Very Laggy!

Hi Olof,
bug report finally sent through.
Issue number is: ACEO-38863

I guess alot of optimization work is needed for this gameā€¦ the thing about the laggy issue is that so many things are moving around and the CPU just gets overwhelmed by it. If it is a graphics issue, maybe add a option to shift graphics onto the GPU rather than CPU since those with a rather decent GPU can handle the load. Looking in my task manager it doesnt seem that Airport CEO is using much of it at all at around 8% on a GTX 1660.

Honestly iā€™ve just decided not to play the game at this point until the next update that optimizes things since its impossible to do anything in the game so youā€™re just sitting there looking at a screen which updates so infrequently the one frame it does is just filled with notifications
Plus its not healthy for the CPU (i think) since its literally being tortured with queued functions to execute

Just as FlyingColors wrote earlier, the more stuff you have happening in the game the less it will perform. Endless content generation games like ACEO, Cities and PA donā€™t really live by the same measurements of performance as single FPS games do. In those games youā€™ll always be able to tell what kind of load the application will put on the system whereas with ACEO it is drastically different when comparing an early game to a late game.

Heathrow, before the pandemic, could have a throughput of roughly 260k pax per day. If we divide that by the 24 hours of the day we get an average of 11k pax, yes there will be peaks and drops but since everyoneā€™s airport is different weā€™ll need to look at the average value. Thereā€™s a slider in ACEO (gameplay settings panel) that allows you to set the pax ratio per flight and itā€™s default setting is 50%. This means that we have set a target of being able to simulate around 5000 pax in an airport at any given moment at 60 FPS on an average PC, which is something weā€™re in most player airports are able to do today. Of course, every airport is different and if you have huge terminals with complex paths your results may vary, weā€™re also still in beta and there is optimization left to be done as well as potential bugs which can affect the performance capabilities of todayā€™s builds. We could very easily put limits on everything and say that ā€œdue to performance limitations, the game will only simulate X amount of pax and Y amount of objectsā€ but I am pretty sure that that would benefit no-one and be pretty hostile, instead you can use that slider and a bunch of other graphics settings weā€™ve implemented that can also improve performance.

Simulating those truly massive airports in ACEO will never be smooth, airports than in the eyes of the game is ā€œunrealisticā€ as 20k concurrent pax is very well beyond the intended limitations but certainly possible, even on a monster PC, due to a number of reasons that primarily has to do with the architecture of the gameā€™s code base. The game is object oriented and not data driven, itā€™s foundation is built by developers (ourselves) with lesser knowledge than what we have today and weā€™re not a triple A team with a million dollar budget. These are not excuses but explanations and something that is reflected in the pricing of the game.

This is obviously a complex topic but Iā€™m pretty sure a CPUs health does not deteriorate by the number of tasks it executes but instead by the heat it develops. Of course thereā€™ll be a default power cycle strain as you use it over time but that would be in my opinion considered normal wear and tear and as long as you keep a CPU cool it doesnā€™t matter how many tasks it executes, things will just execute slower the more stuff it has to do. Iā€™m also pretty sure that when a CPU doesnā€™t have an expressed task to process it instead processes meaningless wait tasks but then again I am no expert and would be happy to be corrected if I am wrong.

Will have a look at it! :slight_smile:

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When I run task manager during the game, by CPU was running near 100%. Graphic card was not more than 10%.
I stopped playing for a while already. Frankly even when I play simcity, cities, I do not encounter this kind of lag. Hope developer can address this

thanks

Maybe you have pax pero flights ratio 100% and you have a Big terminal and a lot of pax, and pax have to calculate things, so that lags your PC. Try putting pax per flight ratio to at least 60% your PC Will go faster, but that take a while to activate that setting (pax per flights ratio setting is inside Gameplay setting)

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reluctant to open the game as it lagsā€¦ well in the end i opened the game but where do I change the ratio?

In the gameplay settings there is a ratio of passengers per flight.

Thank you for your adviceā€¦ just tried to lower it down to 50% and 40%ā€¦ still lags badly. Will wait for developerā€™s adviceā€¦
As of now I have 11333 passengers, 586 staff, 12703 luggage, 29 planes parked, 8 taxiing, 61 en route, 199 service vehicles.

