Planet Coaster needs a Better Optimization in game

[inspectorgadget1]

Decent posts ojonas [up]

 

[En Anu]

. For the average player (those that does not hang around on this forum) the game is playable and enjoyable on average hardware (recommended specs). What else could Frontier do?

The Guest Brain AI is good from a visual point of view, however we need to see stats similar to RCT, before buying PC (bearing in mind Frontier facilitated in building RCT 3) it was deemed reasonable that they would of had the demographics already built in!

The more algorithms placed the more demand on the hardware and so on, no doubt as time goes by the minimum spec will change for PC.

As for the average player (who are probably mainly into sandbox games) who also could not care less for the evolution of the game, I agree they will just stroll on with the same status quo in mind not giving two hoots if the game progresses or not

I have created some very cool parks however I still need to see the fixes (thirst is a good example) and more stats and stock amendments for food, drink and gifts which you could do in Theme Park in early 90's where you could also buy stock and shares and buy other theme parks and a nice little touch would be for us to buy our suppliers out so those Chief Beef burgers (cringe at saying this as I am a fruitarian) could on the whole be much cheaper just a thought!

 

[AndyC1]

We also had similar issues with RCT3 using the same engine.

These games do not use the same engine. Cobra is the name we give our in house engine technology, but there is basically no code in common between RCT3 and Planet Coaster. Think of it in similar terms to Unreal Engine - would you say that Fortnite is built on the same engine as the original Unreal Tournament?

Cheers

Andy

 

[breezerHOG1]

Think of it in similar terms to Unreal Engine - would you say that Fortnite is built on the same engine as the original Unreal Tournament?

Unreal Tournament was built on UE1. Unreal Engine has had 4 or 5 "version" changes plus the Unreal Development kit, theyre probably working on UE5 now.

Maybe you guys should say PlanCo uses Cobra Engine version 2 or something [tongue] I don't think anybody believes the engine is exactly the same after all these years, but adding 2.0 might help clarify that its completely different

 

[Stream]

These games do not use the same engine. Cobra is the name we give our in house engine technology, but there is basically no code in common between RCT3 and Planet Coaster. Think of it in similar terms to Unreal Engine - would you say that Fortnite is built on the same engine as the original Unreal Tournament?

Cheers

Andy

It's still Unreal Engine though. Of course it's a lot more advanced now than it was 10 years ago, but the underlying base is still the same.

 

[Stream]

When we talk about simulation, we also must not forget simulation of the guests themselves. In PlanCo all guests react to the environment, rides, scenery etc. You can zoom in and see different facial expressions and different animations for different feelings, emotions etc. All those things makes the park feel alive and interactive and not sterile and cold. Lots og humor built in as well. Compare this to previous RCT games or Parkitect. RCTW has taken the "walking dead" approach and the peeps there are horrifying. This is also part of the simulation bucket which often gets forgotten. Not all parts of the simulation category has to do with finance and management.

For everyone that compares with Cities: Skyline (a favorite game of mine); that game lags severely given big enough city. This is without mods or extra assets. Bring in those and the situation is even worse when it comes to fps. This very same discussion is happening over at Paradox's forum as well. People are crying because they can't get more than 20fts or less. Whenever you get "unlimited creativity" which both Cities: Skylines and PlanCo has, everyone will hit a point where you just have too much stuff on the map. You and your machine will always be the limiting factor when it comes to how much you can place and do. It is self regulating that way. The alternative is to limit how many items one can place or how many guests you can have (you already can limit it yourself if you like) but my guess is that if Frontier did that this forum would erupt in anger. In the end, if you want to build your dream part (or city or whatever) you have to make sure you have hardware powerful enough to handle it. For the average player (those that does not hang around on this forum) the game is playable and enjoyable on average hardware (recommended specs). What else could Frontier do?

I've built huge cities in Cities: Skyline and have very rarely encounter lag, especially not lag in the same caliber as in PC. Remember with C: S too, every single building does something, has some attribute that is part of the global simulation. Every car has a purpose and a designation, same with every person, so it's definitely a processing-heavy game. In PC you let 3-5000 people into your park and it starts to lag, if you've built a lot of custom buildings it almost becomes unplayable. My point is that I do feel like the Cobra engine itself is an issue, not so much the optimization of the use of said engine. I also feel like this is a very valid comparison between similar games, and personally C: S runs a LOT smoother for me than PC does. (For those curious, I have a GTX 970, an i5 3300, and 8gb of ram).

