Lag/low fps makes game nigh-unplayable

As it states in the title. I've recently begun experiencing some serious lag/low fps issues with my main zoo. It's gone from the occasional 'hiccup' to 'stuttering' and dropping frames practically all the time. My zoo doesn't span the entire buildable area (yet) and I have around 7K guests on average. I've tried changing the graphical settings from high to medium and then even low, but this hardly affects the lag/low fps, if at all.

Now, I understand that a game can't be optimized/made for every single pc configuration out there. But to see graphics-heavy FPS games perform far better than a simulation game, even when taking into account the AI necessary to control the guests and the animals, is weird. Lowering the graphics and other settings should at least have some kind of impact. As it stands my main zoo is quickly becoming practically unplayable. Every time I click on something to perform any kind of action, be it merely looking at an animal, clicking on a habitat or - and this is when it gets the worst - placing paths, there is a very noticeable 'lag' between the intended action and the actual action.

Please solve this, because this makes creating large zoos and playing them almost undoable.
 
Not saying you should play the way I’m suggesting but just out of curiosity have you tried a limit on guests to see if it helps at all? My problem is I try to make everything perfect then start a new zoo but I don’t think I’d want 7000 guests I’ve had about 4500 without problems but never tried with more before.
 
But to see graphics-heavy FPS games perform far better than a simulation game, even when taking into account the AI necessary to control the guests and the animals, is weird.
Is it though? What are your specs for reference?

Please solve this, because this makes creating large zoos and playing them almost undoable.

This isn't anything that can be 'solved', it can be gradually improved sure but there's only so much that can be done with games like this.
 
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I agree with the above post this has been a problem with planet coaster also. Heck even in the zt2 days lag in big zoos wasn’t uncommon. Too many rocks or something for example would crash the game. These games are a little much for modern cpu even the best.
 
As it states in the title. I've recently begun experiencing some serious lag/low fps issues with my main zoo. It's gone from the occasional 'hiccup' to 'stuttering' and dropping frames practically all the time. My zoo doesn't span the entire buildable area (yet) and I have around 7K guests on average. I've tried changing the graphical settings from high to medium and then even low, but this hardly affects the lag/low fps, if at all.

Now, I understand that a game can't be optimized/made for every single pc configuration out there. But to see graphics-heavy FPS games perform far better than a simulation game, even when taking into account the AI necessary to control the guests and the animals, is weird. Lowering the graphics and other settings should at least have some kind of impact. As it stands my main zoo is quickly becoming practically unplayable. Every time I click on something to perform any kind of action, be it merely looking at an animal, clicking on a habitat or - and this is when it gets the worst - placing paths, there is a very noticeable 'lag' between the intended action and the actual action.

Please solve this, because this makes creating large zoos and playing them almost undoable.
The poor performance at high guest level is my biggest issue with the game, sadly not sure it is going to be that easy to fix. Regarding your comment on 'graphics heavy games' it is not really correct, high level of AI can cause FAR more load for the average PC than graphics. The ongoing calculations required to run the AI in this game in large zoos in incredibly high unfortunately. I was always impressed with the AI in game like Prison Architect but this seems to have to manage far more.

The good thing about AI optimisation though is it is possible to find small thing that make massive changes.
 
Not saying you should play the way I’m suggesting but just out of curiosity have you tried a limit on guests to see if it helps at all? My problem is I try to make everything perfect then start a new zoo but I don’t think I’d want 7000 guests I’ve had about 4500 without problems but never tried with more before.
Tbh I want a zoo as big as the map allows, I am only at half, I have 9500 guests and my zoo is only really playable on pause. If we can only have 4,500 guests, they should have made the map a quarter of the size.
 
the guest limit helps only a little bit. I closed my zoo and sold out all Animals,and still had 20.fps.with high end pc
 
But to see graphics-heavy FPS games perform far better than a simulation game, even when taking into account the AI necessary to control the guests and the animals, is weird. Lowering the graphics and other settings should at least have some kind of impact.
[...]
Please solve this, because this makes creating large zoos and playing them almost undoable.
Um, no, not really, because the game graphics are not the problem at all.
The problem is the enormous amount of recurring calculations for:
  • each habitat (traversable areas, land / water areas, shaded or sheltered areas, placement of the food / water / enrichment items)
  • each animal (hunger / thirst / resting, all the habitat requirements, lifecycles, genetics, path-finding inside the habitat, path-finding to mates for interactions, path-finding to the food / water / enrichment items, the whole climbing AI),
  • each staff member (path-finding to workplaces, path-finding to staff buildings, feeding / cleaning routine, happiness / energy)
  • each guest (hunger / thirst / toilet, path-finding to habitats, to food / drink / merchandise shops and toilets, overall happiness, field of vision for the view rating)
  • and so on, and so on...

