The game is slow (laggy)

[DennyZuko]

Hello there. Plese, excuse my poor english and mayby stupid question, but I am fan to this game and I play it only sometimes, not regulary. I remember, whenever I played some patches (0.5 I think, then 0.7 - that I remember very well), everytime, when I started in for example 1950, and reached about 2020 (big cities, few competitors, many trains, vehicles), game started to be quite laggy. Trains, everything was moving in sequence (I hope you know what I mean). Up to year 2000 (when I started in 1950) the game was going quite well (max size 500*500).
My question now. Is it even posible to play map size 2000*2000 (hell a perfect, pleasant posibility, but not for me now with that lagz) with many cities, industries and so on for example from 1950 to 2200 or something like that without that stupid lagz (like my nb would be poor) ? If not, this game is not so interesting for me .

I have MSI notebook (GX701).. C2 Duo, 9600 GT...
OS - WIN XP SP 3

[Rubidium]

What version of OpenTTD are you using exactly? Could you also attach the savegame you are having trouble with so we can see whether it's a bug in OpenTTD or some setting that causes the behaviour?

[DennyZuko]

Wow. Thank you for fast answer. Well that is the main thing I remember, which bored me so much, that I played TTD very little .
I have good idea now. I will try now to play Open TTD (i see actual is 1.02) as I said (starting year 1950, size 2000*2000) and I will tell you imediately when that laggy behaviour starts. I saw here something with disabling 3D acceleration, that is only thing I can try during the testing. I am hell curious.. I wil not use any newgraphs or so, just I wanna test game performance now.

[Yexo]

First thing you can try is disabling all computer opponents. Those can take quite a lot of CPU and slow down the game considerably.

[PikkaBird]

Also, do you really need a map 64 times (with 64 times the calculations?) of the standard TTD map size?

[TruePikachu]

Umm...map size 2000x2000? Did you apply any patch, or are you using an unofficial version? Or is it really 2048?

Either way, with the vast size of the map, you would likely experience slowdowns. I max out size at 262,144 tiles; you are using either 4,000,000 (if 2000) or 4,194,304 tiles (if 2048).

Also check that you aren't using up unneccessary CPU time or running unneeded programs. Preformance will surely change depending on if OpenTTD is the only non-core process running or if you have FSX going in the background (severe memory and CPU usage).

Personally, I am running VectorLinux 6.0 off of 192MB RAM and a 800MHz processor. OpenTTD is started from KDE (which uses up resources on it's own), and I get good preformance, only lagging if there are a huge number of things that need to be drawn to the screen (like the entire screen covered by animated buildings).

[Yexo]

Please don't bump topics like this unlike you have the exact same question. The topic starter hasn't visited the forums since July.

[thethinker]

Well I am actually going to bump because I am having a very similar problem....my computer is older then the original poster but newer then the previous poster. Anyway, exact same behavior, starting the game works great but after ~50 years the game slows way down, to the point of not being playable. I'm attaching a savefile below.

My computer is a Pentium 4, 2.8gz with 2gb RAM, NVIDIA 7300GT with something like 512 mb ram (not totally sure...). I know it's old but it runs games like WoW from Wine pretty reasonably so it's strange to me that OpenTTD is jerky like this. I've tried downgrading the video card to a couple older versions, I can try going back further if anyone thinks that's the problem. Also tried messing with the resolution; changing the resolution in-game helps very little, and changing the resolution on the entire computer helps a bit more but the problem does not go away.

Oh, and I'm running Ubuntu 10.04.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[Yexo]

Any ideas? Thanks!

In your case the slowdown is because of the AI players. Try disabling some of them: first lower the maximum number in the difficulty settings, after that use "stop_ai <company_number>" in the console.

[thethinker]

Wow that suggestion was dead-on, worked like a charm. Is there any way to determine which AIs cause laggy behavior and which don't? Perhaps a sticky somewhere around here, or a page on the wiki site? Or is it really just the presence of AIs (any at all) which cause this?

[Eddi]

there's a setting how many "opcodes" an AI may make in one tick, but i don't know if that can be changed in a running game.

it's in the nature of AIs to take more and more ressources the more they have to manage (vehicles, delivery network, new routes, etc.)

[wozzar]

A question for Yexo. Should OTTD be used with only one core processor.

[planetmaker]

You can run it on a machine with as many cores as you like. Still, OpenTTD won't use more than one. But AIs can make - afaik - use of additional cores, same with writing a savegame.

[Rubidium]

AIs can't use other cores, only music/sound playback and compressing the savegame can. So basically, yes OpenTTD is an application that uses a single core, and no... don't ask us to change it. There are plenty of reasons not to change it and they have been discussed often enough on this forum.

[Lordmwa]

Is there any way that certain individual patches could be coded to run on other cores? I would guess that in the future there may be some processor needy patches that wont get trunk inclusion but could be fun to play with (eye candy type stuff) Or is this a central thing where the whole program has to change?

[Alberth]

Please read a bit in the results of the search button first.

[JacobD88]

Is there any way that certain individual patches could be coded to run on other cores?...

Not for individual cores no, but you can always try to improve things a little performance-wise by looking at what i wrote here and permanently moving OTTD to an unused core of your system so that OTTD is not being shared with other processes on the same core...

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... =multicore

[Kogut]

there's a setting how many "opcodes" an AI may make in one tick, but i don't know if that can be changed in a running game.

it's in the nature of AIs to take more and more ressources the more they have to manage (vehicles, delivery network, new routes, etc.)

And also moving 1000 RV around map is serious CPU eater. You can try to reduce number of allowed vehicles to lower levels, it also can help with laggy game.