Airport CEO Alpha 26 Released (The Performance Update)

Greetings, airport CEO!

From the heart of GDC (Game Developers Conference) 2018, Alpha 26, the performance update, has finally made it to the default branch after months of development on the experimental branch. It addresses one of the core current issues of Airport CEO: Tanking FPS when you build larger airports and process larger amounts of persons. By overhauling several large systems from agent movement and agent path finding to optimizing data structures and rendering, we’ve managed to gain several frames per second by mitigating the top most crucial performance impact sources.

What we’ve been doing exactly can be seen in the patch notes below but do note that this is not really the performance update, but the first performance update. We have a lot more performance updates planned such as various additional data structure and micro optimizations to do including getting rid of certain minor spikes, solving the UI performance leaks, solving very specific bugs where a certain simulation situations can cause otherwise low impact code to be invoked excessively as well as experimenting with more efficient multi-threading solutions and new and experimental architectures that could massively boost the game engine’s ability to handle large amounts of moving agents (more on this in Monday’s development blog).

As with every default deployment, do expect hot-fixes to be deployed accordingly with the severity and frequency of filed bug reports. We will make sure to see that Alpha 26 is as stable as possible before we continue work on Alpha 27 on the experimental branch, and what will become then new UI. Parallel with working on the new UI we’ll make sure to again start including some new content and new features, what those will be will be disclosed in the devlogs as we deploy them on the experimental branch.

Here are the patch notes for Alpha 26:

Release notes - Airport CEO - Version Alpha 26.0

Improvement

• ACEO-2658] - Vehicles in road queues should adjust to speed of ahead vehicle to mitigate gas and break effect
• ACEO-3058] - Implement improved person path finding worker thread
• ACEO-3151] - Improve performance when manipulating object by improving data structures
• ACEO-3402] - Improve object dependency exception handling for vehicles
• ACEO-3458] - Improve object dependency exception handling for persons
• ACEO-3513] - Game object transform consolidation to enhance performance when simulating movement of large amounts of persons
• ACEO-3515] - Streamline agent movement simulation system to reduce performance impact
• ACEO-3516] - Issue with updating walk toggle animation causes performance impact
• ACEO-3517] - Slight person game object appearance redeisgn
• ACEO-3518] - Improved person animations
• ACEO-3521] - Added option (in graphics setting) to disable tree animation to improve performance
• ACEO-3522] - Added faster data structures for various system to improve general performance
• ACEO-3583] - Enhance object pool validation method for minor performance improvements
• ACEO-3587] - Improve object pool scaling logic to enhance performance and memory allocation
• ACEO-3600] - Temporarily increase font size of certain panels to accommodate some Retina users
• ACEO-3606] - Adjusted some pricing values
• ACEO-3641] - Improve appearence of high speed conveyor belt tray
• ACEO-3727] - Reduce size of default start world
• ACEO-3729] - Removed playing animators on hidden underground belts
• ACEO-3730] - Various minor calculation related performance optimizations
• ACEO-3735] - Enhanced performance of distance calculation method by roughly four times
• ACEO-3750] - Added information about unlocking areas in tutorial