All these calculations are done by the CPU and are not affected by any of the graphic settings. And in addition, the CPU is also "supervising" the GPU since the GPU-processor is only a co-processor that cannot be operated autonomously. So, the CPU load is constantly increasing as you expand your zoo and this can't be changed or "solved". Maybe it could be improved a bit, but I wouldn't expect much more than +10 FPS when playing a medium-sized zoo.

And I'm sorry to be a "party crasher", but....
there are so many people who are wishing for a whole lot more animal species, way more building pieces, more plants, completely 3D-calculated enclosures for birds or marine animals ...
uh, of course it would be fun to have those wishes fulfilled and to admire these animals in our zoos, but then you can expect the FPS rate to be half as high as now - or our zoos will be even smaller than they are now. Which is – already - a pity because it is actually impossible to build a zoo on the entire map. Okay, it is technically possible, but no fun to play the game at around 15 FPS.
 
Imo they did not invest enough work in optimization of the engine/ code since Planet Coaster, from which they obviously ported a large bunch of the code.
A game, which is marketed as a zoo sim should be able to allow building/ running a zoo with many different species/ animals. I don’t care about how many guests are needed to be rendered for this. I could live with some hundreds of guests shown and running a 50 species zoo.
 
Imo they did not invest enough work in optimization of the engine/ code since Planet Coaster, from which they obviously ported a large bunch of the code.
A game, which is marketed as a zoo sim should be able to allow building/ running a zoo with many different species/ animals. I don’t care about how many guests are needed to be rendered for this. I could live with some hundreds of guests shown and running a 50 species zoo.

Gotta agree with you here. The number of visitors required, financially, for a really large zoo is pretty ridiculous anyway. The zoos get stupidly crowded. They balanced the whole financial aspect of the game very poorly, and from a performance standpoint shot the game in the foot in that requiring that many visitors hurts performance, but the game is not about the visitors in the first place.
If a game has performance limitations caused by a part of the game that isn't even the focus of the game...that's just really poorly thought out.

I absolutely agree that they need to redo this part of the game, tone down the visitor requirements in the first place so the zoos are less crowded while still providing the necessary resources to add many animals. That's why we all play, for the animals...the whole visitor presence is just a necessity to fund them.

edit: that being said, they seem to be working on that aspect of the game because, for me, the 1.03 patch improved performance. I don't run super large zoos currently but still had some performance issues as I played for longer periods of time, and with 1.03 it got somewhat better and I can play a lot longer without a restart now.
 
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What i find really strange is that people talk about the game requiring so much of your CPU/GPU and that is what is causing the lag. The thing is, I have huge issues with lag/low fps in my big zoo to the point that it's becoming almost unplayable even in pause mode, but when I check my GPU/CPU non of them is even higher than 35% even when running the game for hours? so how does that add up?
 
I agree that it's probably not a CPU/GPU issue after reading several of the comments. I already thought it had to do something with the AI of the guests and animals since changing graphic options didn't do much. I also agree with several people stating that a game about managing a zoo should at the minimum be capable of letting people manage their zoo, especially when they clearly had the option of large zoos in mind if you look at the areas in the maps that you have. I'll try the option of limiting the guests, though I'm not sure how that'll effect my finances (I'm already bleeding money after 1.03, but I did see something about a new patch).
 
Same problem for me, unfortunately it's a big problem that influence the fun of the entire game. Playing with low fps and stuttering doesn't stimulate to create a big zoo in sandbox mode or download big zoo from workshop. Same problem with Planet Coaster, it seems impossible to play titles open world at 60 fps in 4k and have problem with a zoo with some buildings. Really a shame, I think it's a problem of graphic engine of the game.
 
Gotta agree with you here. The number of visitors required, financially, for a really large zoo is pretty ridiculous anyway. The zoos get stupidly crowded. They balanced the whole financial aspect of the game very poorly, and from a performance standpoint shot the game in the foot in that requiring that many visitors hurts performance, but the game is not about the visitors in the first place.
If a game has performance limitations caused by a part of the game that isn't even the focus of the game...that's just really poorly thought out.
Not sure I agree 100% with this, you could argue that in Franchise mode, the guests, their happiness and the financial management of your zoo is the focus of the game. If you are not bothered about your guests and the managerial elements you can go play sandbox and set guests to as low as you want. I also dont have a massive issue with the number of guests needed to make zoos viable for the size of zoos i am building. My current zoo has 9,300 guests at the moment and if anything it needs more but THIS is where the problem lies.

What i do agree with is the performance issues have knock on effects with zoo management and visa versa. I need to run min 8,000 guest to come close to breaking even, which means I basically have to play the game zoomed out (normally watching heatmaps) and you HAVE to paused when you zoom in. If I try to run my zoo close up then I know I am going to be in for a slideshow. This performance issue is mainly caused by guest AI, they are the one big variable here, I know that if I put my guest down to below 7,000 I am going to get +5-10 fps, below 6,000 the game will play ok. Ironically, as has been pointed out, it is the complexity of this AI and the needs of the guests that both causes the performance issue and the fuels need to push the performance, you need more guests to make a viable zoo but more guests break performance, if that makes sense.

