Just as FlyingColors wrote earlier, the more stuff you have happening in the game the less it will perform. Endless content generation games like ACEO, Cities and PA don’t really live by the same measurements of performance as single FPS games do. In those games you’ll always be able to tell what kind of load the application will put on the system whereas with ACEO it is drastically different when comparing an early game to a late game.
Heathrow, before the pandemic, could have a throughput of roughly 260k pax per day. If we divide that by the 24 hours of the day we get an average of 11k pax, yes there will be peaks and drops but since everyone’s airport is different we’ll need to look at the average value. There’s a slider in ACEO (gameplay settings panel) that allows you to set the pax ratio per flight and it’s default setting is 50%. This means that we have set a target of being able to simulate around 5000 pax in an airport at any given moment at 60 FPS on an average PC, which is something we’re in most player airports are able to do today. Of course, every airport is different and if you have huge terminals with complex paths your results may vary, we’re also still in beta and there is optimization left to be done as well as potential bugs which can affect the performance capabilities of today’s builds. We could very easily put limits on everything and say that “due to performance limitations, the game will only simulate X amount of pax and Y amount of objects” but I am pretty sure that that would benefit no-one and be pretty hostile, instead you can use that slider and a bunch of other graphics settings we’ve implemented that can also improve performance.
Simulating those truly massive airports in ACEO will never be smooth, airports than in the eyes of the game is “unrealistic” as 20k concurrent pax is very well beyond the intended limitations but certainly possible, even on a monster PC, due to a number of reasons that primarily has to do with the architecture of the game’s code base. The game is object oriented and not data driven, it’s foundation is built by developers (ourselves) with lesser knowledge than what we have today and we’re not a triple A team with a million dollar budget. These are not excuses but explanations and something that is reflected in the pricing of the game.
This is obviously a complex topic but I’m pretty sure a CPUs health does not deteriorate by the number of tasks it executes but instead by the heat it develops. Of course there’ll be a default power cycle strain as you use it over time but that would be in my opinion considered normal wear and tear and as long as you keep a CPU cool it doesn’t matter how many tasks it executes, things will just execute slower the more stuff it has to do. I’m also pretty sure that when a CPU doesn’t have an expressed task to process it instead processes meaningless wait tasks but then again I am no expert and would be happy to be corrected if I am wrong.
Will have a look at it! 