In short – removed people, new buildings get no smoke emitting chimneys. Enjoy.

is it possible to lower the percentage of people displayed but not remove all?

Thanks

It is lovely to see at least the modders doing something with performance, keep, going. Tack 🙂

-Even without the people the CPU still have to solve every one citizen’s move. That is the bottleneck.

I’m pretty sure that’s false. I usually get laggs when i zoom into the city, or zoom out far enough for screen to capture 2 cities simultaneously.

If i zoom in any other area, like a train track by the field,  i have stable frames per second, which means that graphic rendering is the issue, not CPU. If CPU was bottlenecking calculation those couple thosand people paths, game would lag regardless of me zooming into the city or zooming into a field, because these calculations have to be run non-stop.

My thought is also confirmed by the “error description”, when I CTD: “graphics rendering timeout limitation error”.

But i’m not sure if it’s the citizents causing these problems. Maybe it’s my busses or cars. Will test this mod to see if it’s any improvement

Coincidentally, it is CPU problem – that is, CPU is choking on the amount of stuff needed to display. Current GPUs are very good at displaying tons of similar things. It is up to the programmer to ensure that similar things are ordered in a way that GPU can take advantage of them being similar.

I, for example, get a ton of FPS drops in cities and steady 60 fps when viewing nothing in particular.

Anyhow – if I’ll finde some time this week, I’ll fiddle with it some more.

Definitely it is not because of our own traffic, I tried to start a map and run 50 trains at once immediately and did not experience a drop of FPS before and then (very little).

The cars of citizens also don´t slow the game down, find two cities with the most rush road between and bulldoze a piece of that road. All cars disappear but performance remains the same.

The simulation part of TF can get very laggy once you take its size into account. Seven cities with 1000 people each are 7000 people to simulate. That, if not done properely, is a problem. And I can imagine a situation where people playing large maps, feeding cities for centuries, get 20 cities 3000 people each and then complain about lag.

However – it is quite simple to measure the drain of the simulation on the game speed.

Simulation is, more or less, constaint load. It grows very slowly, but is always there. Thus if you find a nice spot that maximizes frame rate, then you can measure how much that actually gets.

My favorite is looking away into the skybox, when you are on a corner of the map. If you get there, say, 30 FPS, then it takes 33ms to tick simulation once, at most.

Display, on the other hand, is varying load. You look at one place, see stuff, look at another place, see other stuff. Frame rate depends thus also on what you see.

Let’s be honest here. TF is not a pretty game. There aren’t thousands of shaders and advanced techniques used, that can stress the graphics card. The game is reliant on high resolution textures to provide good visuals. Thus we have to conclude that the frame rate issue is bound to the work CPU does to translate game simulation into graphics.

The wildly jumping frame rate when viewing cities confirms such diagnosis.

So, what can I ( or anyone who is not Urban Games ) do?

Well – I can’t fix simulation ( for example, by multithreading it ), because, well, UG is not hiring.

I cannot fix the simulation->display engine,  because, well, UG is not hiring.

I can, however, play with settings in model files, which control what is displayed and when, to ensure that the game display engine is least loaded.