[QUESTION] Too much work to be done

I'm sorry guys, but this is so frustrating! This game is still under development. It should be clear before we get it. Everytime I seem to find a solution for a problem, another problem comes. Most of my time I've been trying to figure out how the game mechanics work to then not have any solution. Just like now. I started another hospital, to try to not go belly up again. I build a common room inside the pharmacy, which is separated from the hospital main building, so that the worker doesn't leave the store alone most of the time, like he does (when there are 2 workers, both usually leave at the same time, so it's useless to have 2 of them), but workers from all other departments start to come and use. And then the pharmacist starts to leave the pharmacy a lot again. Ended up I just built another for no reason at all. And there's so much more. I think I have like 5 or 6 threads here, this is ridiculous. So why don't you devs work on making the game stable? So that so much foolishness stops happening and we don't need to understand how you programmed the game in order to achieve something.

Example?

You're in the pharmacy. You want to drink some water. There's someone in the restroom or someone that's on the other side of the hospital, that ''reserved'' the spot. Then they take ages to get there. The logic here is: I want to use the toilet, please make a reservation! And when there's someone drinking water, instead of waiting a bit or drinking the other person, as it always happens, my worker preffers to go to the other side of the hospital to drink some water. When are you gonna get those things done? Really. Because how can we play and focus when there's always something or illogical happening?

Even more? The info TV's and queueing system is broken! I can put 2 Info TV's inside the waiting area. If they're not on the same wall, one of them will never start working. Yeah, even though it's in the painted waiting area.

marcellhernandes wrote:Everytime I seem to find a solution for a problem, another problem comes. Most of my time I've been trying to figure out how the game mechanics work.

I personally read that statement as a positive review to this kind of game.

As for your complaints, you are mingling different problems into one, which make them harder to solve. Try and solve then separately and it should be easier.

About pharmacy, putting it outside main building is not really a good idea (forget what those screenshots all around will tell you). Just put it inside your main building, just beside main entrance is the better placement.

As soon as your clinic gets more than a half dozen offices you will definitely need more than a couple workers there, just to keep up with demand, not to mention rest, food and bathroom pauses. In a full fledged hospital, with all clinic and hospitalizations dpts at full swing, you will probably need like about ten manned stations at Pharmacy, specially in the morning, when your overnight hospitalized patients are sent home all at once.

When lay outing it, again forget about those screenshots all around, and also the in-game prefabs. You just need the 3 mandatory pharmaceuticals shelves and a lot of counter/chair pairs. You don't even need chairs for your patients to sit on, since they will come here on their way out of the hospital and will not try to sit (hence getting negative satisfaction). Make sure each counter's chair has the shortest possible beeline to a drug shelf, as the employee will use them to fulfill medicine orders for each coming patient.

Also, try and pay attention to your staff traits - though I'm talking about pharmacy workers here, this hold true to each and every staff you ever hire. Either pay upfront to reveal their hidden traits (the mask icon up-right on hiring card) or micro-manage them after a while as the traits become revealed. Anyone with traits like long commute (sp. on morning shift), fast metabolism, hedonist, alcoholism, bad people skills (the monkey icon), snail moving, etc, should be fired (or not even hired at first place) and have someone else hired on their place. Try to have everyone at skill levels 2 or, even better, 3. That's a huge boost to their productivity.

For services, bathrooms and common rooms, I've found out that assigning about 4 to 5 of well sited large (I go for at least 4x10 floor tiles) rooms of each per floor, managed by admin dpt instead of clinical ones, works better than a lot of little ones distributed to each dpt.

Path finding, as currently implemented, will have people going for the nearest unoccupied "need-filler facility" (first for the ones assigned to their dpt, ignoring nearer ones, then, if not found, to any dpts'), as the birds fly, ignoring intervening walls and doors, so plan accordingly.

About the TV thingie, why would you want more of one of them on each waiting room? They cost money and occupy valuable wall space. They are designed to work in tandem with the little pedestal thing, one pair per waiting room. Better use of the spare wall space is plopping a real TV there, or some cheaper wall posters, so your waiting patients will not get bored.

This still does not touch the problem, that techs in the pharmacy first take lunch/rest/toilet after shift change. To offer a soultion: could a queue function be built into objects so that more than one person can use it? Such a thing is done at the waiting rooms, pharmacy etc. Why not at a water dispenser or toilet? If occupied, the person will wait.
Algorithm could check for nearest first and then look at how many peeps are wating. For each peep it will expand search radius for an identical object and if found, go there. Otherwise, stick at the nearest one and wait there. Long waiting at objects could make angry on top of that (- waited too long for XXX).

