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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#31

Post by notahacker »

solardev wrote: post #14
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #3

I don't play videogames, but I am familiar with famous titles like this one. I would have loved to see something really bold, such as Cities set in Venice, and the task is to revamp the city. More interesting, instead of cars, cars, cars...

You might be more interested in the Anno series then, of which 1800 is the most recent release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_1800 It's set in the early industrial era, so a lot of sails and rails and small colonies exporting things all over. I can't remember if there are cars yet, but if there are, it's not a major focus. Some of the levels have you revamping existing towns, while others let you start from scra…

I'd love to see something with the flexibility and sandbox nature of Skylines and the historic themes of the Anno series (which has pretty graphics but is ultimately tied to a grid and more about sticking buildings on the right tiles to maximise efficiency than worldbuilding)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#32

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

It's kind of stunning that a game of this magnitude is able to go out the door without model LOD.

I suppose the fact that it runs at all is stunning -- surely you could not get away with this a decade or two ago -- but perhaps it speaks to the incredible capabilities of modern hardware. This feels a bit similar to the Electron criticism, where convenience ultimately trumps performance, and users ultimately don't care. I wonder how this will play out in the long run.

Bizarre and at least for me, equally sad. I long for the days of a tuned, polished game engine squeezing every inch of performance out of your PC.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#33

Post by Xeamek »

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…

What makes You claim that game like this can't be made in Unity?

Cause honestly this sound like the typical "Unity bad, UE with their flashy trailers good". But maybe You actually do have a valid reasoning, please share it then

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#34

Post by andybak »

Arelius wrote: post #30
andybak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DOTS was actually a perfect fit for complex simulations (and the article hinted that it probably had a positive effect on CPU usage)

All the issues are around rendering and HDRP - which by the sound of things is still not properly integrated with DOTS.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#35

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

kossTKR wrote: post #26

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 sim…

I typed something very similar in parallel with you. Guess the engineering typically required is no more? At least not here.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#36

Post by Arelius »

BillFranklin wrote: post #25
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.

What is that comparing? Beware of sampling mismatch. Due to Unreal's use in AA and AAA and the size of those teams, I wouldn't be surprised to see the statistics reversed when you limit the talent pool to the set of people you need.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#37

Post by Pannoniae »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #32

It's kind of stunning that a game of this magnitude is able to go out the door without model LOD. I suppose the fact that it runs at all is stunning -- surely you could not get away with this a decade or two ago -- but perhaps it speaks to the incredible capabilities of modern hardware. This feels a bit similar to the Electron criticism, where convenience ultimately trumps performance, and users ultimately don't care…

Don't forget the part where they use web tech and waste draw calls like crazy on the UI. These things should literally be banned.

edit: not web tech should be banned, but releasing a game with horrible optimisation like this, either by the store selling the game or by the law

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#38

Post by capableweb »

BillFranklin wrote: post #25
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.

I don't think was a huge concern for Colossal Order (the developer of Cities: Skylines) as the team is very tiny and they're not trying to grow like crazy. Seems they're happy being a smaller studio, so having 100,000 Unity devs available on the market VS 10,000 Unreal Engine devs makes less of a different (numbers made up, don't quote me on those)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#40

Post by Arelius »

andybak wrote: post #34
Arelius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DOTS was actually a perfect fit for complex simulations (and the article hinted that it probably had a positive effect on CPU usage) All the issues are around rendering and HDRP - which by the sound of things is still not properly integrated with DOTS.

Fair enough, but Unreal's Renderer isn't the best fit for this sort of game either.

And their data based ecss is still behind DOTS for simulation last I checked

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