Any improvement on FPS issues in the last few months?

[bhutch]

Hey all,

I have to admit, I rage quit playing PZ back in June of last year due to continuous FPS drop and lag. It felt like playing a stop motion game with constant path glitches, animals auto boxing, guest rides utterly failing to work, etc. The game was unplayable, despite being on low graphics settings and my computer being nicely above minimum recommendations.

Anyways, I'm just popping in to ask if it's worth giving another try or not? Have you guys seen improvements in these issues (especially FPS/lag)?

While I really wanted to love PZ and wanted to buy the expansions, it was just too consistently frustrating to play and spend the money. I'm hoping that time and updates will have helped those issues. (Hoping the game has aged like wine, not milk!)

Thanks for any input! Probably gonna hop on and open one of the career parks and see what happens in the mean time.

 

[paul78]

I haven’t had any problems. Of course big zoos with many guests,animals,and building pieces ect are going to lag. But honestly I do wonder where all these problems are people are always complaining about? The worst I’ve ever experienced was the zoo staff getting stuck on the path bug quite a few updates ago.

 

[fraser11]

I found this game runs pretty well if you limit visitors. For instance I can run a small but nice zoo on my 4650G APU. But even with my 1070 main pc once I go above so many guests it kills performance.

 

[SevenAce7]

Setting to ultra, 20/30 fps with 4/5000 guests. about 40/50 fps in scenarios. It's normal?
I play with RTX 3070, I7 6700, 16GB RAM, SSD M.2 970 EVO.

 

[Aidan635]

Hello, @bhutch, every time I see some one with performance issues I cant help but recommend NVIDIA GeForce NOW. Seriously, check this out. Watch Paulsley's video on it he made about a year ago, really helpful and informative. There is a free and paid version (with drawbacks and benefits). It is $60 for an entire year. If you want to find out more, just ask me!

 

[Cool Cats and Kittens]

Setting to ultra, 20/30 fps with 4/5000 guests. about 40/50 fps in scenarios. It's normal?
I play with RTX 3070, I7 6700, 16GB RAM, SSD M.2 970 EVO.

I suppose that that i7 bottlenecks the RTX. Your FPS are only a little bit better than my Ryzen 2600x/ Vega 56

To the Op. The performance (or lack of) has not chance much since last year. For my specs, Planet zoo is played best with a zoo of around 10-15 animals species, 2-3k guests (with wide paths!) and medium detailed custom made buildings. If you want to build a bigger zoo, okay on sandbox with guests of

 

[Roxxsmom]

I found this game runs pretty well if you limit visitors. For instance I can run a small but nice zoo on my 4650G APU. But even with my 1070 main pc once I go above so many guests it kills performance.

Same, though mine really start to lag above 6500 guests or so. The problem with limiting guests is it also limits how much you can grow your zoo, since animals and staff cost money to maintain, and fewer guests mean fewer donations. One type of lag that seems to show up intermittently even before the high guests numbers is the "clicking bug," where sometimes something in the interface simply isn't clickable for a while. I find that increasing the program's priority to "high" helps with this, but once guest numbers get really high the lag becomes more frequent.

I mentioned in a different thread that it would be kind of cool if they had (for franchise and maybe challenge modes) an additional source of funding from granting agencies, perhaps in return for breeding and releasing high quality members of endangered species, or for doing a certain amount of bonus research on rare animals. The eco credits are great for getting more animals, but they don't pay for food or staff salaries. This would allow players to maybe be able to lower guest numbers and still increase the zoo size to breed more rare animal or to do more research.

 

[Cool Cats and Kittens]

Same, though mine really start to lag above 6500 guests or so. The problem with limiting guests is it also limits how much you can grow your zoo, since animals and staff cost money to maintain, and fewer guests mean fewer donations.

I mentioned in a different thread that it would be kind of cool if they had (for franchise and maybe challenge modes) an additional source of funding from granting agencies, perhaps in return for breeding and releasing high quality members of endangered species, or for doing a certain amount of bonus research on rare animals. The eco credits are great for getting more animals, but they don't pay for food or staff salaries. This would allow players to maybe be able to lower guest numbers and still increase the zoo size to breed more rare animal or to do more research.

Thats very true. I usually build a small highly profitable franchise zoo which slowly bleeds to dead as soon as it got bigger and it's guest number limited. The easiest solution would be if it was possible to move money from one franchise zoo to another (but not shared money in case the player wants to start fresh)

 

[LN]

Don't have 200 Flamingo's.
Keep animal count per species low.

 

[ShadowLilly]

I realy hope they fix this issue.. . I want to use the full map and don't let me limit the items or animal numbers... Without fps dropping to 5.... (and yes, my specs are way better than recommended, so a new pc with higher (not even possible at this point ) specs wont solve the issue)

I mean: why would the map otherwise be so big if you can't even use it... :/

They fail the 'build the zoo of your dreams' claim when you need to hold back on so many things

 

[LN]

I mean: why would the map otherwise be so big if you can't even use it... :/

With Planet Coaster Alpha many people felt the map was to small, and this was an issue that many players had with the size they didn't like it, so Frontier increased the size before release.

Naturally they transfered the same map size to Planet Zoo, as it runs on almost the exact same engine, and the performance has improved slightly between both games.

But:

• Give players a smaller map, and they won't be happy because of the small map size.
• Give them a large map and building restrictions to ensure performance stays good (as seen in Planet Coaster Console Edition), and people aren't happy either because they are restricted.
• So we end up with a big map, no restrictions, the only caveat is that at some point performance drops, that point being different for every player depending entirely on their system.

Which of these 3 options do you prefer if they can't improve(fix) it?

Animal and guest count affects the most. Like I said, keep animal counts low per specie, don't keep 200 flamingo's for instance.

 

[Cool Cats and Kittens]

I feel that the logical solution is to give the players the option to choose between several map sizes (small, medium and big = current). Medium would be the default and big should come with a little disclaimer, that your PC will be pushed to its limits (Rimworld has a similar system for its map creation and it's very player friendly). There are smaller maps in the campaign, so the map size is not hard coded into the engine.

 

[Cocolori]

I feel that the logical solution is to give the players the option to choose between several map sizes (small, medium and big = current). Medium would be the default and big should come with a little disclaimer, that your PC will be pushed to its limits (Rimworld has a similar system for its map creation and it's very player friendly). There are smaller maps in the campaign, so the map size is not hard coded into the engine.

In Planet coaster the scenario editor allowed you to alter the park area to effectively make the map whatever size (and to some extent shape) you wanted. This obviously was aimed at people making their own scenarios but because you could then import those into sandbox (and i think challenge mode?) it effectively meant you could alter the conditions for any of the game modes. Not sure they could work it with franchise but other than that if they introduce similar to PZ (which I really hope they will) it would solve this issue.