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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#61

Post by chc »

mschuster91 wrote: post #43
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Game dev in general is that way, but my impression was that Colossal Order had traditionally been a little better than most. I suppose I may have been mistaken.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#62

Post by solardev »

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.

I think their reviews are punishment enough. "Very Positive" for CS:1 and "Mixed" for CS:2. And if it improves over time, the reviews improve with them!

Cyberpunk was a good example of that. And the graphs make it really easy to see how it's changed over time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/#a...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#64

Post by wetpaws »

Xeamek wrote: post #33
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

[dead]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#65

Post by FireBeyond »

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.

> makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too.

Agreed. There's such a whole world of unreported 'sponsored' or otherwise products, and streaming is a big part of it. And no-one is immune.

When the cheesegrater Mac Pro came out, I watched a lot of videos on it, particularly on YouTube in the photo/video segment - I was planning to get one, and while I had other uses for it, I'd be doing a lot of photo work on it in my recreational time.

Quickly I noticed just how many of the big name streamers had launch day or very early access to the Mac Pro and Pro Display. Sure.

And then I noticed how each and every one spun it as "I just got mine", "just bought one", and so forth. All organic, they'd have you believe - not a single one said "Apple sent me this". And yet...

By "a curious coincidence", every single one had seemingly ordered the exact same spec: an 18 core CPU, 384GB of memory, the Vega II Duo GPU, and 8TB SSD, and the nano-textured ProDisplay.

So what, you might think, that might have been the quickest shipping order. Also an $18,000+ computer, $25K with the display.

And if you're a photographer, even if you're working on medium format digital, and 100MP images, you in no way shape or form need 384GB of memory, or that GPU. For me, LightRoom / Capture One and Photoshop all barely sweated on my 12 core 192GB W5700X variant.

So then Occam's Razor applies. What are the odds that, even of just the 8-10 streamers I watch, they all got exactly the same spec Mac? Or is it that that was the spec Apple was sending to high popularity streamers?

Except not a single one even implied that that might have been the case. And I don't doubt that many or all bought their own at some point. But I suspect it was mostly "got one from Apple, talked it up, and then substituted it with my own when it arrived".

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#66

Post by rychco »

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? There's already a hardware survey & they could easily have an opt-in system that reports the user's average framerate while playing games. If the average hardware specs can't run that game >=60fps >=90% of the time on any graphical setting then it's beyond fair to give it a "Hardware reports indicate that this game performs poorly" label.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#67

Post by hypeatei »

chc wrote: post #53
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.

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

True. Marking it early access would just save more peoples time and be more explicit about the current state of the game.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#68

Post by jrajav »

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.

Read the reviews and don't buy it. This works fantastically as a punishment already without ham-handed, opaque moderation.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#69

Post by capableweb »

Havoc wrote: post #63

The odd thing is I doubt a single sky line fan thought “what this really needs is graphics so intensive I can’t build a big city” It’s remarkably tone deaf

I also doubt any of the developers were aiming for that too.

I've been looking through the decompiled code for the purposes of modding for the last few days, wrapping my head around their ECS/DOTS code, and the game has a much better foundation for a scalable simulation than CS1 ever had, even after years of optimizations.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#70

Post by Pannoniae »

capableweb wrote: post #52
Pannoniae wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Directly from the article:

"The last remaining draw calls are used to render all of the different UI elements, both the ones that are drawn into the world as well as the more traditional UI elements like the bottom bar and other controls. Quite a lot of draw calls are used for the Gameface-powered UI elements, though ultimately these calls are very fast compared to the rest of the rendering process. "

With this minimalistic, flat-style soulless UI, the correct number of draw calls spent on UI should be single digits....

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