I have around 4900-5100 guests at the moment and my FPS isn't ever higher than 15... Building paths is an absolute nightmare (the game freezes for about 3 seconds every time I place a path) - is this because of the number of guests? I tried putting all my settings on lowest and nothing changed. Time for a new processor?
Low FPS, impossible to build paths in live mode.. too many guests?
- Thread starter Iksarra
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I have over 9k visitors, big zoo and FPS problems are real. Game is really bad optimised. My spec Is on high end as all new games I play are on ultra spec without issue.
When I start game FPS is around 30-35 but as time goes by, it drops to 15-20. Then I have to restart game after 30-40mins and everything is fine.
When I start game FPS is around 30-35 but as time goes by, it drops to 15-20. Then I have to restart game after 30-40mins and everything is fine.
No because I had the same issue in sandbox, I didnt even have the zoo open and it was a very new build hardly anything in there yet.
We had this with Planco too. Never been solved, i'm scared that this won't be solved in this game either. You can change the maximum guests visiting your Zoo. In Franchise mode you do this in the game settings menu "Maximise guests > set guest limit" in other game options it's able to change this under the entrance fee.
Are people not able to comprehend the difference with this game? The guests arent sprites going up and down a pathing map triggered by a couple of scripted responses, they are all individual AI with different needs "personalities" reacting to a world that has unlimited terrain and habitat layout possiblities and trying to react in a realistic and challenging manner. The animals are even more advanced e.g. with line of sight mechanics unlike in Planet Coaster. There is a hell of a lot of calculations going on here! Sure lets imagine performance improvements especially anything that resembles degredation over time like a memory leak but overall we are in the realms of cutting edge here. Enjoy the ride. I have perfectly profitable zoos with ~1 to 2K guests, if you want giant sprawling zoos that is a personal choice but there is going to be an impact of course that will need to be managed like limiting the number of guests! Nothing in the game forces you to create giant zoos or x thousand guests, thats just for personal bragging reasons, in fact the game goes out of its way to give you the option to easily open multiple zoos under your franchise or sandbox. If your PC can't hack it, build smaller more specialised zoos and wait to see if they can extract more performance improvements over time. Instead of complaining about games that try to push technical boundaries why not blame Intel who sat on their monopoly for a decade 
Perhaps spoilt by the hair physics in Witcher 3 with a Core i9 lol. Certainly has anyone tried playing Civilisation 6 in the modern era on a Standard sized map with 3 AI components and a couple of hundred units! Make a cup of tea between turns.
It is interesting, strategy and real time world building games like this would be ideal candidates for game streaming, where you have super computers taking time off from calculating weather patterns and predicting sub-atomic particles to send us a few juicy frames. A few years off I imagine but maybe 15K zoo guests is a tangiable future!
Honestly, there're probably just too many guests. The sheer amount of people the game depicts visiting my podunk little zoo and runs AI calculations for is completely out of scale. There's no need to have 2000 guests in my zoo massing into globs when 200 would still be overkill for a realistic portrayal and perform much better. With fewer guests, we could also get better AI, things like actual collision checks on path scenery. Personally I'd much rather have a handful of visitors that behave believably than a few thousand that don't. The simple financial fix for this is to increase the amount a single guest spends or reduce costs. There are more than enough knobs available to the developers that performance shouldn't be an issue.
The simplified guest AI "running into things" compared to Planet Coaster is to give more priority to the animal AI which is what this game is about, its not to allow thousands of guests. There is already a mechanism to limit the number of guests and put up the price to have a premium zoo, you just have to design it well enough to attract premium customers.
That's not really a solution, that's a work around to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. The number of guests is far too high and looks unrealistic at base level, and that number is causing people's performance to tank and forcing people to play the game differently when they shouldn't have to. There's no benefit to keeping it the way it is. If zoos are frequently becoming too crowded to be playable, then the game developers should reduce the crowding and balance the ramifications around the decision for the sake of the fun. Your entire argument seems to be that AI is too resource intensive, my solution is to reduce the number of AI running in the park significantly and rebalance other elements of the game around that. If you have 1000 individual guest AIs running, every single decision that a guest needs to make is running 1000 times; if you have 200 guests, those same lines of code are only running 200 times. The performance savings in down scaling number of guests would be well worth it and allow resources to be invested elsewhere.
Edit: I wanted to add some numerical proof. So the San Diego Zoo, one of the largest and most popular in the US, hit 4 million visitors annually for the first time in 2018. They're open 365 days a year, so that averages out to roughly 10959 guests per day. They house more than 650 species and subspecies, and over 3500 individual animals. None of our zoos are that scope. None of our zoos are half or a quarter or even an eighth of that scope (an eighth would be 81.25 species, so we're actually pretty close!). So why are our visitor numbers? If we assume that number of zoo guests scales linearly with the number of species displayed, an amazing zoo with everything in the game currently really shouldn't have more than 1500 visitors at a time.
Edit: I wanted to add some numerical proof. So the San Diego Zoo, one of the largest and most popular in the US, hit 4 million visitors annually for the first time in 2018. They're open 365 days a year, so that averages out to roughly 10959 guests per day. They house more than 650 species and subspecies, and over 3500 individual animals. None of our zoos are that scope. None of our zoos are half or a quarter or even an eighth of that scope (an eighth would be 81.25 species, so we're actually pretty close!). So why are our visitor numbers? If we assume that number of zoo guests scales linearly with the number of species displayed, an amazing zoo with everything in the game currently really shouldn't have more than 1500 visitors at a time.
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I don't mind the high guest count.
When I went to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding and it was packed to the point where I sometimes had very little space to see the 30+ pandas on display. It's not a officially a zoo but it certainly acts like one with only 2 species (Red and Giant Panda).
As I have written in my other thread: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ance-will-be-better-in-future-patches.530800/
I wish the game took more advantage of the resources in my machine.
Yeah. The game seems to recalculate the entire pathfinding AI every single time you place a single path piece. If anything, it should only recalculate after you haven't placed a new piece in the last 10 seconds, that way it will only freeze once, instead of every fricking time you place a path piece. Same thing seems to happen with tracks from transport rides, which is kinda dumb because it should only do calculations once the thing is actually finished. My game froze for 10 seconds every single time I placed a piece. I counted!