Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#21

Post by solardev » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

darklycan51 wrote: post #6

Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…

This is a sequel to Cities: Skylines 1, which was also written in Unity. It was probably easier to reuse code (and personnel) for the sequel without switching to a totally different engine?

Maybe for CS:3 :)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#22

Post by solardev » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #15

solardev wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Wake 2 looks a lot better, though. From the article: > As a comparison similar hardware in Alan Wake 2 — which was released the same week as C:S2 and is considered by some to be the best looking game of this console generation — reaches comparable average framerates with all settings cranked including path tracing, either at 1440p without any upscaling magic or at 4K with some help from DLSS. I think that’s a go…

This is why steam reviews are nice. It's fine to review something negative out of the gate and review it more favorably once it's in better shape. This helps other people more than rating it positively.

Yeah, I love the review score histogram over time feature too, along with the "Overall reviews" vs "Recent reviews" summaries.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#23

Post by wilde » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:31 PM UTC

darklycan51 wrote: post #6

Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…

It is very possible to make a game that runs like shit in Unreal. Immortals of Aveum comes to mind.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#24

Post by spoonjim » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

darklycan51 wrote: post #6

Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…

> When did the gaming industry become a place where what people inside the company want matters more than the end user?

Happened everywhere. Now if you run an intense company where people are expected to work hard towards ambitious goals or be fired, you’re “toxic”

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#25

Post by BillFranklin » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

darklycan51 wrote: post #6

Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…

The model LOD issues described in the article can be fixed without changing engine. It's slightly easier to hire Unity devs to work around Unity issues vs hiring Unreal devs because there are many more Unity devs (Unreal has 13% of the market). Plus Unreal takes a 5% royalty fee on all sales, vs a flat fee for using the Unity engine.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#26

Post by kossTKR » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

This is everything wrong with both (sweatshop) games and programming!

This is 180 of how people programmed for the older consoles in the most fun and creative ways to squeeze the most out of smaller hardware.

Take a look at this for comparison:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/war-stories-how-crash...

Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus.

I absolutely hate this way of doing things, because for me all art, all engineering, all creativity is about boundaries, dogmas, and squeezing and optimising the hell out of your _elegant_ systems.

I mean even in my small webgl/threejs projects the fun part was getting every last bit of eye candy out of the smallest file sizes i could, simplifying geometry, lowering resolution, while maintaining great looks.

100k vertice log piles and hundreds of people with teeth?

Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Is it 100% shitty work conditions? How could single devs and small studios create relatively large games with love 20 years ago for small money?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#27

Post by purpleflame1257 » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

> Quite a few YouTubers and streamers got early access to the game, but they were explicitly forbidden to talk about performance until the regular review embargo was lifted. This, along with games like Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs, makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too.

Gamergate, to a certain extent, was indeed about ethics in game journalism. It just got hijacked into culture war bullshit like everything else.

But who cares? As long as the sheep keep preordering the music won't stop.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#28

Post by CooCooCaCha » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

I hope these issues come from the game being rushed and not from a lack of rendering expertise.

Luckily it seems like there are pretty simple reasons for the poor performance so I'm hopeful they can at least do something even if they don't have a ton of rendering expertise.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#29

Post by raytopia » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

darklycan51 wrote: post #6

Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…

UE5 is no magic bullet.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#30

Post by Arelius » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #20

darklycan51 wrote: post #6

Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…

UE5 isn't some magic pixie dust and Unity isn't a curse from which it is impossible to recover. Whilst some of the issues here are potentially the fault of DOTS and HDRP not being production ready (in combination at least) there's plenty of blame to go around. Elsewhere other people are making gorgeous and performant games in Unity.

Yeah, and city builders have a very unique set of constraints that would prove to be a misfit for most modern off the shelf engines,

And remember, despite Epic's efforts, UE is still a first/third person engine at it's core. I wouldn't nr surprised if the challenges using Unreal would be at least as great if they had chosen that.