Serious lag issues

Lingos9 · April 30, 2020, 6:09am

Hello,

I am experiencing a lot of lag in the gameplay at the moment which is making the game unplayable. I have only 2 large stands and 5 medium stands and the graphics set to ‘Simple’. I’m pretty sure the passengers easily navigate their way through the airport and I don’t seem to have any issues with that.

I have always had lag issues but only after I’ve built much larger airports. It seems to have got much worse since Alpha 35, and now even the home screen is showing serious lagging and it didn’t do before Alpha 35.

I’ve got a MacBook Air that is running OSX 10.14.6. Only 4GB of RAM, which is perhaps a factor in this problem, but not sure what the minimum requirements are.

Would appreciate any help or advice, if indeed that’s possible?

Rubble · April 30, 2020, 9:41am

What graphics chip is installed? What spec also?

Artik · April 30, 2020, 10:09am

i dont think itll be the ram as i have 32GB and still have lag

Lingos9 · April 30, 2020, 11:06am

Graphics is Intel HD 5000 1536 MB. It’s the 2014 model with the core i5 processor 1.4GHz

Artik · April 30, 2020, 2:25pm

Wait can you open task manager and check your cpu usage?

Lingos9 · April 30, 2020, 3:38pm

This was at night time with only 2 flights in the airport

Artik · April 30, 2020, 6:31pm

I wonder if you have got loads of passengers failing with finding a way through the terminal? Im having this now where all is fine then suddenly nobody can find a path, which then ramps my cpu up to 100%!

I’ve tried the obvious too, deleted and replaced all of my zoning - solves nothing

Lingos9 · April 30, 2020, 6:36pm

I’m thinking it must be that. I have a very large number that “can’t find their way” but then the incident resolves itself after a few seconds. However, the lag is not much better at night when there are very few passengers. I also have a lot of passengers waiting at bus stops but not many buses turn up to collect them.

I’ve tried to lay it out as best I can, not sure what more I can do to be honest.

Lingos9 · April 30, 2020, 6:40pm

Also, even just going to the ACEO home screen sends my total cpu usage to 70% now. It’s very strange

Rubble · April 30, 2020, 7:18pm

Try holding down the Alt key as you start the game and see what screen resolution you are in.

Lingos9 · April 30, 2020, 8:44pm

It starts in 1440 x 900. I’ve tried smaller resolutions but still same result.

Perhaps it’s my computer that was the problem, but it runs multi-layered video in Final Cut Pro X like a dream. I’ve tried other games in Steam and they all seem to be running ok.

Artik · April 30, 2020, 9:16pm

I’ve figured it out with my case. depart/ arrival gate seperation! what i had done is tried to seperate the dep to upper floor, and arr to lower by using a wall to seperate them, which resulted in pax wanting to exit the departure area without a way out!

swagman · April 30, 2020, 9:29pm

I would try cancelling all flights and sending everyone home. Maybe with subways. Then when you’re sure that there are no passengers, start scheduling new flights after making sure the zoning is all good and that there are no bugs with walls, bus stops, foundations, and sidewalks. If they get stuck in a specific area a lot rebuild that.

dellonia · May 1, 2020, 6:54am

I experience similar lag issues. This mainly occurs after building new elements in my airport. After that, the airport is just lagging and any movement creates lag spikes.

Pasi · May 1, 2020, 11:54am

Big lags like that are usually caused by failed pathing. For example arriving pax wants to go to departing side but can’t find a path. So ensure that they can go everywhere or that security zones for arrivals and departures are separated.

Artik · May 1, 2020, 1:14pm

I’ve tried seperating security zones for dep/arr with walls and detelted the zone tiles between, and they still fail as having a seperate zone for arrivals demands security desks! Only way I found to fix this was to not seperate the zones at all, this seems to cut 1000’s of failed paths down to around 3 - 4.

Lingos9 · May 1, 2020, 8:49pm

Yes, I’ve been playing about with zones today. Having one single international zone seems to have made it a bit better. Although it kind of defeats the object of having the segregated arrival/departure feature in the first place

Artik · May 1, 2020, 10:29pm

It works for mine now, as the passengers always go down to exit, but they can use the toilets or shops on arrival need be

Olof · May 2, 2020, 2:38pm

So the experimental branch is indeed experimental and we always look at function first and then performance. With 1536 MB VRAM you are infact below the minimum 2 GB requirement which may be a contributing factor for sure. Also the size and setup of your airport greatly impacts performance, the larger and more complex layout it is and has the more strain it puts on your hardware to simulate it which is another thing to keep in mind.

That said, please do bug report any performance issues you have that “seem odd” and we’ll look into it once we’re more confident in the functionality of Alpha 35. Some performance issues have an underlying bug while some are due to a too low specced device.

Lingos9 · May 2, 2020, 5:53pm

Thanks for the help. I’ve found one or two bugs which I will report. I think there is an issue with arriving passengers wanting to access the amenities in the ‘departures’ international zone. This is solved by having only a single interconnecting zone for both passengers, but negates the segregation feature of Alpha 35.

Shame that my computer doesn’t meet the requirements, that does answer a lot of questions including the home screen lag. Maybe this is the perfect excuse I need to upgrade to the latest MacBook…