Game suddenly running very slowly

[andrealmeidadavila]

Hi everyone, looking for some help here.

I am having an issue where the simulation is running very slowly (time, vehicles) all of a sudden.

I have been playing this game for a couple of months on my Mac, and I have been downloading quite a few mods and assets over this period. I never faced major issues with that though - the game continued to run very well in my 70k pop city, and whenever I faced a problem I would just reload the previous saved version or unsubscribe the latest mod I had subscribed to.

After not playing it for a little over a week, I came back to it today, after downloading a couple more mods (Vehicle Selector 1.4.4 and Transfer Manager CE v2.4.23). When launching the game, it took about twice the time it would usually take for the game to load (2:20 minutes, seen on Loading Screen Mod) and everything in the game was a lot slower (a one day cycle would take around 25 sec). I unsubscribed to the mods I had just subscribed to, and tried to load an old save, but the problem still persists: long loading screen time, slow simulation. I even loaded a version of my city where the population was around 30k, and the problem still persisted.

I have no idea what could have happened. I faced a similar issue before but solved it by deleting a few paths that I had created (following this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/s8jd0c/60_fps_vehicles_and_time_moving_super_slow/).

Could it be related to the mods I downloaded, despite already unsubscribing then? Some kind of hidden update during the week I didn't play?

Please help me!! It would be really sad to lose all the work put in this city because the game is running slow motion now :(

Thanks a lot :)

[james]

Does the game launch? There's a lot of RAM used during launch and a "slow" load time is not unusual. More mods, population, and assets will increase the load time. As your population grows, the simulation speed does slow down - for my setup it's usually around 60-90k population size where 3x starts to run at about 40% speed. This is expected behavior based off the rig's capabilities. An increases pagefile helped my performance, you may look into that.

[MaxFX]

Long(er) loading times is often the result of Windows increasing the pagefile. Don't know if this is the same with MacOS. But perhaps you're running out of memory.

When the game loads, the Loading Screen Mod gives you some numbers in the screen while loading. Do these turn red?

If so, then I suggest you read this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2114415052&searchtext=pagefile

[Major Kudos™]

Remove the game and all the mods, reload the game and restart un-modded, enjoy.

[andrealmeidadavila]

Originally posted by james:

Does the game launch? There's a lot of RAM used during launch and a "slow" load time is not unusual. More mods, population, and assets will increase the load time. As your population grows, the simulation speed does slow down - for my setup it's usually around 60-90k population size where 3x starts to run at about 40% speed. This is expected behavior based off the rig's capabilities. An increases pagefile helped my performance, you may look into that.

Thank you so much for your replies.

The game does launch, but more slowly. Also, it launches on pause and takes a while before I can resume the simulation (for 1-2 min, clicking to resume the game does nothing).

What is weird is how this exact same game was running smoothly one week ago and now, without changing anything as fas as I know, it is showing these problems.

I am not sure I understood how a pagefile might help performance, but it seems to me that on Mac you cannot/don"t have to setup a page file.

@MaxFX loading screen only shows one missing asset in red — it was from the Barges mod, which I just deleted to try to make things run more smoothly. Apart from that, there doesn't seem to be that many errors.

Don"t know if it could be related, but I have the impression that, after loading the assets on Loading Screen, the game would start quite quickly, whereas now it still takes a long time to start after loading the assets.

[numbat]

Originally posted by andrealmeidadavila:

I am not sure I understood how a pagefile might help performance, but it seems to me that on Mac you cannot/don"t have to setup a page file.

Macs do have a page file, but it's called a swap file in Mac and Linux land. You can see how much is being used in activity monitor.

I believe that it's size is auto managed, but there is probably a way to set a minimum size.

Cheers,
Chris.

[andrealmeidadavila]

Hey everyone, thanks for the replies and help. I unsubscribed a couple more mods/assets and then the game came back to running smoothly. I actually re-subscribed them and the game continues to run well, so I have no idea what happened. But I'm glad it's fine now.
Thanks again for the support!

[yankees992007]

Originally posted by numbat:

Originally posted by andrealmeidadavila:

I am not sure I understood how a pagefile might help performance, but it seems to me that on Mac you cannot/don"t have to setup a page file.

Macs do have a page file, but it's called a swap file in Mac and Linux land. You can see how much is being used in activity monitor.

I believe that it's size is auto managed, but there is probably a way to set a minimum size.

Cheers,
Chris.

Windows does the same. It auto managed. Users dont have to change it if they dont want. The system has options to either allow OS to decide pagefile or user adjustments.

I have gaming computer system by ASUS so their software takes over and do the job.

[13jpgbass]

I have had this issue as well. I had about a week of smooth gameplay before the game completely collapsed again. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I'll keep looking for a solution.