Don't forget that DirectX12 is only available for Windows 10 and 11. Back when Planet Coaster was released, 90% of all Windows users was still using Windows 8 or older. If they would have used DirectX12 from the start, most of us would probably have never heard of Planet Coaster because nobody would be able to play it at launch.
I've said this on more than one occasion over the years we've been waiting for PlanCo 2... One feature that really would help would be, once you have spent many hours placing the 1000 or so pieces into your blueprint and grouped it, you have the option to save as is (for possible future editing) or 'flatten' it so in affect making it a solid single piece count item.
Honestly, no, it definitely is well optimized, you can easily tell, and they did a great job at it too. The reason it sucks performance is purely the baby Cobra engine it was made in, Cobra was simply not really advanced enough to properly load and render as much data as a Planet game requires. That doesn't mean this is a bad thing, however, as this just means Planet Coaster pushed the developers to really build on Cobra and not just rely on optimization (which they ALSO did) which makes Cobra as it is NOW an amazingly optimized game specifically for Planet games. Planet Coaster walke- struggled to move along, I mean, so Planet Zoo could "walk quickly" and Planco 2 could run!
Optimizing traditional games means removing or ignoring as much unnecessary detail as possible at all times. But in any builder simulation like this, the goal is to allow the player to add as much detail as they want. You can't accomplish both of these at the same time. A traditional game will not concern itself with spawning in and simulating parts of the world that the player is not in proximity to, but a tycoon game has to. It can't just stop thinking about half of the park guests or roller coasters just because your camera isn't currently looking at them. It can't convert your 4000-piece decoration into a single giant mesh and mega texture so there's only one draw call with automatically-generated Levels of Detail submeshes. It can't do that.
If your park is slow: PlanCo is optimized. Your park isn't. I see so many people just randomly smashing thousands of objects into their park just to create for example a simple window or wall, and this is the definition of poorly optimized.
Please don't look at my park that isn't even the park itself yet and just a quarter of a realistic Luxembourg environment that already cut a third of my framerate XD
Indeed excellent choice using gta, since the ps2 one to save on database processing cars spawn in blocks, if you pay attention while driving one car you may notice other cars more. The game robustly removes thigns from memory it thinks the player can't see. Sometimes you will catch it on gta 5 or 4 removing them before your eyes. More common online where it has to track alot more due to all the players. Fun fact in single player gta 5 you often here random explosions, this is because the npc aircraft have pilots spawn in, but pilots despawn closer to the player than vehicles so sometimes the pilot despawns, then the game has a check if you for example kill a npc driver the car crashes, shoot a helicopter pilots helicopter crashes. So the game makes the despawned pilots plane crash, you won't see it because if you can see it the pilot npc exists, if you can't plane crashes but you hear the boom. Gta fires of lots of random code to make npcs do things to make the city feel alive. that's why I was blown away by gta 6 trailer and think the npc count may go down. Planet coaster has a lot of scripts for the guests based on what they can see in paths etc, more guests more interactions, more slowdown.
I believe you are in my mind. I just posted in planet coaster nation on Facebook. Ask you a question about performance mainly AMD versus Intel CPU but this video really helped. I am going to go for the I-9 or the AMD equivalent. Thanks for sharing. 8:32
I think people think optimizing code is like spamming the smooth tool in Planet Coaster. They think "oh this game's not optimized." like it's just some process you have to run and devs just run out of time to do it. Like when some PC coaster reviewers say "this coaster needs more smoothing." Really, optimizing code is a lot more like a scavenger hunt a lot of times. You have to FIND ways to improve efficiency WITHOUT making the code horrible to work on later down the line. I'm not a professional game dev, but I am a professional programmer (who got into it from Flash back in the day). When I'm writing code, I write it for myself first. Meaning, I try to write my code in a way that's as maintainable and extendible as possible so future me doesn't hate life when I inevitably come back to keep developing, fix a bug, or add features. I only care about performance if it becomes an issue. Game devs don't have that luxury. They HAVE to make sure it's performant. But like I said earlier, when you're just building out the features, you want to build them in a way that's easy to work on. But optimizing often means making the code harder to understand or change later in order to do little tricks that improve efficiency. Back in the day when you'd publish a game once and distribute it on physical media like a cartridge or DVD, you could build out the whole game, then since you were "done" with it, you could go back and make all those optimizations and changes to increase performance. AND you didn't have to care about working on the game more later because patches, DLC, game passes, etc weren't a concern. These days, devs have to both keep the game optimized and maintainable so they can keep adding new features and content as users and employers have come to expect. Like you mentioned, Planet Coaster in particular suffers for something else entirely, which is the fact that it came out right when Windows 10 was being adopted. So it's using Direct X 11 instead of 12 so that the majority of people could play it at launch. So at the end of the day that's PC's biggest struggle.
