Improving performance

[johnson2008]

For some starters, how should the typical size of a simutrans-extended map be?
I am having issues where warping, to somewhere (t=15) and above would cause massive lag and stuttering.
I use a 2048*2048 map since distances in extended are so much shorter per block compared to standard, evidenced by the station's coverage and having multiple cities: 170, and a population of 2,7 million, the big issue is at the beginning of the game where the technology level is too weak and there is not much management/construction needed thus I want to increase the warp speed to go to later stages. but the game runs so slow on some higher speeds achieving 12 fps in most areas while zoomed in, at unpopulated regions. the CPU is stressed but not completely getting to 60-70% due to application single-threaded performance. in some cases, fps are high with stuttering(some very low peaks), is it possible to disable some graphical aspects temporarily to allow higher warp speed when it is needed? any feedback is highly appreciated

[zook2]

Hi,
(there should be a list of command line parameters somewhere, but I always have to search a while...)
Anyway, you can start the game with
...\Simutrans-Extended-64.exe -nomidi -nosound
which disables sound and might save a tiny amount of CPU cycles.
Also, you can disable waves in the options somewhere. Again, it helps a little bit only.

[prissi]

There might be still the tool in the editor tools to jump years, if you just want to reach more modern times quickly.

[johnson2008]

There might be still the tool in the editor tools to jump years, if you just want to reach more modern times quickly.

the issue is that it doesn't progress the game as it should, cities, don't grow, it just jumps and you don't earn money either, you would be better off starting in a later year instead.

[prissi]

That is the purpose of this tool. Otherwise, extended (or experimental) has still added a lot of additional code which is very computing intensive. I am not sure how the fast forward is implented in extended, but if it still follows the standard system, the drawing routines are already set to the simplest level during fast forward and using threading for drawing.

Extended has some routines (like the recalculation of the connection map at the beginning of each month) that scales quadratically with the station number (and hence game size) and thus slows down the game a lot (the spike in low fps).

If it is too slow, then the only thing out is using the standard version, which probably runs 10-1000x faster ... You can change the station coverage and month length in standard too. The "scale" in extended is nothing more than an arbitrary number that scaled divers parameter you can set by hand in standard. It does not affect the passenger generation nor city density.