Slowing down of the world as it progresses

[DJDíez | EL NANO 4EVER]

Hello.


It has been a long time since a problem has happened to me in the game that no matter how much I search on the internet, I cannot find a solution.

When I start a game and I set the maximum speed of the game, it goes quite well, but as progress goes by and the game grows, it slows down, no matter how much I put x4, it is not a FPS problem, but it seems that it does not processes objects well and they go very slowly.

From what I have seen it has to do with the processor but I have already investigated about bottlenecks etc, and there should be no problem, but as far as making sure my pc is this:


16 GB RAM
GTX 1660 SUPER
INTEL XEON E3 1245 V5 3.5 GHZ 8 Threads.


I hope there is a solution and that you do not have to buy anything.

It should be noted that it also happens to me in cities skylines etc ...

[doug]

It's done deliberately to avoid stuttering. It's mentioned in the release notes from June 22, 2020 - see pinned thread above.

[DJDíez | EL NANO 4EVER]

Yes but i have this problem.

[ClearchusOfSparta]

The game stops you from 2x, 4x the speed because your cpu cant process the calculations fast enough.
As Doug said above, this was in the release notes.

[SlimNasty™]

Originally posted by Diezstein:

Yes but i have this problem.

It's NOT a problem, it like that by design as doug has said.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Late game performance impact is largely due to population growth + road network size. Public transport including cargo has a minor influence.

I suggest you use this mod late game if you wish to keep playing maps for a while, what it does is reduce the amount of people per building. The game default is 1, the mod default is 2 - double the amount - change it to a value under 1.

A value of 0.5 will halve the capacity of a building, from say 10, to 5, and so on. A value of 0.25 will decrease by 75%, a value of 0 will make every building have 1 capacity.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2036235984

If profitable passenger traffic is desired, do not reduce it too much.

[clixor]

I'm reaching a fairly matured map right now, like 15 cities with approx 2k people per city. I'm playing with the increased growth mod because playing without you can't get that 'mega' cities and personally that's where the fun is for me.

As for performance i must say i'm indeed getting no stuttering but gameplay is kind of slow. I also did some performance tweaks and my potato CPU is running at 80% ish.

Now, my cities have a prospected size of around 4k, so i have to see how things will develop, but i do feel the forced delayed time could be more dynamic, if that's even possible. For instance, i get the game has to do a lot of calculations when you change routes or make other changes. But after catching up the calculations should be more stable right? And this should be reflected on game speed.

Anyway, all in all i think the city size changes were a good thing. Playing TF1 on a bad PC was a very frustrating experience as you'd know at some point your map would be unplayable.

[Yanus]

If I have well understood, the destination in TF2 is calculated when a ressource is generated (good or people). This result in some strange behaviours when you duplicate terminal on a single simple line to allow several vehicules to load at the same time.

As both ressource generation increase and transport network increase with time this make huge calculation and lag. The transport calculations in TTD, openTTD or locomotion were probably much simpler resulting in less lag during end game and the possibility to make huge megalopole with suburban network.

A solution to increase performance in TF2 would be to reduce the volume of calculation by grouping ressource according to some criteria (date, time spend on party, etc). For example, transport calculation could be done for each ressource in 1850, for each 5 ressource in 1900, for each 10 ressource in 1950, etc.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Yanus:

The transport calculations in TTD, openTTD or locomotion were probably much simpler resulting in less lag during end game and possibility to make huge megalopole with suburban network.

Simpler calculations in TTD and Locomotion is an understatement (Not familiar enough with openTTD to say). There was no simulation of the people in those games. They were merely a number generated at stations based on the buildings in catchment and they had no destination in mind. They (the number labelled as a passenger) would simply transfer to any vehicle that showed up and be dropped off wherever you felt like taking them, so long as the drop-off accepted passengers. So zero path finding was involved for passengers in those games. The only path finding was that of your own vehicles.

[Yanus]

OpenTTD is an reverse engineering of TTD with some improvements (exemple conditional entry signal for railroad segments).