When optimizing, you first have to figure out where your bottlenecks are, then figure out what is causing them. Then once you find the cause, you have to know or figure out a way to improve them. Sometimes that can be simple like changing the way you store data so that it's either easier for the computer to update that data, or easier for it to access/read that data. Sometimes it's hard, like if you had a really intricate algorithm for doing some calculation needed in the simulation, but that complicated algorithm is just too many steps. So you have to now figure out a way to reduce the number of steps it takes while also comparing its results to your previous "good" algorithm to make sure it's either still producing the same output or close enough that it doesn't break the simulation or even just make it unbalanced. Sometimes, you need to really understand the hardware the code is running on to optimize specifically for that hardware's strength and weaknesses. This is also something Planet Coaster can't do (much) since it's cross platform. Even being a PC game alone limits this since PCs are so customizable. A lot of the time, these "easy" fixes are done by default, so the "hard" ones are the ones causing the issues that make games seem "unoptimized." There's a TH-camr Kaze Emanuar who makes great videos where he goes into details on how he's been able to optimize Super Mario 64 to make it wayyyy better than the release version. Even if you're not a programmer, he explains things plainly enough for most to understan if you really want a good concrete example of what optimization really looks like.
Hey. Thanks for the videos. So...I am running a 14900 on the Strix 790 board, 128 GB RAM, with four Samsung 990 NVME drives, and running a 3090 for graphics driving three UHD monitors. Some of my city-builds will even make my system hiccup when running max graphics.
Well.. if we are talking Cities 2, then sadly this falls under the "incompetent coder" category. Your system is plenty powerful enough to handle tycoon games!
same, but i can understand, since the game has to operate many tasks at the same time: spline creation, moprhing the track asset around the spline while rendering EVERYTHING in the whole file at once. i am actually surprised PlanCo even works at all
Don't forget that DirectX12 is only available for Windows 10 and 11. Back when Planet Coaster was released, 90% of all Windows users was still using Windows 8 or older. If they would have used DirectX12 from the start, most of us would probably have never heard of Planet Coaster because nobody would be able to play it at launch.
I've said this on more than one occasion over the years we've been waiting for PlanCo 2... One feature that really would help would be, once you have spent many hours placing the 1000 or so pieces into your blueprint and grouped it, you have the option to save as is (for possible future editing) or 'flatten' it so in affect making it a solid single piece count item.
Honestly, no, it definitely is well optimized, you can easily tell, and they did a great job at it too. The reason it sucks performance is purely the baby Cobra engine it was made in, Cobra was simply not really advanced enough to properly load and render as much data as a Planet game requires. That doesn't mean this is a bad thing, however, as this just means Planet Coaster pushed the developers to really build on Cobra and not just rely on optimization (which they ALSO did) which makes Cobra as it is NOW an amazingly optimized game specifically for Planet games. Planet Coaster walke- struggled to move along, I mean, so Planet Zoo could "walk quickly" and Planco 2 could run!
Optimizing traditional games means removing or ignoring as much unnecessary detail as possible at all times. But in any builder simulation like this, the goal is to allow the player to add as much detail as they want. You can't accomplish both of these at the same time. A traditional game will not concern itself with spawning in and simulating parts of the world that the player is not in proximity to, but a tycoon game has to. It can't just stop thinking about half of the park guests or roller coasters just because your camera isn't currently looking at them. It can't convert your 4000-piece decoration into a single giant mesh and mega texture so there's only one draw call with automatically-generated Levels of Detail submeshes. It can't do that.
If your park is slow: PlanCo is optimized. Your park isn't. I see so many people just randomly smashing thousands of objects into their park just to create for example a simple window or wall, and this is the definition of poorly optimized.
Please don't look at my park that isn't even the park itself yet and just a quarter of a realistic Luxembourg environment that already cut a third of my framerate XD
my computer cant cope with planet co so every bit of optimisation is life saving
Indeed excellent choice using gta, since the ps2 one to save on database processing cars spawn in blocks, if you pay attention while driving one car you may notice other cars more. The game robustly removes thigns from memory it thinks the player can't see. Sometimes you will catch it on gta 5 or 4 removing them before your eyes. More common online where it has to track alot more due to all the players. Fun fact in single player gta 5 you often here random explosions, this is because the npc aircraft have pilots spawn in, but pilots despawn closer to the player than vehicles so sometimes the pilot despawns, then the game has a check if you for example kill a npc driver the car crashes, shoot a helicopter pilots helicopter crashes. So the game makes the despawned pilots plane crash, you won't see it because if you can see it the pilot npc exists, if you can't plane crashes but you hear the boom. Gta fires of lots of random code to make npcs do things to make the city feel alive. that's why I was blown away by gta 6 trailer and think the npc count may go down. Planet coaster has a lot of scripts for the guests based on what they can see in paths etc, more guests more interactions, more slowdown.
