Transport Tycoon Forums

jfs wrote: 06 Mar 2025 13:36 No computer in existence can run an 8k map well. The amount of data in the game world is just too large, and because the game is single-threaded having a multi-core CPU helps very little on overall performance.

jfs wrote: 06 Mar 2025 13:36 No computer in existence can run an 8k map well. The amount of data in the game world is just too large, and because the game is single-threaded having a multi-core CPU helps very little on overall performance.

SwissFan91 wrote: 06 Mar 2025 12:16 I have a very old crappy laptop (12 years old) that I still use for OTTD which can handle vanilla games fine. However, it very much struggles with my current game using JGR patchpack, an 8k x 8k map and a boat load of GRFs.

The actual in-game itself runs OK (which is why I still play it) but the title screen, load game screen and save game screen take a few business days to load. My question is: do other people experience lag while running huge games, maps and GRF lists or is this something a new laptop would fix? Do I have unrealistic expectations and need to cut my GRF list and map size down to have a better experience?

For reference the laptop has a Pentium 2.4ghz B980 processor & 4GB RAM. I know 4GB is very low for modern requirements but not sure if purely upgrading on this would help OTTD run faster or if big games are just big games.

(I haven't posted this in JGR patchpack as I am curious how other large games run on vanilla OTTD too)

jfs wrote: 12 Mar 2025 07:47 OpenTTD does not do disk access during gameplay. The only time OpenTTD reaches to the disk is for loading game data, and when you (or autosave) loads/saves the game in progress. The core game itself does not. If disk access is limiting your performance, it's because you have too little RAM and the operating system has to do swapping. A map sized 8k x 8k contains 67,108,864 tiles (yes, 67 million), which I believe uses a total of 1 GB of static storage for the map array, plus all the dynamic storage required for towns, industries, vehicles, and other moving/"living" objects. I would expect a memory usage of between 2 GB and 4 GB for an 8k map game. If your machine can't keep that all in RAM without swapping then you should definitely not be playing maps that large.
Compare with a standard size 256x256 map, which is a factor 1024 smaller, that would take between 2 and 4 MB of memory, small enough that it can fit entirely inside the cache of a modern higher-end CPU.

kkidslogin wrote: 12 Mar 2025 16:26 That's what I was saying. The OP said the game itself works well enough; it's the title screen, load game screen, and save game screen that are having difficulty, suggesting that it's a disk issue.

jfs wrote: 12 Mar 2025 07:47 OpenTTD does not do disk access during gameplay. The only time OpenTTD reaches to the disk is for loading game data, and when you (or autosave) loads/saves the game in progress. The core game itself does not. If disk access is limiting your performance, it's because you have too little RAM and the operating system has to do swapping. A map sized 8k x 8k contains 67,108,864 tiles (yes, 67 million), which I believe uses a total of 1 GB of static storage for the map array, plus all the dynamic storage required for towns, industries, vehicles, and other moving/"living" objects. I would expect a memory usage of between 2 GB and 4 GB for an 8k map game. If your machine can't keep that all in RAM without swapping then you should definitely not be playing maps that large.

ebla71 wrote: 13 Mar 2025 00:03

jfs wrote: 12 Mar 2025 07:47 OpenTTD does not do disk access during gameplay. The only time OpenTTD reaches to the disk is for loading game data, and when you (or autosave) loads/saves the game in progress. The core game itself does not. If disk access is limiting your performance, it's because you have too little RAM and the operating system has to do swapping. A map sized 8k x 8k contains 67,108,864 tiles (yes, 67 million), which I believe uses a total of 1 GB of static storage for the map array, plus all the dynamic storage required for towns, industries, vehicles, and other moving/"living" objects. I would expect a memory usage of between 2 GB and 4 GB for an 8k map game. If your machine can't keep that all in RAM without swapping then you should definitely not be playing maps that large.

Just checked and a 16k x 16k map when loaded in the scenario editor (not a running game) leads to OTTD consuming 3.2 GB RAM per instance of the program.

I can open and run two instances of OTTD in parallel on my laptop and work in them without too many problems. Loading takes a minute or two and scrolling is a bit more slow than the 4k x 4k games I've played so far but speed it clearly well-acceptable on this configuration.

kkidslogin wrote: 13 Mar 2025 00:28 Interesting. These huge maps are a lot more feasible now than when 4k was first introduced.

Mayhap we could get larger sizes merged into trunk, now that any computer worth its salt has 8-16GiB of RAM.

kkidslogin wrote: 13 Mar 2025 00:28 Mayhap we could get larger sizes merged into trunk, now that any computer worth its salt has 8-16GiB of RAM.

kkidslogin wrote: 13 Mar 2025 19:58 Well, on the other hand, any computer that can handle that sort of map can run JGRPP, and only really serious players can utilize maps over 4k*4k. The usual casual vanilla player (in my experience, as in talking about me lol) can hardly finish a 2k*2k map.

ebla71 wrote: 13 Mar 2025 21:01

kkidslogin wrote: 13 Mar 2025 19:58 Well, on the other hand, any computer that can handle that sort of map can run JGRPP, and only really serious players can utilize maps over 4k*4k. The usual casual vanilla player (in my experience, as in talking about me lol) can hardly finish a 2k*2k map.

The size of the binaries is OTTD14 14.4 MB vs. JGRPP 0.63.1 53.4 MB which should not make any difference anywhere.

Not sure why JGRPP is almost 4x larger but might more due to efficiency of the compiler than on tons of extra features?!?

Whatever - I'd definitely like to have larger map sizes also in the standard OTTD and if anybody thinks this is too much for the inexperienced player, maybe it could be made available only via the "special" menue?

AntoninKyrene wrote: 13 Mar 2025 21:07 ~snip~ ...it falls upon We the 1% to keep uselessness relevant. That's why I am here. Long live PowerPC.

kkidslogin wrote: 13 Mar 2025 21:09 Both games use the same compilers. The size difference is because JGRPP has a lot more features and code. Not that a ~40MiB difference matters on most machines nowadays.

ebla71 wrote: 13 Mar 2025 21:01

kkidslogin wrote: 13 Mar 2025 19:58 Well, on the other hand, any computer that can handle that sort of map can run JGRPP, and only really serious players can utilize maps over 4k*4k. The usual casual vanilla player (in my experience, as in talking about me lol) can hardly finish a 2k*2k map.

The size of the binaries is OTTD14 14.4 MB vs. JGRPP 0.63.1 53.4 MB which should not make any difference anywhere.

Not sure why JGRPP is almost 4x larger but might more due to efficiency of the compiler than on tons of extra features?!?

Whatever - I'd definitely like to have larger map sizes also in the standard OTTD and if anybody thinks this is too much for the inexperienced player, maybe it could be made available only via the "special" menue?