Lag in Alpha 8

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FallingFear
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Lag in Alpha 8

Postby FallingFear » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:06 am

Does any one else get significant lag as your Alpha-8 prison grows? This isn't just due to memory leak issues, since it begins with a fresh programme on the same save.
Rappelle
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Re: Lag in Alpha 8

Postby Rappelle » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:47 am

FallingFear wrote:Does any one else get significant lag as your Alpha-8 prison grows? This isn't just due to memory leak issues, since it begins with a fresh programme on the same save.


Yes. I get this problem. It's odd though- my CPU, Memory, and GPU don't even get near full load - yet the game lags quite a lot. When I pause the game, everything returns to being smooth.
Urigella
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Postby Urigella » Sat Mar 23, 2013 12:18 pm

I used to get this problem with alpha 6, but it disappeared with alpha 7. Back in alpha 6 whenever it happened I could pause them game, unpause and then it returned to normal. I'm sure it'll get sorted out asap.
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Re: Lag in Alpha 8

Postby HerrJoebob » Sat Mar 23, 2013 5:55 pm

FallingFear wrote:Does any one else get significant lag as your Alpha-8 prison grows? This isn't just due to memory leak issues, since it begins with a fresh programme on the same save.


Alpha 8 is pretty rock solid for me. I was even able to play a large map up to a couple hundred inmates all in one session, so it's a huge improvement for me. Prior alphas needed to be restarted roughly twice per game day well before the prison got to that size due to lag and memory leak issues. Medium size and smaller prisons never need to be restarted now.

It's interesting that people's experiences are so very different - for instance, not everybody had to restart the game as often as I did in previous alphas. Maybe it's the (lack of) optimizations that people talk about. Alpha is alpha I guess. :)
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Postby Ewokster » Sat Mar 23, 2013 7:20 pm

I bought the game on Steam today, and have been having huuuge lag issues all the time, with my fps peaking at around 5. This was a problem throughout the introduction, and in the small amount I played in a new prison I created. I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.8, and was playing on windowed mode (though I still got the mass lag on fullscreen) with nothing else open. Could someone help please? :\
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Postby 111none » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:55 pm

Ewokster wrote:I bought the game on Steam today, and have been having huuuge lag issues all the time, with my fps peaking at around 5. This was a problem throughout the introduction, and in the small amount I played in a new prison I created. I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.8, and was playing on windowed mode (though I still got the mass lag on fullscreen) with nothing else open. Could someone help please? :\

give me your GPU,CPU , memory,opengl specs
With the sincerest regards,
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Dybing
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Postby Dybing » Sun Mar 24, 2013 4:03 am

Got a medium size prison going (about 80 inmates so far), and it do start to lag after a good while. Everything struggles to keep pace. Be it scrolling the map, zooming and even the sounds start to chop. But resolved through setting game speed to slow or pause for a little while, even just hitting escape into the menu, save the prison and then going back. It takes a long time to happen though. Maybe a couple of hours. Exiting and restarting the game solves it completely for a long time as well, whereas the other "solutions" are temporary.

On the bright side, the game do not crash on me, and the lag do not make it unplayable. It's just annoying.

I'm on PC though and not running the steam version.

Nice to see the game getting more stable. Now we just need some more features that wrecks it :D

Oh, and a little bug I stumbled upon: I have lost 4 people to heinous murderous killers. Two inmates, a cook and my groundskeeper. The inmates were carried to the morgue by guards. The cook by another cook. But my groundskeeper is still flat on the ground in a pool of blood on the grass of the Yard. Have been for days. Hired a new groundskeeper, but he just conveniently sweeps the place like the previous one wasn't even there. The guards won't touch him, and neither will any of the workmen.

It is in the jobs list though - carry Willy to the morgue. But nothing is ever done about it.

First time anyone ever died in any of my prisons, so it's a new experience for me and I can't compare to how it's been before (been here since alpha 5 I think). Perhaps having max-sec inmates in a holding cell with others and a lack of enough beds in it is a bad idea :p But now my max-sec wing is well underway with most such inmates already gotten assigned a cell there, holding cell is empty until next intake and things are expanding pretty well :)

Now I just need to make a min-sec wing to make room for more normal-sec inmates.
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Postby Jasin » Mon Mar 25, 2013 8:55 pm

I actually had the same lag last night when I had around 45 staff. After reading on the Steam forums people talked about Window mode being slow. I didn't think I was in Borderless Window mode but I was. I went to graphic options. It wasn't checked. I checked it, then unchecked it and the game went fullscreen and lag was gone.
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Postby ssaavedra » Tue Mar 26, 2013 9:03 pm

Mine is also lagging, and besides of multithreading in Prison Architect, there seems to be that two threads eat their capabilities: my CPU is 4-core, and 2 of the cores would be at 100% (making the game "seem" like it is at 50%, but actually it is full capacity within those two threads).

This is my performance report, if it is of any use to Introversion.

ImageImageImageImage

This report was taken in a large map with like 50 people in them (inc. crew).
As you can see, the bottleneck are two threads that can't feed the rest of the rendering, one of the threads is a computation thread, and the other is the one that paints the screen (running from Steam, it has some connection to the gameOverlayUI.exe that steam uses to get their nice overlay on top of the game, but that shouldn't be causing any trouble).

Maybe that's more of a bug to-be-fixed in early beta stages.
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Cdr_Keen
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Postby Cdr_Keen » Wed Mar 27, 2013 12:13 pm

me also got large fps drops, as they described above.

playing via steam, windows7 64 sp1, i7 2600K, 16GB, SSD, HD 5770 oc
PatrickV
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Postby PatrickV » Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:03 am

Have notice that too, I guess Chris break the game as he was trying to fix bugs in the game.
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Postby Xcevion » Thu Mar 28, 2013 9:27 am

The lags are related to the pathfinding issue, too many people on the map will over short or long make the game lag really hard
What i noticed is, that some lag issues can be reverted by only having 5 workmen in your prison,
when i have more the game will start to lag soon (if there are already prisoners in the house),
building up a new prison (without any prisoners) with 40 workmen is no problem
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MrHambanana
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Postby MrHambanana » Thu Mar 28, 2013 5:51 pm

Yeah i also have lag spikes sometimes but its quite strange because sometime I just pause the game and put it back running and the lag disappears, it should be fixed in the mean time.
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Postby dr_mibbles » Sun Mar 31, 2013 5:47 pm

I was really enjoying the alpha but after an hour or the lag kills it, and I have a powerful high-end gaming PC

I had a mass escape, half my prisoners escaped, and the lag remained, so it's doesn't seem related to how many prisoners you have (I had about 80, it dropped to 40, lag was still crippling)

I noticed it only used one of my processor cores though (in an i-2600k), which I thought was odd
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Postby fragro » Sun Mar 31, 2013 9:45 pm

Does this lag occur on the same large maps after a reload? The significant lag I have faced usually can be fixed with a reload, implying I am encountering the memory leak issue. Even after a minute or so when the paths are being calculated there is less lag than after 20 minutes or so real-time in the game.

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