The more I think about it, the simple solution could just be to make the guests much less demanding, make them spend a bit more, stay a bit longer, not require so much food / drink, lower the animals they need to see by 1. This will allow us to generate more income from fewer guests, so you can then turn down the number of guests entering the zoo. Also, by making they AI less demanding, it should reduces the number of AI functions each guest has to perform, which would reduce the overall load of the guest AI, you would need less shops, so less vendors. So you would need less guests with the benefits of increased performance.

I am not normally one for making games easier, I quite like it that this game can be tough, but performance for me is a massive issue.
 
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you could argue that in Franchise mode, the guests, their happiness and the financial management of your zoo is the focus of the game

@Moosegun, that's my point...you currently could argue that, which is a problem. ..zoos should be about the animals, that's just simply a fact. The reason for visitors is to fund that work, not the point of it in the first place.

Mind you, there have been (and probably still are) zoos in the real world where the point of the zoo is the visitors (and the profits), but that's not the kind of zoo this game is clearly trying to convey. With the emphasis on education and conservation that exists in the game it is clear that Frontier's intent is for zoos in the game to be the "good" kind of zoo, where the focus is the animals and with visitors invited in order to fund the work. Ergo, they stumbled on the design implementation when it comes to visitors and just how much emphasis we need to put on them in order to make larger zoos.

I'm not suggesting they make it too easy, because it's actually realistic that one needs to put some importance on visitors in order to get that funding. But it shouldn't be so front and center in terms of gameplay, particularly in terms of the performance impact. I think the problem is they imported a lot of the design from Planet Coaster...and see, a Theme Park does have visitors as the main priority. Everything, literally everything, in them is about giving visitors thrills, chills and entertainment.
 
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@Moosegun, that's my point...you currently could argue that, which is a problem. ..zoos should be about the animals, that's just simply a fact. The reason for visitors is to fund that work, not the point of it in the first place.

Mind you, there have been (and probably still are) zoos in the real world where the point of the zoo is the visitors (and the profits), but that's not the kind of zoo this game is clearly trying to convey. With the emphasis on education and conservation that exists in the game it is clear that Frontier's intent is for zoos in the game to be the "good" kind of zoo, where the focus is the animals and with visitors invited in order to fund the work. Ergo, they stumbled on the design implementation when it comes to visitors and just how much emphasis we need to put on them in order to make larger zoos.

I'm not suggesting they make it too easy, because it's actually realistic that one needs to put some importance on visitors in order to get that funding. But it shouldn't be so front and center in terms of gameplay, particularly in terms of the performance impact. I think the problem is they imported a lot of the design from Planet Coaster...and see, a Theme Park does have visitors as the main priority. Everything, literally everything, in them is about giving visitors thrills, chills and entertainment.
I could go into a long boring post about zoo economics here (most medium / large zoo need large ticket income to survive and place a MASSIVE amount of focus on guests) but really going off topic, I think we are both agreed that the game shouldnt be suffering performance issues due to the demands of guest AI. With most AI, when dealing with large numbers of bots, toning down complexity is a quick fix. If each of my 9,000 guests is making less queries per visit, performance increases, how much? Got no idea.

Of course the other solutions come from finding issues in current AI code / optimisation. My worry there is that they have had this engine for a long time, as you point out, so not sure there is much more they will be able to get out of it.
 
I basicly gave up on my big zoo, the lag/low fps was so bad that it just wasn't fun to play it anymore :( I wish my problems had to do with big guest numbers, but since my zoo was still closed I had 0 guests. But apparantly the game can't handle that you do to many terrain modifications in combination with a big zoo :(
 
I face the same issue here.
Quite a big park, 350 animals 8-9K visitors, some terrain modifications and quite some buildings, while zoomed in its a 8-9fps slideshow. Short before giving up this one, which would be a pity as it has a lot of hours in it. Initial plan was to get all species in there...

Memory of my RTX2060S is constantly at over 90%, GPU-Processor at ~35 per cent, CPU ~60 usage, kind of weird, though I'm well aware all those AI calculations in the background.
Limiting visitors, not sure whether that would be a solution as the Zoo as it needs ca. 180k of ticket sales alone p.a. to remain profitable.

What is the point of providing users with such big flat maps, when they obviously require NASA supercomputers to play that smoothly on a fully built map?!
 
I can only say that I hope Frontier is aware of this and maybe implements the 'solution' that something mentioned: make the guest AI less demanding. Yes, making sure your guests are happy is part of the game, I completely agree, but right now guests are forcing me to spend more time making sure they're happy than I do making sure my animals are happy. That shouldn't be the case in my opinion.
 
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