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I have an i9-1100K, Nvidia 3070 Ti, 980 Pro SSD and 32GB of 3200Mhz ram. In the large zoo I was playing this morning I averaged 27-30 FPS, which was very playable for me. I navigate quite smoothly from one area of the zoo to another as the animal management demands are frequent. There were about 5500 guests in the park and there are more than 400 animals in habitats. There is also a section with large temple structures in it. In short, a lot of rendering and calculations for the game to keep up with.
I don't think the game was developed for a player to completely fill a map. I think a larger than necessary area was provided to give the player more freedom for zoo design but probably felt that players would limit their zoo size to whatever their hardware could handle. Perhaps they underestimated the number of players who would feel they had to completely fill a map to be happy. I do know I wouldn't want the large zoo I am speaking of to be any larger. LOL, I have a hard enough time keeping up with births, aging, death, buying and trading as it is. That zoo keeps me on my toes. :)
I'd say just about anywhere into the realm of below 30fps is no longer a playable experience. its obvious to say that 30 is manageable but from there on down its going to become an increasingly miserable experience in a non-linear line.
For some people, a little choppiness is acceptable but for me. not so much. I can't recall how many guests I had when I started to have issues, but i think it was similar to you. in around the 5 to 6000 mark. and i think i put up with it until close to 8 or 9.
at which point it was unplayable. but at that time, I hadn't been able to get all that many animal exhibits in. I suppose I could make multiple zoo's in the franchise but at the time there was no real financial benefit which would carry over from Zoo to Zoo.
I think were they to implement a franchise that feels like an expanding business empire by allowing your income to expand a long with new Zoo's I might have been more forgiving. As it was back then (dunno if its changed) the only tangible benefit would be taking some high rating animals along with you to give yourself a bit of an early guest draw. Not really enough for me to justify having to start over and build a whole new zoo every time I reach what I'll call the "Asset Cap" and really I don't think its fair to say they didn't expect people to build huge Zoo's.
This game is primarily a creative sandbox, like planet coaster was. But i give this game credit for having a more robust economic management side. Which i appreciated alot as a player that looks for that type of game. But lets put that aside for a minute and address the large map. If its a creativity game and you give an artist a large easel to work with they're going to use it no? But okay, I can accept that there are hardware limitations. But should it really have been up to the player to discover what that limitation is by reaching it and then having to give up on their hard work? And as a side note, we're not talking about even a half full map. its more like 1/4 before you start to feel the hardware bottleneck.
In any case, I didn't come to say anything negative about the game. I did enjoy it. And I appreciate the replies. I was just hoping to hear that some work had been put into optimisation. Given that there are now like a dozen DLC's developed I had hoped at least a little time had been put toward making all those animals accessible. I get that they are... I guess I just had a different impression of what to expect in the game and thought I would be making a Zoo with all of them in one. And the large maps would certainly indicate the space capacity to do that so I thought it was their intention given that they even give us ways to transport guests quickly over large distances. anyway
Cheers.
I don't like choppiness either. Note I mentioned how smoothly that zoo runs at 27-30 FPS. The 27 FPS doesn't feel any differently to me than the 30 FPS does. I didn't mean to indicate Frontier didn't think people would build large zoos, just perhaps underestimated the number of people who would think they had to fill a map, which isn't necessary to have a large zoo. BTW, I've actually seen a zoo on the Workshop that says it has all animals in it. I haven't downloaded it to take a look but don't see how it could be much more than very basic habitats and little decor to have it run. I guess there could also be multi-species habitats as well.
I can't speak to what is and is not currently implemented in franchise mode. I play in sandbox mode. They have added so many settings for sandbox that I do set it up as if it was a zoo in another mode, i.e., using cash and conservation credits etc., after doing some building with unlimited cash and cc for stocking it, lol. Then I concentrate on making it support itself. There really isn't any need to have more than 5500 to 6000 guests to support a large zoo, so I usually cap guests at 6000.
I honestly don't equate a large canvas with the zoo map. I saw it as presenting design options, like being able to put the zoo entrance in the middle and radiate outwards, if that is what one wants to do. Outside perimeters can be defined by trees so you don't even notice there is more space available. That's where it would be nice to have a tool to paint foliage in rather than doing individual trees or groups of them but that isn't an option. :) TBH, I honestly don't even think about what percentage of a map is filled. The zoo dictates when it feels full to me.
I also do think they have and continue to work on optimization. This is in their best interest, especially around the time of an update and DLC release. Every DLC a player adds to their game taxes the CPU further. If it has been a while since you played, why don't you give it a try and formulate your own opinion about improvements, or the lack thereof, in your opinion. I don't think you came to be negative about the game, just seeking information. However, not knowing the last time you played, anyone reading this thread can't pinpoint changes made to the game that you may not have seen yet and along with those changes came behind the scenes tweaks. You may find improvement, and you may not for what you want to do, but it can't hurt to try again, if you enjoyed playing in the past.
