Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#51

Post by kossTKR » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

QuickMinuteOats wrote: post #42

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…

Pardon the snark, but the answer should be obvious: budget and deadlines. Producing well-optimized, “clever” code usually requires magnitudes of more time than the simplest, quickest solution. Hobbyists line yourself, and a few companies like Nintendo, are typically the only ones that can afford to spend time optimizing like you describe.

I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove the teeth in one go.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#52

Post by capableweb » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #37

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

Where are you getting this from? I'm literally sitting with the game open right now with the Chrome Devtools connected to it, and I'm seeing no unnecessary modifications on the DOM side of things.

Could be that the integrated the Gameface library incorrectly I guess? Still interested in more details from you.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#53

Post by chc » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

hypeatei wrote: post #47

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…

Valve/Steam should really have some policies around unfinished or unpolished games so that they are forced to be marked as "early access" It is absolutely ridiculous that these developers can get away with releasing a beta (essentially what it is) and setting the full release price without the end user knowing they're a guinea pig.

They let you return the game no questions asked if you haven't played it for two hours.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#54

Post by athorax » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

hypeatei wrote: post #47

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…

Valve/Steam should really have some policies around unfinished or unpolished games so that they are forced to be marked as "early access" It is absolutely ridiculous that these developers can get away with releasing a beta (essentially what it is) and setting the full release price without the end user knowing they're a guinea pig.

Valve/steam should absolutely not be doing that

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#55

Post by solardev » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #16

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...

I heard about city simulator games modelling the number of carparks they'd need before deciding to scrap them instead. If they left them in, it would have been a fun challenge to minimise them. https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/9/4316222/simcity-lead-desig...

Parking and traffic is actually a big deal in Cities: Skylines too, both 1 and especially 2. Traffic will make a lot of areas harder to get to.

The second game adds parking lots of various sizes, parking structures both underground and above ground, etc. But it also encourages you to build alternative public transportation like buses, trolleys, trains, metros, etc. (Sadly no bicycles in the 2nd game yet).

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#56

Post by Pannoniae » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #44

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…

> 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? Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest…

They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch.

In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management, economy or politics is a joke)

This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#57

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #49

mschuster91 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay peanuts get monkeys. Game dev has been infamous for taking in young, fresh college graduates, promise them "credits" and "fun life" and then run them through the grinder for shit pay. And eventually, even those who survived the grinder and ended up living long enough to become seniors burn out, and that's how you get this kind of clusterfuck in the end. Game dev seriously needs to follow the VFX industry and unio…

Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Insulting engineers and describing them as "monkeys" because you are unaware of businesses function is quite unwarranted. "Real engineers" need to take a real look at themselves!

"Pay peanuts get monkeys" is a proverb.

> Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut.

Won't happen. The US barely has any employment laws, and so do many other countries of the world.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#58

Post by capableweb » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

rychco wrote: post #39

Much like Cyberpunk on it's release, this will hopefully be de-listed from the various digital storefronts & all customers issued a refund in full.

Unlikely. The game actually does run, even though it has performance issues and bugs. Cyberpunk barely ran on the PS4 when it launched.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#59

Post by hypeatei » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

athorax wrote: post #54

hypeatei wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve/Steam should really have some policies around unfinished or unpolished games so that they are forced to be marked as "early access" It is absolutely ridiculous that these developers can get away with releasing a beta (essentially what it is) and setting the full release price without the end user knowing they're a guinea pig.

Valve/steam should absolutely not be doing that

Why not? They're still able to list the game and sell it.

I don't see the issue with making it more clear to end users that they're beta testing a game.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#60

Post by capableweb » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #28

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.

I think the guess in the article is pretty close to the truth, I've seen stuff like that happen countless of times. You make a bet on a early technology (Unity DOTS + ECS in this case) which gives you a lot of benefits but also, it's immature enough that you get a bunch of additional work to do, and you barely have time to get everything in place before publisher forces you to follow the initial deadline.