 

[AndyC1]

It's still Unreal Engine though. Of course it's a lot more advanced now than it was 10 years ago, but the underlying base is still the same.

It's still called Unreal Engine if that's what you mean. It's safe to say it doesn't have very much in common with the original engine from Unreal / Unreal Tournament. Unreal only started making their versioning "public" when they were simultaneously selling UE4 for "next generation" consoles, and UE3 for the previous generation. Up until the release of UE4, games were only ever "Powered by Unreal".

Cheers

Andy

 

[mr.sugar]

Unreal Tournament was built on UE1. Unreal Engine has had 4 or 5 "version" changes plus the Unreal Development kit, theyre probably working on UE5 now.Maybe you guys should say PlanCo uses Cobra Engine version 2 or something [tongue] I don't think anybody believes the engine is exactly the same after all these years, but adding 2.0 might help clarify that its completely different

Adding 2.0 won´t help. Most reasonable people realize this engine is different compared to the version from 10 years ago. The work on the engine is visible. But by adding 2.0. to the name, it won´t fix the real problems this engine has. And it always had problems and always will I guess. It kind of remind me Source engine, which is just modified GoldSrc engine. Both are great for it´s time, but Source still has some limitations/problems from the base engine from 1998. I haven´t looked into Cobra much honestly, but it might need to rewrite a loads if the code to fix some problems imr maybe, Frontier are just too ambitious, trying to be ahead of time and implement features that is not possible to handle very well with today´s HW.

 

[Stream]

It's still called Unreal Engine if that's what you mean. It's safe to say it doesn't have very much in common with the original engine from Unreal / Unreal Tournament. Unreal only started making their versioning "public" when they were simultaneously selling UE4 for "next generation" consoles, and UE3 for the previous generation. Up until the release of UE4, games were only ever "Powered by Unreal".

Cheers

Andy

I know you get my point, and I am definitely very aware of the fact that the engine between RCT3 and PC is different, but I also know that it's similar in a lot of ways. It had a lot of issues, especially performance issues, back when it was used for RCT3, and it still does today with PC. I'm not saying that it's a simple thing to solve regardless of engine used, but I honestly do believe that a lot of performance issues are specifically due to the engine.

 

[danijami23]

Hey everyone,

I've spoken about optimisation and Planet Coaster quite a bit before, so I won't repeat everything I've said about this in the past. Suffice to say we are still making optimisations, but there aren't any giant areas of optimisation remaining - the short answer is a game like Planet Coaster and it's piece by piece construction is a difficult task to tackle.

The topic of recommended and minimum specs is difficult, partly because we have people who play in many different ways. We set our minimum and recommended specs at what we believe to be appropriate levels. I'm aware some people will disagree with this, but we do have some data to work with. When we add a new set of scenarios to the game, we will produce what we consider to be a good solution to it - one that fulfills all objectives. We test these on our minimum spec machines (and sometimes on machines below our min spec too), where they must achieve a framerate of consistently greater than 20fps - in reality after map optimisation and code optimisation during an update the framerate these achieve is much higher . I know this is low, but quite frankly Planet Coaster isn't a twitch-gaming experience, and we believe you can still have a lot of fun with the game on older hardware.

We've done our best to make the game run as well as we can on lower spec machines, but we rely on users to be the limiting factor on performance. We strongly feel that throwing any kind of limits on object counts or complexity isn't really within the spirit of Planet Coaster. So we won't stop you building if your framerate hits 30fps - we leave you to decide what is an acceptable level of performance for your current plans. We also frequently test larger parks on a variety of machine specifications, and are always looking for the possibility to upgrade.

In summary, we're aware that you're not going to be able to build a massive park on minimum specs, but our recommended specs are broadly similar to the machines we develop Planet Coaster on here at Frontier, and we really feel you should be able to get a good experience on them.

