Alternate Death Wave Explanation: Glitched Hearses

[Spec. Tater]

As a player who almost never encounters death waves, (over 1000 hours played), I have recently encountered death AND garbage waves frequently!

"Confused" or stuck vehicles suck seem to hit a wall in the road. They stay in one place, blocking traffic and not able to complete missions. Trucks, buses, trains, and other long vehicles move back and forth on their paths (typically, less than the length of the vehicle) , unable to turn around. Smaller vehicles may make endless U-turns, like hearses and garbage trucks.

Vehicles that are stuck do not automatically despawn.

• If trucks fail a mission, they may despawn if the failure results in the abandonment of the vehicle's owner location. Generally, trucks have a short lifespan, so glitched trucks are only a problem when they temporarily block already-heavy traffic.
• Buses can glitch when their routes are severely disrupted by road construction, especially if stops are moved too much.
• Fire trucks (and police?) appear to resolve these issues well - fire trucks that do not arrive at a fire in time will return to their station; police will drive on to the next crime event.
• Garbage trucks are like police - they rarely cause abandonment, and when they do they are usually still in motion and so the game's pathfinding handles a new destination pretty well.

Which brings me to... HEARSES.

• Hearses make prolonged stops at each mission (body pickup), when they return, and when "relocating" bodies. It appears that the pathfinder is far more likely to glitch on a stopped hearse than any other service vehicle.
• Hearses have long missions - 10 bodies to pickup is quite a few - so unlike other vehicles, hearses do not despawn often.
• When a hearse glitches in front of cemetery, it can block traffic, including other hearses. It may also prevent hearses from spawning if they are "trapped" and unable to reach the road.
• There is also a delay in the AI dispatching additional hearses from facilities. This delay is negligible at low population, but above 80-100K, it rises.

Finally, I have noticed that my glitched vehicles may misidentify themselves : glitched trains think they are bicycles or hearses; glitched garbage trucks that think they are trains, etc.

RESULT:
If a glitched vehicle thinks it is a hearse, it appears to SEVERELY interfere with the overall hearse routing routines: new hearses are not dispatched, existing hearses do not get routes altered quickly, and bodies pile up. The result is that death icons spread in an area, even when the closest cemeteries only have 4/15 hearses out.

While this may happen with other service types, it affects hearses the most because hearses have long missions, infrequent despawn, and have more opportunities to glitch. Coupled with the delays in hearse dispatching, and it's very easy to get service failure cascades.

Testing this, I hunt my map for confused and glitched vehicles. Finding and deleting the "Train that thinks its a hearse" usually has a large and rapid effect on overall hearse behavior, citywide.

 

[TotalyMoo]

Would love to hear more about your results in this research, very interesting to see a new angle on this topic.

 

[Pallidum]

If you can find a reproducable case, or a savegame with no or very few mods, where we can easily replicate the glitching behavior, it would hugely benefit us.

 

[Spec. Tater]

Thanks!


My city is over 150K, lots of low density res so it's very spread out. That means that hearses would need be dispatched from one side of town to the other and back, depending on which is "closest", and never complete a mission. So I cut my city into sections, using barriers like rivers, freeways, and green boulevards, and then use the Traffic mods to prohibit hearses from travelling from one section to another. It's not as perfect as the old ARIS mod for districts, but it's good enough. The game is smart enough to not assign missions that the hearses can't reach.

With the divided city, death waves are reduced. I can watch as death waves rage in one section but not another, where they used go go city wide. The difference, I suspect, is greater numbers of hearses and shorter travel distances compared to the hardest hit sections. So clearly, some death-wave behavior is traffic and demand related. Fine.

But in some cases, every section is hit hard - even sections I have deliberately overprovisioned with death services. The culprit is facilities that don't dispatch, despite huge numbers of nearby beige and red skulls: 2/10 or 3/25 is NOT going to get it done.


More evidence of pathing-related failures:

• I've seen glitched hearses cycle thru dozens of potential missions "Picking up from ...<lots of options too fast to read>....".
• Most bodies are picked up long before the first icon appears - if you see the first beige skull icon, there's already something wrong or delayed. Yet I've seen stopped hearses get assigned to an already-warned dead body, pull out of a cemetery, and then wait for 10 seconds before being correctly pathed to the body four blocks away - blocking other hearse traffic in front of the cemetery.

Sadly, I've got way too many mods and assets. Like, 1000+ assets and 50+ mods. Not all are active, but most are. I know that's not helpful from a diagnostic perspective.

I've also tried a variety of different combinations of settings in the "Central Services Dispatcher" mod to address hearses (easily the biggest problem), but nothing resolves the problem of not dispatching sufficient hearses in a timely fashion.

 

[Pallidum]

The game is not designed for divided cities, so that can play into it. Also yes, the amount of mods can definitely affect this.

With a large amount of mods, it's very difficult for us to troubleshoot as we don't know how to reproduce the bug, and we don't know if it's caused by a mod. That unfortunately means that we cannot spend time and effort to try to reproduce the error that might not exist in the unmodded game.

If you can create a reproducible case where this bug occurs in a non-modded city, it's super helpful, as that would allow us to identify the cause of the bug.

 

[Spec. Tater]

After some more research, I found some reports on Reddit of folks whose divided cities failed due to hearses. So I went back and reexamined my city - and with SOME sections it worked, but i think those were sections where the ranges of the "overprovisioned" death services were roughly coterminous with the city divisions.

I still think that delays and hearse spawning are a big problem in death waves. Its a shame that this is not a good fix.

Thanks.

 

[Kakunofuyu]

How exactly do you find and identify agents that misidentify as something they are not? In a big city, that's the needle in the haystack.And what mod do you use to delete those once you found them?

 

[Spec. Tater]

Mostly based on behavior. They are stuck in traffic and confused. They are causing traffic jams. When you get their info, they identify incorrectly.
I use ARIS Remove Stuck Vehicles which lets you remove any vehicle.