Have you actually done this yourself? It does not seem like it, because you would have seen that one core is not maxed out. Instead you would see that some cores being used more than others and multiple cores being used. FS is what we could consider a basic multi-core engine that is inline with most other multi-core engines. There are other elements that could potentially be taken further, like AI workers running not on the main thread, but you get into an issue of high complexity, development cost vs what reward.
Who are these people struggling to hit a stable 60 FPS with the hardware you mentioned? They don’t exist, unless they are pushing the game well beyond its limits with ridiculous numbers of bales and equipment items and using mods that are “polybombs”.Everyone cares about performance. There's a difference between the "smooth" framerate which is >60FPS and a slideshow at 5FPS.
I always see people defending the "single-core" utilization from by saying that it's because the game has to run on everything. If that's the case, then why do people with Ryzen 9s and RTX 3000 cards struggle to hit stable 60+FPS ?
The engine is already multi-core and apart from the CPU being an issue when you have a large number of workers going, it’s not particularly heavy on the CPU. Getting further multi-core support into the engine has basically nothing to do with the slot system. Even if the game was 100% optimised for multi core, there still would be a slot system. The only game other there right now that is close to being 100% multi-core optimised is Doom Eternal. Unfortunately ID Tech 7 does not have the features to create a farming game.
Also, wouldn't they want to target the biggest market and cater to their optimization ?
According to the Steam Hardware Survey, 41,40% of players have 4 core CPUs, followed by 29,27% who have 6 core CPUs.
Yet GIANTS caters to the 1 core CPU playerbase, which is 0,21%
But, going back to your banal interpretation of statistics, every computer with 4 cores, or more, has 1 core. So by targeting 1 core one is actually targeting 100% of users.
Great. I created a racing game on my ZX Spectrum in 1989 and I built a shed for my tractor in 2014. I am not sure what my racing game, shed or World of Tanks have to do with a farming game though, but I figured you were reminiscing about things that happened, so I decided to join in.Wargaming - creators of World of Tanks had reworked their engine in 2018, adding multicore support
The density map system keeps details of the world in chunks of 0.5x0.5 metres. This is what allows the player the create fields, plant crops, fertilise them and so forth. Technically speaking it is an incredibly well designed and thought-out system from a speed and functionality point of view and I don’t think that enough players appreciate what the system is capable of, considering how much information is stored and how quickly it can be accessed, updated and synched between multiplayer connections. The updating of the growth does happen in chunks of around 16x16 metres and hence why you see the “Minecraft squares”. That does not mean that the information is stored at that density. Doing the updates at the actual density of 0.5 metres squared would take too long, hence why the game engine was OPTIMISED to work like this.
That is simply not true. Farming Simulator has the world split into chunks and each chunk keeps only a few variables stored due to low complexity of the game. That is also why the game's fields look like Minecraft - you can see each "square" change state during the groth phase. Have you never seen half of a field ready to harvest and the other still green in FS ?
Also, FS doesn't even render things that far. Take a look around your tractor, do you see the circle around it, where in a greater distance there's no detail ? That's a spotlight effect caused by the old engine that struggles to render past it. NPC cars simply disappear over a long distance as well. If you want to compare NPC daily tasks and keeping track of them, take a look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance where each NPC has their own daily routine and quests can contiune even without the player.
Like I’ve said before, there is no other engine out there that can render the amount of crops and keep all of the details that a farming game requires. KDC is an awesome game that is still poorly optimised performance wise. Because of the amount of agents that it has to keep track of, it is particularly heavy and taxing on the CPU. FS is not.