Fair enough, context about when i last played was indeed missing. Im tempted to play again, thats why im here. maybe i will.
Thanks.
You've got good hardware with which to play the game. I see no reason why you can't find a middle ground that works for you, but you are the only one who can make that decision.
There is no getting around this my dude.
What you can do is lower guest count. But thats it. There isn't a way around more work meaning longer render times.
FPS are related to the GPU. If the CPU has a lot to say in it then the game is not properly optimized. Also, good applications use all kind of algorithms and techniques that optimize the usage of resources. This is crucial and with the right approach, games could run surprisingly smooth despite of a lot of stuff going on.
Sometimes development companies invest a lot in the artistic part while ignoring the hard core coding because optimization takes a lot of time and the money must pour in as soon as possible. If you don't do it at the beginning, once a poorly started codebase is there, it's hard to refactor it later. But you can alwas tell players to just not add to many things in the game if they don't want their machine to set on fire and there you go. Let's make another DLC even though you won't be able to use it because the game is already too slow
Wrong. Most open-ended simulation games like Planet Zoo will have a CPU bottleneck. In the case of Planet Zoo, that is easily seen when the guest count increases past a certain size.
There is a minimum level of work needed for any algorithm to actually generate the right results, which means that optimizations can only improve performance to the limit of big theta of an ideal algorithm and not further. For example, you can't sort a list of n items faster than n log n.
Planet Zoo is on its tenth major update, so all of the easy optimizations have already been made. Players can improve the performance mostly by using the widest possible path size and spreading out attractions so that you avoid heavy crowds in any one hotspot.
You're mostly correct, I just didn't reply because I didn't want to get drawn into an argument with someone that is either lacking some fundamental understanding of how games are engineered, or was trolling. My inclination is toward the latter.
There are certainly aspects to graphics rendering that can be bottlenecked by CPU and in the case of Planet Zoo this is certainly evidenced by many entities being present in the game and the CPU being asked to perform many many logic calculations for all of them. IE, Food and drink requirements, pathing to satisfy those needs, where to dump the garbage, etc. And all of those decisions need to be made simultaneously. But that, in combination with the rendering of the models and the terrain being performed by the GPU will quickly result in frame rate loss if the two are not optimised in any way.
To simply suggest that we should throw our hands in the air and say "there's nothing that could be done to improve this" is just ignorant and lazy and I completely agree that just telling the player to live with it and make smaller zoos is over simplifying the solution.
Obviously im not suggesting that computers have an infinite capacity to process the things we want them too. But what planet zoo demands of the machine is nowhere near as complex and demanding as other games I've played with many times more entities and calculations to manage. When our zoos tend to drop in frames is around 5000 guests and a couple hundred animals. The game I just logged out from was managing over 50,000 entities and far more complex physics within the game world. The reality is that the developer got planet zoo to the point where it was "good enough" to be playable and has decided not to invest any additional effort into what isn't a revenue generating focus. You can't sell optimisation as a DLC. simple as that. I won't put all that blame on the developer. They are not always free to develop as they see fit, the publisher has much more control over that in most cases but its just disappointing that as I said before, my creativity has to be tightly controlled in this game. I have to sit and think hard about whether or not I actually want to build a unique habitat, knowing that doing so will march me ever closer to the invisible cap. Or if I want to just make a box with the minimum plant assets to cover the animal needs, usually large trees. And that sucks.
I stopped after reading half of your blabbering because you're obviously too arrogant to have a conversation, you probably just want to look smart in front of strangers, which is really, really pathetic.
Btw, I have worked on game engines and no good engine does things "simultaneously". That's why multi-threading and asynchronous jobs are a big thing today. That's why modern APIs like Vulkan provide asynchronous rendering models. I come from a time where these things did not exist and you really had to think about distributing the work. That's why I know there's so much room for improvement in the coding of this thing if 6000 data elements create a bottleneck already.
Now, it's use this IDE or throw this framework over this other abstraction, dependencies over dependencies and launch that ♥♥♥♥. Of course it's gonna clog everything but that's because you didn't optimize the CPU work and make the GPU wait. The FPS must depend on the GPU before the CPU. Otherwise, you have an unoptimized game
games like cities skylines. shrugs, deal with it or dont play these games.
Of course it does. I love Planet Zoo, but there are several performance issues and bugs , there's nothing wrong in aknowledge that. I love Cities Skylines aswell, but again, its performance issues are ridiculous. It's absurd to say "deal with it" when there's room for improvement.