Cheers

Andy

Hi Andy. I just wanted to say a huge thank you for getting involved in this thread. While I don't necessarily agree with you on how you've decided to publish your requirements, it's very nice to hear you guys just telling us why you've done a thing that you're doing. This is the kind of communication that fans appreciate; some proper 2 way dialog between dev and fan. I know that in the case of optimisation that you've discussed your areas for optimisation once or twice before (which I also appreciated) , but I think this community (and the forums!) would be so much healthier with this kind of dialog in loads of other areas of this game.

2 things that really come to mind are the management aspects of the game, and QoL improvements. Without going too far off topic, some of us really want to know what the craic is. Are you recognising that there is a subset of management fans who are frustrated? Are you going to address that with changes, or are you not? At this point, I would so prefer for you to just say "shut up" there are(n't) changes coming" than the kind of half silence we get at the moment; sometimes I feel like I'm just shouting at the wind, you know?

Anyway, thanks again. I appreciate you being here (and for being a freaking awesome programmer)

 

[ojonas]

Hi Andy. I just wanted to say a huge thank you for getting involved in this thread. While I don't necessarily agree with you on how you've decided to publish your requirements, it's very nice to hear you guys just telling us why you've done a thing that you're doing. This is the kind of communication that fans appreciate; some proper 2 way dialog between dev and fan. I know that in the case of optimisation that you've discussed your areas for optimisation once or twice before (which I also appreciated) , but I think this community (and the forums!) would be so much healthier with this kind of dialog in loads of other areas of this game.

2 things that really come to mind are the management aspects of the game, and QoL improvements. Without going too far off topic, some of us really want to know what the craic is. Are you recognising that there is a subset of management fans who are frustrated? Are you going to address that with changes, or are you not? At this point, I would so prefer for you to just say "shut up" there are(n't) changes coming" than the kind of half silence we get at the moment; sometimes I feel like I'm just shouting at the wind, you know?

Anyway, thanks again. I appreciate you being here (and for being a freaking awesome programmer)

In the end, do we want the devs to work improving and adding to the game, coding etc. or be here answering questions from fans? Doing one will make the other suffer and vice versa. At the current state of the game and development process I would prefer them working on the game. There have been multiple times where they have shown that they pay attention to what is being discussed on the forums. We know that they are aware of the "issues" a lot of people are experiencing. Why do you need a confirmation that your request has been read?They may not be able to answer because they don't know the answer yet. Would you prefer them to say "No, we can't/won't do this or that" and have them abandon that part or have them not say either way and leave the possibility of it being worked on and fixed down the road? What does everyone today need to know that they have been heard?

 

[Chems]

In the end, do we want the devs to work improving and adding to the game, coding etc. or be here answering questions from fans? Doing one will make the other suffer and vice versa. At the current state of the game and development process I would prefer them working on the game. There have been multiple times where they have shown that they pay attention to what is being discussed on the forums. We know that they are aware of the "issues" a lot of people are experiencing. Why do you need a confirmation that your request has been read?They may not be able to answer because they don't know the answer yet. Would you prefer them to say "No, we can't/won't do this or that" and have them abandon that part or have them not say either way and leave the possibility of it being worked on and fixed down the road? What does everyone today need to know that they have been heard?

Communication goes both ways.

 

[En Anu]

I've built huge cities in Cities: Skyline and have very rarely encounter lag, especially not lag in the same caliber as in PC. Remember with C: S too, every single building does something, has some attribute that is part of the global simulation. Every car has a purpose and a designation, same with every person, so it's definitely a processing-heavy game. In PC you let 3-5000 people into your park and it starts to lag, if you've built a lot of custom buildings it almost becomes unplayable. My point is that I do feel like the Cobra engine itself is an issue, not so much the optimization of the use of said engine. I also feel like this is a very valid comparison between similar games, and personally C: S runs a LOT smoother for me than PC does. (For those curious, I have a GTX 970, an i5 3300, and 8gb of ram).

I too have Cities Skyline and I seldom notice any lag if at all. My worry is the Cobra engine and its underlying issues what I mean by this is there have been various base problems and no fix, exhausted in pointing the finger here it might be a case that Cobra has its own restriction and/or the base problems are so deep that re-coding could jeopardise the games in infrastructure! I am hope I am wrong and they show use some major fixes come the 22nd!

