Does gamespeed affect entropy?

Hi all,
a short question: is it possibile that increased gamespeed generates more entropy? Delays, passengers late, etc.
When I run at normal speed everything goes smoothly, when I speed up delays start to happen

Thanks,
Lorenzo

2 Likes

Over time, several people on forums suggested this, but it has never gone very concrete.

Yeah, Iā€™m one of them who has the same impression as lawrencetb.

Once I talked to Olof (I think it was him).

My assumption was that some cpu cycles could get lost on higher speeds causing bugs. Olof answered, that this shouldnā€™t be possible by design and itā€™s more likely that this is a wrong impression, caused by faster speed means bugs may happen faster too.

Still Iā€™m not convinced yet and keep my (and lawrencetbā€™s) impression. At least there seems to be something out of sync. Thatā€™s why Iā€™m playing on slow pace most of the time.

1 Like

I have similar experiences

Another explanation could be that with increased speed we pay less attention to details and things can go wrong faster.
Letā€™s wait for the developers :slight_smile:

1 Like

Iā€™ve thought about this too and noticed similar patterns as well. I tend to limit myself to middle speed if I wasnā€™t to progress things faster and only tend to run top speeds for short bursts.

1 Like

Wellā€¦ When you speed up the game, pathway calculation is still done at the same ā€˜fastestā€™ speed right? I mean, pathway calculation is just done and not related to the in-game speed. So the time that it takes to calculate a path between point A & point B on normal speed and fast speed is equal. Could this then cause passengers to start moving some fractions of a second later when the game is at fast speed and you have a lot of passengers (= a lot of calculations?) Not sure however if this would make a significant difference however, just a thought. Also not sure if this is the way it works within the game.

2 Likes

After more and more hours of gameplay I am even more sure that there is something that needs to be figured out.
@JeremyK idk but that might have sense, another possibility is that everything at (letā€™s say max speed) is 3x up, also ā€œproblems generationā€ if there is something like that inside the core engine

For me it is clear, I have made several tests:

  • running at normal speed: no problems occur nearly ever, given a single day you can see no more than 3 ā€œredsā€ into the process monitor
  • running at 3x speed: process monitor becomes getting red and keeps getting worse if you continue to run at that speed

Iā€™ve compared similar timeframes, with normal speed I could basically leave the game alone in autopilot mode and have no delays, at 3x speed it is a crazy run to manage all the flights and spot problems

It definitely seems like thereā€™s something going on here. I had an airport run without any issues for hours at normal speed, only to find everything clog up and breakdown at triple speed. Itā€™s almost like the passengers donā€™t get through the terminal to their gate fast enough.

I wrote a more lengthy explanation on this in a different post which I canā€™t find, but essentially there can be a bottleneck issue when running the game on a higher speed. The more data your CPU needs to crunch each cycle, the more computational power is required. If you cram in more data to crunch than your CPU can handle it will postpone it until a later cycle when resources have been made available for it. This is why your path-finding can stack up when under heavy load, while the time keeps on ticking.

There are ways to solve this of course, performance improvements in combination with perhaps elongating the minutes when under heavy CPU load but this is something weā€™ll wait with until weā€™ve reach the beta stage of Airport CEO because we need to get the scope done first before we start experimenting with balancing like this.

To test this, running a small airport on normal and triple speed (given that your PC holds a steady 60 FPS) should have no impact on turnaround performance.

3 Likes

Awesome, makes sense, and Iā€™m glad that itā€™s not just my dumb airport designs. Thanks again for your attention. I adore your game and am cheering on your updates and progress!

2 Likes

CCP/EVEONLINE did this, they call it timedialition.

1 Like

The baseline blogpost.

And later on.

1 Like

Thatā€™s a good question.

I play on 3X constantly and never notice anything wrong. Might be that I set it so that if there is a delay its sent away instantly

I noticed this over time as the airport gets bigger. The bigger my airport the more I have to stick to speed 1 with short bursts of speed 2 or 3 (but not very long. When I stick to speed 1 I have noticed my passengers and aircraft and staff all on time or early, EVEN at an airport with very long walking distances to the gates!! Just my 2 cents

1 Like

In my experience, the only thing that cant keep up, is your cleaning crew. It was growing in the 1000s in some occasions. But with all updates by olof, I dont see it in my latest game anymore. Only still would like to block-zone cleaning staffers.

1 Like

May I see a picture of your airport?

This topic was automatically closed 31 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.