Just a solution proposal @ devs - I do not know how this can be implemented or if it is even possible, but could help pathing and avoid strange ways to walk. I think one cause of that behavior is indeed that a near object is blocked AT THE CURRENT MOMENT, so peep goes to another free one. If the same object could be reserved by more than one entity and those will just wait there, all will be fine, won't it?

marcellhernandes wrote:I'm sorry guys, but this is so frustrating! This game is still under development. It should be clear before we get it. Everytime I seem to find a solution for a problem, another problem comes. Most of my time I've been trying to figure out how the game mechanics work to then not have any solution. Just like now. I started another hospital, to try to not go belly up again. I build a common room inside the pharmacy, which is separated from the hospital main building, so that the worker doesn't leave the store alone most of the time, like he does (when there are 2 workers, both usually leave at the same time, so it's useless to have 2 of them), but workers from all other departments start to come and use. And then the pharmacist starts to leave the pharmacy a lot again. Ended up I just built another for no reason at all. And there's so much more. I think I have like 5 or 6 threads here, this is ridiculous. So why don't you devs work on making the game stable? So that so much foolishness stops happening and we don't need to understand how you programmed the game in order to achieve something.

Hi, thanks for the message and sorry you're finding the experience frustrating! While Project Hospital didn't go through Early Access, a lot of work in the 18 months since release has gone into making the user experience smoother, fixing bugs and implementing new features the community suggested before or after the game went live - just check the release notes of any of the recent patches. We still try to fix every single bug (I'll be for example looking at the waiting room screens and let me double check employee's needs at the start of their shift).

Apart from bugs, we're of course aware of some necessary compromises and limitations in the implementation of the basic systems, like in any game - the object reservation could be one example. Unfortunately at this point it's not realistic to completely overhaul any of the core functionality, given how many systems depend on in, also taking in account backwards compatibility of older saves, but we still try to improve the systems wherever possible.

DocDesastro wrote:This still does not touch the problem, that techs in the pharmacy first take lunch/rest/toilet after shift change. To offer a soultion: could a queue function be built into objects so that more than one person can use it? Such a thing is done at the waiting rooms, pharmacy etc. Why not at a water dispenser or toilet? If occupied, the person will wait.
Algorithm could check for nearest first and then look at how many peeps are wating. For each peep it will expand search radius for an identical object and if found, go there. Otherwise, stick at the nearest one and wait there. Long waiting at objects could make angry on top of that (- waited too long for XXX).

Just a solution proposal @ devs - I do not know how this can be implemented or if it is even possible, but could help pathing and avoid strange ways to walk. I think one cause of that behavior is indeed that a near object is blocked AT THE CURRENT MOMENT, so peep goes to another free one. If the same object could be reserved by more than one entity and those will just wait there, all will be fine, won't it?

Hi, thanks for the suggestion - this is actually something we considered in the early stages of development, but it got quickly discarded as too complicated - let me quickly mention a few points as this is a pretty good example: this would require a system of people smartly queuing for objects, not standing at the same spots, moving to the next place in the queue etc. What should the queue look like in confined spaces and around corners? Where should the queue start for each object? Next to it? In front of the closest door if it's a toilet? What if the player built the room completely differently than expected? How should two queues interact with each other?
Implementing something like this would be teoretically possible with a lot of development time and resources, but it probably still wouldn't be perfect and the simple system with reservation is much safer when it comes to possible bugs.

I hope you find this little example interesting!

Thanks, as it lends a bit of insight into your work. I compared it with the waiting rooms and persons there, so I assumed, a queue mechanism was already in place. Being not a developer you might not simply see the problems you might get. This was very educating.

I got a question in that regard: How do the waiting room seats work? We have objects that already can be used by more than one person. As far as I understand it, the game reserves the seat for up to two persons. Would that work for say a water dispenser or vending machine as well?
And could using the waiting room mechanism help with the toilets? Imagine the part of the restroom where the sinks are as 'waiting room'. People go there to wash hands and wait for toilet stalls to be free. Those would act like a doctor's room and 'call' the next person that entered the toilet. Having a complete toilet stall instead of several objects (doors, wall, toilet) could make things a bit simpler for my amateurish view. The stalls would have a 'hidden zoning' that declares them as 'doctor's offices' - with the restroom as 'waiting room'.