Bug

• ACEO-2311] - Quickly rotating an object in opposite directions can cause the object to become misaligned with the grid
• ACEO-2352] - Building small door in paused mode causes sprite to be incorrectly rotated
• ACEO-2853] - Add person usage direction arrows on certain items to mitigate risk of placing wrongly rotated objects
• ACEO-3084] - Aircraft can at very few instances get stuck on stand due to a null reference exception
• ACEO-3173] - Structure using light handler have their lights become visible prior to structure completion
• ACEO-3270] - Trying to CTRL delete active taxiway nodes does not give a warning
• ACEO-3294] - Unable To Place Fuel Tank Next To Fuel Depot
• ACEO-3310] - Rare issue with stuck service truck caused by dead lock when trying to offload non-hauled baggage
• ACEO-3401] - Unbuilt attachable fuel tanks are registered as functional by their parent fuel depot
• ACEO-3411] - Persons who get lost due to rezoning do not update their security clearance status correctly resulting in becoming stuck and unable to again pass security
• ACEO-3421] - Minor typos
• ACEO-3496] - Vehicles claiming to be in a vehicle depot when they are actually not can cause stuck vehicles
• ACEO-3507] - Aircraft cannot find holding point if stuck outside map
• ACEO-3512] - Issue with person movement system yielding causing a high performance impact
• ACEO-3514] - Improper way of handling agent parent transform in relation to simulation causes rendering performance issues
• ACEO-3526] - Animation causes head and body to become separated
• ACEO-3531] - Unable to build bathroom or baggage areas
• ACEO-3536] - Flights won't apear after ATC tower relocation & relocation/creation new stands
• ACEO-3539] - Oversized ramp agent driving service truck
• ACEO-3553] - Clicking luggage causes loss of left-click functionality for remainder of game session
• ACEO-3554] - Error on delivery site missing when game is paused
• ACEO-3556] - Left clicking function can occasionally stop working
• ACEO-3564] - Delivery object null check causes aviation fuel supply trucks to not correctly execute deliveries
• ACEO-3565] - Light poles can be placed outside world
• ACEO-3576] - Null reference thrown when deserializing aircraft causes loading process to abort rendering staff and vehicles not to spawn correctly
• ACEO-3578] - Skip night feature flights scheduled early mornings can cause passengers to miss their check-in as vehicle spawning and movement is blocked
• ACEO-3582] - Push back truck waiting loop with lacking cancellation check may in some very rare instances cause it to stuck
• ACEO-3588] - Legacy code for speech bubble displayment causes over-allocation and over-pooling of speech bubbles
• ACEO-3602] - Information desks do not generate any job tasks
• ACEO-3605] - Click error when selecting cargobay
• ACEO-3614] - Baggage handling system disables itself when loading game
• ACEO-3615] - Franchise staff does not reappear properly when shift change takes place
• ACEO-3616] - Assets carried in front incorrectly positioned on top of person
• ACEO-3618] - Contractor hammer tool not spawned correctly if game is saved and loaded prior to contractors getting spawned in world
• ACEO-3619] - Earth patches not correctly spawned when contractor is constructing a structure
• ACEO-3620] - Contractors ignore demolition cancellation order on certain objects
• ACEO-3625] - Sprite material not correctly updated on offloaded baggage causing "bright" baggage shipped around at night
• ACEO-3626] - Sprite material not correctly updated when employees spawn tools outside causing "bright" tools to be carried around at night
• ACEO-3628] - Minor issue on grid update on area in front of subway entrances causing persons to stuck
• ACEO-3629] - Legacy code related to animation culling causes persons to not update their animation state correctly when moving camera resulting in a sitting floating movement
• ACEO-3630] - Minor issue with certain conveyor belt items with integrated belts being animated despite time being paused
• ACEO-3631] - Rare panel null reference issue when loading asset panel can cause the user interface to become unresponsive
• ACEO-3633] - Exaggerated performance null check on fuel depot parking can cause fuel trucks to target zero vector
• ACEO-3638] - In certain activities persons fail to recognize that a given path request has failed, resulting in them floating across the terminal through objects and walls
• ACEO-3642] - Subway entrance is enabled for transit despite not being fully constructed
• ACEO-3655] - Foundation bulldozer not working
• ACEO-3658] - Persons leaving the airport can get stuck in a waiting loop if no bus stop is available but subway entrances are
• ACEO-3668] - Queueable objects with an incorrect rotational offset on the last queue point causes the game to crash when passengers try to access it
• ACEO-3679] - Automatic fuel aviation refueling does not execute properly
• ACEO-3690] - Incorrect characters in some airport names
• ACEO-3692] - Very heavy performance impact on moving aircraft in tripple speed setting
• ACEO-3700] - Large performance impact on system related to passengers getting interaction items (seats, desks, etcetera)
• ACEO-3717] - Game can freeze when a person with a certain set of permissions cannot find a nearest walkable node
• ACEO-3719] - Incorrect brokenrunway alert text
• ACEO-3725] - Large rendering performance impact on conveyor belt related simulation due to incorrect disabling and lack of culling on animators
• ACEO-3726] - Noticeable performance impact on path request and grid related methods due to ancient code
• ACEO-3731] - Several minor lightning related issues with persons, structures, effects and assets having incorrect material and incorrect illumination at nights
• ACEO-3733] - Various minor placement and simulation illumination issues for objects, persons and assets
• ACEO-3738] - Stand name not visible
• ACEO-3739] - Minor issue with flight time visibility on flight planner
• ACEO-3740] - When building boarding desk, walls don't remove by default
• ACEO-3743] - When loading a save game from an existing loaded world, path finding breaks down
• ACEO-3748] - Employees can get stuck when demolishing an object related to a currently performed job task
• ACEO-3749] - Tutorial lack step for expanding areas
• ACEO-3752] - Person speech bubbles do not rotate with camera
• ACEO-3756] - Occupation point fetching error causes passengers to be unable to interact with desks in food and shop rooms
• ACEO-3758] - Poor thread cancellation handling when loading main menu or quitting game from in-game world causes the game to crash
• ACEO-3762] - Aircraft can get stuck in rare occasions when taxiway connects via side to runway
• ACEO-3765] - Minor queue occupation issue on metal detector passage point causing persons to not respect one-at-a-time principle
• ACEO-3766] - Excessive post-desk interaction relocation method in tightly built room areas can cause persons to abort their eating or shopping activity
• ACEO-3774] - Transform children structure for built objects causes slight WaitForJobTaskGroup render performance impact

New Feature

• ACEO-3579] - Havana airline added
• ACEO-3595] - Implement Subway Entrance
• ACEO-3597] - Added FPS bound camera speed
• ACEO-3598] - Data structure performance improvements
• ACEO-3599] - Nearest city and country is now shown in new game location setup
• ACEO-3640] - Add two new bus types
• ACEO-3643] - Add new bench type
• ACEO-3728] - Add ability to unlock areas

Epic

• ACEO-3057] - Improve game engine simulation and rendering performance