Massive Frame Drops Due to Guest Population in Franchise Mode

[Rowlie]

I bought planet zoo 2 months ago. I tried out all the different modes, but franchise mode is my favourite. Once my zoo got popular however my frames began to drop drastically due to the guest population. This is negatively impacting my gaming experience and makes certain areas in my zoo unpleasant to scroll over.

I love the process of selectively breeding animals and trading them with players. Franchise mode was a HUGE selling point for me and why I bought the game in the first place. I find sandbox mode extremely boring as there isn't thousands of other players to trade animals with. I enjoy trading with other players and it's a big part of the fun for me. I sadly predict a lot of peoples answers to this post will be "go play sandbox mode huh duh", but that isn't helping the issue. It's like telling a guy who loves vanilla ice cream to eat mint ice cream instead because the vanilla ice cream he loves is served without a spoon. The guy doesn't like mint ice cream though, so people shouldn't tell him to eat it when he wants to enjoy his vanilla ice cream! Sandbox mode is boring because you can't trade on a competitive open market. There is also no thrill of getting a good deal or sense of accomplishment for how far you've come...

I feel as though the guests are poorly designed for this game. There is too much going on when a zoo becomes 5 star and starts getting 3000 guests visiting. Every guest is it's own asset, with it's own actions going on. It gets so much that even my high end gaming PC frames drop while I'm playing. I think Frontier was well aware of the issues the guests pose as they have merged guests into groups to try and help with performance. I also noticed the humans in this game do not have realistic looking models like the animals... A theory I have is that the guests were meant to be higher quality models like the animals, but the game simply couldn't handle it so Frontier made them cartoony instead to try and help with performance. It is a big suspicion of mine that Frontier knew about this issue for a long time and the reason it hasn't been resolved yet is because they don't want to alter the guests as it's too much work.

Regardless there is an issue posed for Franchise mode players. They are forced to either deal with severe frame drops or to build lots of low star zoos. Most game devs would do a complete rework of mechanics to fix a problem like this... It doesn't need to be overcomplicated either. The zoo could say there is 3000 people, but is the player really going to count? I've thought of dozens of ideas to help remedy this issue and I know that Frontier has capable people who could easily do the same if they really wanted to.

How I would fix the issue:
It could be as simple as with every star rating the guests who arrive level up. Guest numbers don't need to get to crazy high amounts if the game can't support such a thing anyway. The higher quality guests could spend more money and have lower rates of vandalism, while lower quality guests would be more likely to partake in crime and have less money to spend. I feel as though my idea would be more efficient and help reduce frame drops considerably. This post is intentionally made for feedback, but it feels wrong to criticize a feature without giving a way of improvement.

For the record I love this game. I have 344 hours and I've only had the game for 2 months. I gave it a positive review on steam and I am thankful the devs made such a good game. I just feel the people on franchise mode could benefit from the devs taking action to overcome an issue that has persisted and been discussed online for a long time now. Farewell.

 

[LindaBroer]

First off, welcome to the PZ community. Though there are definitely people with strong opinions here, I think you'll find we are mostly a nice and helpful bunch and will not tell you to go play Sandbox instead, when you clearly state that you want to play Franchise.

I play both Franchise and Sandbox depending on my mood and I understand the issue you are facing. It doesn't bother me personally, even if I build a larger zoo as I just build multiple secret zoo entrances that are hidden inside larger buildings to spread the guests better through my zoo. This avoids the big pile-up near the entrance area and no guests at all towards the end which could partly explain the issue you are facing. I'm not a game developer and completely unaware of how games work or anything like that, so it might be that I'm wrong with suggesting this as a potential solution for you. This is just the way I'm handling it both in Franchise and in Sandbox where I do play with guests in my zoo. Also limiting the number of animals in a given area (just because you can have 500 flamingos does not mean you should have 500 flamingos) tends to help.

Another thing you can do is limit the number of guests you'll allow in your zoo in the options menu. I have never tried this though and have heard conflicting results for this, but it is something to try. Some people say that by limiting the number of guests they earn less money and end up in the red. Others say that guests are actually willing to spend more money when limiting the number of guests. I have never tried this, so I don't know. It's something you could try though.

 

[Cocolori]

I have guest limits on a couple of my older, more complete franchise zoos to keep things manageable for my fairly rubbish PC. I also do the multiple entrance thing and have widened paths etc. because the calculations seem to be worse if they are trying to move through crowds. Hopefully the new tour system will be another money maker and allow us to funnel guests to less well used paths.

The guests are actually cartoonish because they are essentially a straight import from Planet Coaster, the theme park builder so rather than it being about performance it was likely a saving on development time strategy plus it means there is some consistency in style for their two 'planet' games. Personally it doesn't bother me at all but I know others have found it jarring.

 

[FoxyDee]

Agreed. As a challenge mode player, I am facing similar problems. Not only those huge masses of people are causing a lagg, but it is also quite unrealistic to have so many people that they get stuck on path just because there are simply so many. I have never seen so many people in zoos. I hope the devs will look at this and give us, management mode players an option to limit the guests only visually, while the economy would still be simulated so that our cash flow would be still going.

 

[Nioell]

A very simple solution would be to simply cut everything cost/ guest number wise in half or even make it a third of what it currently is.

Meaning instead of having staff costs of 10k it'd be 5k which would obviously result in way less guests needed to sustain such a park. I did that with some costs that I could find via modding (sadly staff costs were not among them) and tested it in my largest challenge park (I don't play franchise anyway) which had 8k+ guests. With only food costs cut back some I was able to easily half the number of guests and still made a 150k+ profit with a considerable increase in performance.

It's such an easy and fast thing to do, literally minutes of changing some nummbers in the files, but it has a huge impact on how long a zoo can be played for and I really wish they'd take that into consideration. It'd really change nothing game play wise only the number of guests that are needed.