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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#111

Post by Pannoniae »

habinero wrote: post #100
Pannoniae wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bui…

Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features. Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have. Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected. It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know. But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see. If y…

I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to manage it.

It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in making an actually playable game, which indicates that the problem is not something inherent but a simple product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see Creative Assembly's meltdown)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#112

Post by imiric »

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 don't buy that excuse. To me it seems more like game developers have become complacent with the powerful hardware consumers have at their disposal, especially on PCs, and the fact they can always push fixes after the release. Decades ago it used to be a major milestone when a game "went gold". It meant QA was successful and that the game was fully playable. Budget and deadlines also existed back then, but there was (usually) much more care taken to ensure a good gaming experience, regardless of the hardware. Saying that only a few companies can do this successfully today is excusing objectively bad development practices.

Consumers should vote with their wallet, and stop preordering and falling for preorder bonuses and marketing hype, which is another disease affecting modern gaming. Unfortunately, publishers know that they can release a lackluster product based on hype alone (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077), and then spend years "polishing" a game into a state they promised before the initial release. The modern gaming industry is rife with scams like these to the point that it should be heavily regulated. So, no, none of these companies can be excused for releasing a garbage product and charging full price for it.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#113

Post by rkagerer »

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…

Can someone expand on exactly what is meant by "model LOD" in this context?

Does the commenter mean they should have implemented a system to reduce texture resolution or polygon count dynamically, eg. depending on what's in view or how far away it is? That the artists should have made multiple version of assets with coarse variants removing things like computer cables from desks in buildings?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#114

Post by vGPU »

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…

Sure, but this is Paradox, a company that constantly makes buckets of money on DLC for Stellaris, Europa universalis, crusader kings, etc. I doubt they were about to run out of money. They just had to release a new race of scantily dressed aliens for stellaris and they’d be good for another half a year.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#115

Post by jokethrowaway »

capableweb wrote: post #74
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…

> 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. Correction: React/Web technlogy is responsible for all the UI, from the loading screens to in-game labels when using road tools and everything in-between. And their implementation of Coherent Gameface is not the reason for the performa…

I think parent meant to imply there is a similarly wasteful culture in frontend development so of course they'd use react for menus and labels.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#116

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

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.

Really? Shipping logs with 100k vertices and people with individually rendered teeth is an "obvious budget and deadlines" issue?

It strikes me as a "how many idiots are in a position to make important decisions on this game" issue, or "how generally competent is the development team" issue.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#117

Post by zf00002 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #65
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 o…

I've been getting into sim racing lately and a majority of the youtube reviewers do this thing where they claim it's not a sponsored video but the company sent them the product for free. And that's the same problem when it was magazines publishing glowing reviews of mediocre products just so the gravy train of free stuff doesn't end.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#118

Post by solardev »

notahacker wrote: post #31
solardev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

PS: 1800 is free this weekend, if you wanna try it https://store.steampowered.com/app/916440/Anno_1800/

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#119

Post by chc »

solardev wrote: post #55
mrkeen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Cities: Skylines was sort of a follow-up to Cities In Motion, which was entirely about transportation, so that's a very essential part of its DNA.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#120

Post by tus666 »

wilg wrote: post #77

It sounds like these issues are relatively fixable. It's a classic victim of the Unity engine's tech debt though. I use Unity myself and they desperately need to decide on how they want people to make video games in their engine. They can't have three rendering pipelines and two ways of adding game logic that have a complicated matrix of interactions and missing features. And not great documentation and a bad bug rep…

It's a classic victim of shitty, shitty software developers who blames tools rather than taking ownership.

Or shitty software dev companies that push out crap to meet marketing deadlines.

Either way, take your money elsewhere.

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