Idle Workers

[Nate T]

I always seem to end up with A TON of idle workers. Just people standing around, not doing anything, even when there's stuff that needs carrying around or delivering. How do I get them to actually go do work?

[Rudy (Snowy Ash Games)]

Hey! That doesn't sound very good and shouldn't happen.

There is no way to manually tell the workers to do something. Carriers (those not stationed at any buildings) should deliver any items that can be delivered. Tradesmen (workers at buildings) may also carry nearby items for their own needs.

I can't really say more without details. Do you have a screenshot to share or could you please upload your save game (there's a direct upload via save/load menu little red button)?

[Silberling]

I have the same problem. I uploaded a save game and reported that I tried to influence the game loop via vsync and frame cap without success.

[Silberling]

Screenshot: here
On the top right there are about 600+ workers idle. 1126 Delivery jobs, 585 carriers but 404 idle. I set the min workers for hauling to 768. That does not look good to me.
On the left the citizens were spawned just minutes ago and still standing there.
Some houses do not get their requested resources and production is not fully used. Pottery for example: Potteries stock isn't fully utilized and mines have some idle people. Before restarting the game nearly half of the potteries isn't even running.

[Rudy (Snowy Ash Games)]

Heya and thanks for reporting this. I will take a look.

Originally posted by Silberling:

On the left the citizens were spawned just minutes ago and still standing there.

I quickly checked your save and I can see the villagers remain idle and new deliveries don't get assigned even though it says there's hundreds of potential ones. I'm not sure what's going, so I will investigate.

Originally posted by Silberling:

[..] I tried to influence the game loop via vsync and frame cap without success.

The game's loop runs on a variable/delta time. Changing the actual time between frames wouldn't noticeably matter. Mostly, this just affects how frequently you see updates like unit animations and such. That said, pathfinding and delivery assignments run on separate threads. But the load between threads would get distributed roughly evenly, so one thread cannot really outpace the others unless there's some bug causing delays. It's not likely to be the case here.

[Osiris]

I must admit that it's rather unclear when there are workers "really idle".
I had the best effect when I kept building houses until there was no longer anything "in red" when hovering over the workers thing (where you see idle carriers & stuff)

[Silberling]

Hey Rudy,

thank you for your fast and kind response. If there's anything I can do to help you just let me know.

Have a nice evening and stay healthy.

[Rudy (Snowy Ash Games)]

Seems I was partially wrong. The main issue seems to be indeed due to a timing and queuing issue, broadly speaking. Once the world gets busy/large enough, the number of generated deliveries becomes greater than the number of update ticks to process the results and assign the deliveries. So the delivery queue backlogs and never gets cleared and you get idle villagers and waiting items.

I fixed the main issue and all deliveries should now get started instantly. This also slightly improves delivery "performance" on worlds that are becoming busy but not yet hitting the limit.

That said, another issue is that the numbers displayed in the top right task overview are not really correct. I mean, they are technically accurate, they just don't really represent the player's perspective. It's hard to explain more without excessive detail, but basically you can have red carriers even when all deliveries are technically fulfilled.

Unfortunately, I need to fundamentally rewrite how I count the numbers and also change the display, so I cannot do it for a quick fix at this time. I also want to better explain the numbers in more player-friendly way rather than show semi-useful backend values. So I'll work on it eventually.

[Silberling]

Hi Rudy.

Thank you very much for your effort. It feels much better now. Products are getting moved around, happiness increases. Really well done.

Originally posted by Rudy (Snowy Ash Games):

[...] Unfortunately, I need to fundamentally rewrite how I count the numbers and also change the display, so I cannot do it for a quick fix at this time. I also want to better explain the numbers in more player-friendly way rather than show semi-useful backend values. So I'll work on it eventually.

I'm already quite happy that you made this hotfix. Just stick to your priorities.

But to be honest, the map got too small :-) I'd like to request maps 2* each edge as a feature in the future with a low priority.

Oh and: Did you add swords, bows, silver and gold by accident? I can see the resources but I can not build anything so I can obtain the resources.

Thank you again for your help. You're doing a good job.

[Rudy (Snowy Ash Games)]

Heya!

Originally posted by Silberling:

Did you add swords, bows, silver and gold by accident? I can see the resources but I can not build anything so I can obtain the resources.

Oh whoops, those aren't suppose to be visible. That's a small bug with the options toggle. I'll fix it for the next update.

Originally posted by Silberling:

But to be honest, the map got too small :-) I'd like to request maps 2* each edge as a feature in the future with a low priority.

Yea, I really want to make bigger maps, but I need to optimize a lot of stuff first. I'm afraid, this likely won't happen for a while.