TF 1 and TF 2 have beautiful graphic in comparison and their railroad system is cool (the conveinant building system with mouse, the speed limit in curve, etc). Unfortunately, pathfinder on vehicule is limited (no dynamic platefome selection or railroad ways, no overpassing of road vehicules) because computer power is used to calculated destination of ressource. The required computer power is also the reason why we have not access by default to megalomania map size, lags went private vehicules become more common, and some choice on TF2. Unfortunalty, only few people have access to a supercomputer such as Piz Daint.

However, I am still dream of a TF3 combining the best of TF and openTDD with access to fluent megaolomanic map where I could reproduce VBZ network. But to have that, urban game need to have some control on the volume of calculation which do not involve limitation of population.

Three others minor thing that they need to change in my opinion is :

1) cost of locomotive versus wagon. Wagon should be cheaper in maintenance but locomotive more expensive.

2) possibility to save the configuration of a station (number of platform, train tracks, length of line and position of building) to reproduce it elsewhere because modify station induce some strange lags.

3) Maximal size of a train station SHOULD not be calculated from the first main passenger/cargo bulding but from the current area of the station. I discovered that when you could not build anymore platform in a direction you could still destroy the main building and construct in the other direction.

[Mackintosh]

Not only does modifying the station cause lag, but it's also persistent lag that won't go away until the game is restarted. There must be a resource leak in the recalculation routine somewhere.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Yanus:

Unfortunately, pathfinder on vehicule is limited (no dynamic platefome selection or railroad ways, no overpassing of road vehicules) because computer power is used to calculated destination of ressource.

Yeah, I agree. That is unfortunate. And I agree that it may be because of lack of computer power that they didn't include that functionality into TpF. The original Transport Tycoon (not TTD) was actually my favourite game back in the mid 90's.

[Overlord]

I hate it. It is so stupid. I had to use mod which basically halved my population in every city.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Nothing wrong with the solution you took.

As noted, the lag is not the game's fault but simply a CPU bottleneck.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2760202773

The alternative would be getting rid of the agent system and using something akin OTTD or Railway Empire, just a flat population number, with intercity traffic based off these numbers. This would likely enable much bigger physical maps, but at the cost of no private car traffic simulation, other than maybe some randomly generated traffic that will not exactly look visually good.

[Overlord]

Originally posted by ⭐ Tsubame:

Nothing wrong with the solution you took.

As noted, the lag is not the game's fault but simply a CPU bottleneck.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2760202773

The alternative would be getting rid of the agent system and using something akin OTTD or Railway Empire, just a flat population number, with intercity traffic based off these numbers. This would likely enable much bigger physical maps, but at the cost of no private car traffic simulation, other than maybe some randomly generated traffic that will not exactly look visually good.

Yeah that explains it, but it does not explain the GPU issue I always have in this game. When I open for example town statistics by GPU basically "turns off" and I hear fan slowing down. Game starts to give me 10 FPS and GPU load is going down (under 10 %) and as soon as I close the town statistics menu gpu starts to go higher and of course I also hear the GPU fan.

I would love to see changes to that agent system especially with citizens and their private cars. I dont want to simulate every citizen and every car if I have to give up playing on larger maps with large cities.
Some settings to set % of simulated trasportations by cars would be nice. If somebody wants to do change it he should be able to. Some private transport despawning command or mod like Traffic president in cities skylines would be cool as well. I have no joy seeing thousands of car on every major road between cities stucked especially when it slows my game :/

[Northwold]

Originally posted by Overlord:

I would love to see changes to that agent system especially with citizens and their private cars. I dont want to simulate every citizen and every car if I have to give up playing on larger maps with large cities.

Exactly this. Showing everyone is a nice idea in theory, but in practice it grinds everyone's system to a halt, including very well specified systems, at just the point where you have an interesting transport network. If a nice to have makes the game as a whole unplayable, then you need to get rid of, or adjust, the nice to have. It certainly doesn't help that the game doesn't exploit multicore well (which is where the vast majority of modern CPU heft lies), but it's not realistic to expect the development team to master that. Indeed, many, many AAA games cannot master that, even when there appears to be scope to exploit multicore.

It shouldn't be necessary to use a mod to downsize city populations just at the moment when they reach a size that the numbers feel a little more realistic. There are shortcuts that would get round that, such as showing one person to represent two, then three, then four, as population levels rise. Such tweaks really ought to be in the base game.