at the problem won't actually give much improvement.

A far better solution would be to improve the path-finding algorithms so that they run better on a single processor.

xander

[St0l3n_ID]

Every programmer should be aware that the hardware wont grow fast enough if the code is bad

[xander]

Every programmer should be aware that the hardware wont grow fast enough if the code is bad :P

It isn't even a question of the code being bad (though the underlying code in Prison Architect *could* certainly be terrible---I can't possibly say). Some problems are, by their nature, computationally intensive and grow complex very quickly, whether or not the underlying code is well written and optimized. Consider the problem of inverting an arbitrary nxn matrix, for example, which is generally going to be something on the order of O(n^3) or (if you are clever) O(n^2.4).

xander

[knoest26]

Just saying that the performance issues are quite a big thing if we need to test the mechanics on a larger scale, not demanding they improve it right away or saying it's easy, just pointing out that it really is quite a big issue

[mazetar]

It's a big issue that will need to be dealt with later when more systems are in place.
A lot of systems which greatly affect performance is still being built and/or designed
There's no denying that this is a big issue, and it's clear that the developers work with long term solutions.