Major lag with a massive prison

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punchball
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Major lag with a massive prison

Postby punchball » Fri Aug 07, 2015 1:02 am

Hi guys, So i'm building a massive prison and when I was putting down all the cell rooms and once I hit over 1,000 cells my game started lagging really bad! For instance, a janitor will walk then the game freezes and it could take the poor dude 5 minutes in real life time to get down a short hallway.... Is there any way to fix this? I'm starting to take down some of my prison to hopefully help with lag! I have roughly 250 staff and 0 prisoners at this time and I have taken several land expansions out (That also seems to lag a bit if you take too many out)

If you have any suggestions please comment below!
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby blackdwarf » Fri Aug 07, 2015 11:40 am

Get a much faster computer.

I'm sorry for what may sound like a non-helpful answer, but that's the real answer to the question. The dev team has been working to make the game run more efficiently, and there have been many suggestions given to them on how to accomplish that. As well as criticism.

But really, no matter how efficient the game is, there will be a prison that is big enough to make it lag. The only way to make that go away is for there to be a limit to the size of the prison you can build. Something like no more than so many rooms total, or so many tiles placed. Something along those lines. The devs have chosen to not have those kinds of limits.

Given the current game software and your computer system, your massive prison is too massive. Make it smaller.
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby punchball » Fri Aug 07, 2015 2:19 pm

blackdwarf wrote:Get a much faster computer.

I'm sorry for what may sound like a non-helpful answer, but that's the real answer to the question. The dev team has been working to make the game run more efficiently, and there have been many suggestions given to them on how to accomplish that. As well as criticism.

But really, no matter how efficient the game is, there will be a prison that is big enough to make it lag. The only way to make that go away is for there to be a limit to the size of the prison you can build. Something like no more than so many rooms total, or so many tiles placed. Something along those lines. The devs have chosen to not have those kinds of limits.

Given the current game software and your computer system, your massive prison is too massive. Make it smaller.


Thanks for the reply, My computer is pretty top of the line with a Intel I7-4790k and EVGA GTX 970 with 8gbs of 2133mz ram, so I doubt it my system, although it could be the hard drive I have the game files saved too which might be the issue so if I throw the prison onto my ssd it may help, other wise like you said I will make it smaller.... Thanks again for a reply!
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby MFWIC » Sat Aug 15, 2015 10:47 pm

The ram is your bottleneck. I'm running basically the same setup, except I maxxed the motherboard out at 32 gigs of ram; I experience no such slowdowns and the prisons I typically design are in the 15-1800 range.
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RichieGrape
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby RichieGrape » Tue Aug 18, 2015 7:52 pm

MFWIC wrote:The ram is your bottleneck. I'm running basically the same setup, except I maxxed the motherboard out at 32 gigs of ram; I experience no such slowdowns and the prisons I typically design are in the 15-1800 range.

i agree with this...lets face it your OS is using up to 2 gigs of ram itself....and lets assume you have 1gig of programs running in the background....right there you have almost used up 1/2 of your ram and thats without the game running
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby fresh meat » Tue Aug 18, 2015 9:51 pm

right click on your taskbar. start task manager. see in processes how much ram PA uses with your prison.

2 gig of ram in idle? win7 for me uses 1.3 gig
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby 5hifty » Tue Aug 18, 2015 11:47 pm

Yeah 2g is a pretty bloated OS. Mine idles around 1.5 and thats with a whole range of extra stuff running in the background. But yeah, RAM def isn't my bottleneck. When I start getting slowdown I'm barely pushing 60% usage.
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby Karkadinn » Tue Aug 18, 2015 11:49 pm

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that most people aren't going to be willing to buy over two dozen gigs of extra RAM just to play high population Prison Architect. I mean, I'm a huge fan of this game, but jeez.
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby 5hifty » Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:23 am

Ive got what you could call a 'large' prison. Its about 3-5 land purchases on each side of the road. Its basically the same facility mirrored on each side of the road. Has about 1000 pawns running around it. Maybe more. Anyway it running used just over half a gig. My RAM usage bar didnt even move when I started it, so a RAM bottleneck isn't the problem.
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby WyDavies » Wed Aug 19, 2015 4:53 pm

I don't think extra RAM will help (unless you've only got 2Gb. Upping to 4Gb will help everything, not just PA). It is a 32 bit process, which means it uses a maximum of 2Gb (or 3Gb if it is large address aware). I've got it running right now on a +1000 inmate prison where I've bought a lot of extra land (planning for around 3000 cells with quite a few extra-large luxury cells) and it is using 1.45Gb of memory.
I've got 24Gb and it is all over the place in terms of run-speed. At meal-times really hurts and drops to less than 1 fps. And the moment "Eat" period is over it suddenly goes super-smooth.
To confuse things even more, once I got over 1000 cells it started running faster (except at meal-times).

Edit: It just got to the evening meal in my prison and I've noticed that it is odder than I thought. The first 30 minutes are fine, but immediately on the half-hour of the "Eat" period it hits a brick wall and the game slows to a painful crawl. What on earth is happening half an hour into the meal period to cause this? Memory usage hasn't shifted, but the processor usage has. 2 cores are at 50% and the other cores are idling. Very odd indeed.
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby arwan » Thu Aug 20, 2015 12:43 am

its very likely the bottle neck is in the software of the game itself.

the engine the game uses likely is chugging under all the stuff it has to do.

i have a feeling that short of changing game engines, or serious rewriting of the engines code, that there is not much more the devs can do to make it run better.
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby xander » Thu Aug 20, 2015 2:56 am

arwan wrote:its very likely the bottle neck is in the software of the game itself.

the engine the game uses likely is chugging under all the stuff it has to do.

i have a feeling that short of changing game engines, or serious rewriting of the engines code, that there is not much more the devs can do to make it run better.

Personally, I think that the real problem is with the dilithium crystals. When you run Prison Architect, the flux capacitor goes out of alignment, and you have to reverse the polarity of the main deflector array and hit it with a tachyon burst in the 1.21 jiggawatts range. Unfortunately, that is something that requires quantum computing, and is not yet available in most desktop machines today.

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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby Biggley » Thu Aug 20, 2015 6:15 am

I think the flux capacitor should be recalibrated.
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RichieGrape
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby RichieGrape » Tue Sep 01, 2015 5:55 am

xander wrote:
arwan wrote:its very likely the bottle neck is in the software of the game itself.

the engine the game uses likely is chugging under all the stuff it has to do.

i have a feeling that short of changing game engines, or serious rewriting of the engines code, that there is not much more the devs can do to make it run better.

Personally, I think that the real problem is with the dilithium crystals. When you run Prison Architect, the flux capacitor goes out of alignment, and you have to reverse the polarity of the main deflector array and hit it with a tachyon burst in the 1.21 jiggawatts range. Unfortunately, that is something that requires quantum computing, and is not yet available in most desktop machines today.

xander

:shock:
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RichieGrape
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Re: Major lag with a massive prison

Postby RichieGrape » Tue Sep 01, 2015 5:56 am

5hifty wrote:Yeah 2g is a pretty bloated OS.

ever since i upgraded to win10 i've been noticing this

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