It will lower only for new flights. All which are already scheduled or offered keep the old number of passengers.

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Normal, you have to cancel all the flights like that the new flights Will arrive with minus passengers, @papajoe

Hi Angel, okā€¦
I am thinking, this game is fun, and with improvements over time and having bigger maps, players will bound to increase number parking stand, and generate more and more passengers. Eventually will face the same situation as meā€¦ right?

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Have you tried the latest version of the game?
Iā€™m having 1k+ staffs, 60+ stands (not including GA), and 8 runways. It gets a bit laggy but loading is still fine (takes a minute or so), although traffic is now a big issue for me.
Yet the FPS is about 10-13

My PC: Ryzen 3600, RTX 2060S, 32GB RAM

seems like your build is better.
Below is my PC details:
Processor IntelĀ® Coreā„¢ i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
RAM: 40 GB
Operating System: Windows 10

hmmmā€¦ 7700 is kinda old but performance shouldnā€™t be like that. I used to though the RAM usage would be the problem. When in Alpha the game just ate all my RAM space and quit. :rofl:

Hi, have you looked at my submission?

Yes I had a look at it but I donā€™t have anything to add other than the longer post I made above.

ACEO is simply not built to handle such amounts of pax youā€™re trying to push at 60 or even 30 FPS (i.e. well above 10k). In some instances where the airportā€™s layout is perfectly built and the airport runs optimally, the game can handle above 10k at 30 FPS but that really then starts to come down to ā€œphysicalā€ terms, in other words how easy the airport is to navigate.

Hi guys,

Just want to jump into this thread on performance. I know games of this type we normally donā€™t expect to have FPS similar to something like a BR standard since those games are totally different, but to me, it feels like there is a lack of garbage collection going on. I know in Prison Architect as a fine example, you sometimes notice some crazy lag, but you know as soon as it autosaves, almost all the lag goes away, because a TON of garbage collection tasks happen on save. It seems like with ACEO, garbage collection of a large amount only happens on game load. If I close my load and reopen it, things run great, as the minutes go on, it gets worse and worse, until I remove all of my passengers and planes. Right now Iā€™m running an airport with about 4k passengers and ~40 planes at a time, but my FPS is 10-20 at best. I have my graphical settings turned down to the lowest and weather off, and Iā€™m having no luck in getting this game to take less CPU than it is. Itā€™s taking at minimum 40%, but closer to 90% at a lot of the time, which is causing the FPS lag.

Iā€™m running an i7-8700k (I know not the newest!), 32gb RAM and a 1660, Iā€™m able to run a lot of simulation games, Cities Skylines heavily modded and PA same thing, without much issue, and it sucks that I can barley consider playing ACEO because I have an absolute cap on how big I can make my airport without getting frame issues, which is like 10 planes at this pointā€¦

Is there any more garbage collection we can have performed to avoid these issues? What kind of things are collected at game load that never happen again seems to be a big cause of this problem, like I said, at game load it works great, later on it gets worse.

Thank you!

Garbage collection in C# is handled automatically and not something that developers invoke on a regular basis. Memory leaks are a different matter however, i.e. if you have some function that is constantly either invoking calculations that are heavy to process or is invoking some operation that allocates a lot of memory which immediately in one frame is cleared out (also known as lag spikes).

If your airport over time, regardless of how many passengers that are in the terminal, is becoming slower and slower as your FPS decreases and you come to a point where there is no simulation going on but your FPS is significantly worse than when you started, then that airport invokes a memory leak and is something Iā€™ll want to take a look at as soon as possible. The test airports we run at the office every night partly have a purpose of testing just this and they do not invoke any memory leaks so it would be specific to yours then.

However, if your airport ā€œonlyā€ has 4000 passengers and you have very poor FPS despite a good computer it can either be because of very complex paths through multiple floors and multiple turns (i.e. a lot of closed areas and not a lot of open space). Same goes for bags, vehicles and aircraft. However, it can also be a bug, so if you feel that your game is running inexplicably poorly we always recommend that you bug report that airport so we can profile it and check it out.

If you make a bug report and leave the number here Iā€™ll have a look at it.

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