I believe you are in my mind. I just posted in planet coaster nation on Facebook. Ask you a question about performance mainly AMD versus Intel CPU but this video really helped. I am going to go for the I-9 or the AMD equivalent. Thanks for sharing. 8:32
I think people think optimizing code is like spamming the smooth tool in Planet Coaster. They think "oh this game's not optimized." like it's just some process you have to run and devs just run out of time to do it. Like when some PC coaster reviewers say "this coaster needs more smoothing." Really, optimizing code is a lot more like a scavenger hunt a lot of times. You have to FIND ways to improve efficiency WITHOUT making the code horrible to work on later down the line.
I'm not a professional game dev, but I am a professional programmer (who got into it from Flash back in the day). When I'm writing code, I write it for myself first. Meaning, I try to write my code in a way that's as maintainable and extendible as possible so future me doesn't hate life when I inevitably come back to keep developing, fix a bug, or add features. I only care about performance if it becomes an issue. Game devs don't have that luxury. They HAVE to make sure it's performant. But like I said earlier, when you're just building out the features, you want to build them in a way that's easy to work on. But optimizing often means making the code harder to understand or change later in order to do little tricks that improve efficiency.
Back in the day when you'd publish a game once and distribute it on physical media like a cartridge or DVD, you could build out the whole game, then since you were "done" with it, you could go back and make all those optimizations and changes to increase performance. AND you didn't have to care about working on the game more later because patches, DLC, game passes, etc weren't a concern. These days, devs have to both keep the game optimized and maintainable so they can keep adding new features and content as users and employers have come to expect.
Like you mentioned, Planet Coaster in particular suffers for something else entirely, which is the fact that it came out right when Windows 10 was being adopted. So it's using Direct X 11 instead of 12 so that the majority of people could play it at launch. So at the end of the day that's PC's biggest struggle.
When optimizing, you first have to figure out where your bottlenecks are, then figure out what is causing them. Then once you find the cause, you have to know or figure out a way to improve them. Sometimes that can be simple like changing the way you store data so that it's either easier for the computer to update that data, or easier for it to access/read that data. Sometimes it's hard, like if you had a really intricate algorithm for doing some calculation needed in the simulation, but that complicated algorithm is just too many steps. So you have to now figure out a way to reduce the number of steps it takes while also comparing its results to your previous "good" algorithm to make sure it's either still producing the same output or close enough that it doesn't break the simulation or even just make it unbalanced.
Sometimes, you need to really understand the hardware the code is running on to optimize specifically for that hardware's strength and weaknesses. This is also something Planet Coaster can't do (much) since it's cross platform. Even being a PC game alone limits this since PCs are so customizable.
A lot of the time, these "easy" fixes are done by default, so the "hard" ones are the ones causing the issues that make games seem "unoptimized." There's a TH-camr Kaze Emanuar who makes great videos where he goes into details on how he's been able to optimize Super Mario 64 to make it wayyyy better than the release version. Even if you're not a programmer, he explains things plainly enough for most to understan if you really want a good concrete example of what optimization really looks like.
Hey. Thanks for the videos. So...I am running a 14900 on the Strix 790 board, 128 GB RAM, with four Samsung 990 NVME drives, and running a 3090 for graphics driving three UHD monitors. Some of my city-builds will even make my system hiccup when running max graphics.
Well.. if we are talking Cities 2, then sadly this falls under the "incompetent coder" category. Your system is plenty powerful enough to handle tycoon games!
@@Nerdchacho My system was built to make my MSFS run the way I want with the best graphics...and as few hiccups in the process, eh?
four nvme drives adn 128gb ram and then a 3090... maybe get priorities in check. Probably 32gb and a 4080 would do much better
@@ijv5567 why not go all out and go for the 4090?
Good thing I just bought a new computer
i got a new computer with some pretty nice specs and still everytime I place a track a freeze for a second. Super annoying
same, but i can understand, since the game has to operate many tasks at the same time: spline creation, moprhing the track asset around the spline while rendering EVERYTHING in the whole file at once. i am actually surprised PlanCo even works at all
the nerd is strong in this one
FIRST