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

I know you get my point, and I am definitely very aware of the fact that the engine between RCT3 and PC is different, but I also know that it's similar in a lot of ways. It had a lot of issues, especially performance issues, back when it was used for RCT3, and it still does today with PC. I'm not saying that it's a simple thing to solve regardless of engine used, but I honestly do believe that a lot of performance issues are specifically due to the engine.

I am perplexed - as coming from the development team on RCT3 Frontier knew what the fans liked (eg comprehensive stats) and therefore one would assume this would be automatically be built into the framework of PC, or was this blunder an oversight?

 

[En Anu]

In the end, do we want the devs to work improving and adding to the game, coding etc. or be here answering questions from fans? Doing one will make the other suffer and vice versa. At the current state of the game and development process I would prefer them working on the game. There have been multiple times where they have shown that they pay attention to what is being discussed on the forums. We know that they are aware of the "issues" a lot of people are experiencing. Why do you need a confirmation that your request has been read?They may not be able to answer because they don't know the answer yet. Would you prefer them to say "No, we can't/won't do this or that" and have them abandon that part or have them not say either way and leave the possibility of it being worked on and fixed down the road? What does everyone today need to know that they have been heard?

The more communication between two parties the better hence mediation was created for both parties to work with one another. So I disagree with you here communication (both ways) is paramount to future proof trust and expansion of the game and its ideas!

 

[Elgane]

Would it help optimisation if walls were merged? Either, they could be merged after being placed, or, just not draw every surface if they are the same, or whatever is hidden (if it's not already the case). The other idea I had alreeady suggested was that you could change the interface to allow bigger wall parts of the same texture or size type. So instead of placing many 4x4 walls, just have a popup window where you could type in 16x4, or 16x2 etc.

 

[ojonas]

Communication goes both ways.

Where did I say it didn't? I just stated that we either have communication at the expense of some less overall time to develop or the opposite. Based on this forum it seems like there are plenty of items that could be looked into from a coding perspective. For the devs to spend part of each day here on the forums replying to threads will take away from the time to fix the actual issues. Do we want the issues fixed or do we want to keep talking about them? There is a saying, "action speaks louder than words" which is very fitting here. More words from the developers (replying to posts here on the forum) means less overall action (time to work on the code, assets etc.).

We can't have the cookie and eat it at the same time.

 

[ojonas]

The more communication between two parties the better hence mediation was created for both parties to work with one another. So I disagree with you here communication (both ways) is paramount to future proof trust and expansion of the game and its ideas!

The only winner in a scenario like that is the mediator or lawyer in between the two parties. For either side it is just a waste of time and money.

Most, if not all, of the major successes in the gaming industry really has no communication at all between the developers and the customers. Planet Coaster is fairly unique in this sense when it comes to a development studio of this size. It is a privilege to have this close connection with the actual developers but I feel that is being abused most of the time, requiring answers to this and that.

 

[AndyC1]

I know you get my point, and I am definitely very aware of the fact that the engine between RCT3 and PC is different, but I also know that it's similar in a lot of ways.

As I've repeatedly stated, it really isn't similar to RCT3 at all.

Cheers

Andy

 

[Stream]

As I've repeatedly stated, it really isn't similar to RCT3 at all.

Cheers

Andy

I mean, I haven't looked under the hood of both games, so I really have no way of actually knowing. Maybe they're very different but just suffering from the same issues? Because I could list numerous identical issues between the two games. It's ok though, it just feels like you had RCT3 as a base and built onto that. Like every system is just an elevated version of what we had in RCT3, we even have many of the same bugs between the games.

 

[Chems]

I mean, I haven't looked under the hood of both games, so I really have no way of actually knowing. Maybe they're very different but just suffering from the same issues? Because I could list numerous identical issues between the two games. It's ok though, it just feels like you had RCT3 as a base and built onto that. Like every system is just an elevated version of what we had in RCT3, we even have many of the same bugs between the games.

What issues. Low fps with a densely populated park?