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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#121

Post by lyu07282 »

rstat1 wrote: post #90
capableweb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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." Literally quoted from the article. Standard 2D UI like that can be done in as little a single draw call (or so I have read, never actually done it)

If you composite on the CPU I guess? no that React/Webpack UI is actually a pretty good solution to complex game UIs. It offers great DX while the performance penalty is miniscule compared to a huge deferred render pipeline. Btw the last Sim City used the web platform for UI too.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#122

Post by davedx »

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.

This old chestnut again.

Software is not “essentially a beta” because it doesn’t meet a bunch of entitled users’ arbitrary definitions of “finished”.

A game having some performance issues doesn’t mean you’re a beta tester.

Did you even buy this game? I suspect not.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#123

Post by lamontcg »

capableweb wrote: post #69
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.

What probably happened is that certain dev teams built ridiculous things on top of the ECS/DOTS code to see how much they could push the detail. So you wound up with things like the teeth. Which was probably some internal demo-driven development that everyone 'wow'd at the fact that it could be done. Times 100x or something like that. With nobody owning overall performance or whoever owned the overall performance didn't have any management support before launch because it was deprioritized. Nobody gets promoted for ripping out someone else's perf-expensive features and being the bad guy, you get promoted for building new clever features on top of the shiny new engine.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#124

Post by cipheredStones »

Someone1234 wrote: post #92
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 makes one wonder what their internal employee incentives are and if they're problematic. Microsoft has a similar problem where nobody gets promoted from fixing bugs or maintaining stuff, everyone gets rewarded for new innovative [thing] so every two-three years there's a completely new UI framework or similar. Although I feel like wanting to start-a-new is a common tech problem, where there are problems and everyo…

> Microsoft has a similar problem where nobody gets promoted from fixing bugs or maintaining stuff, everyone gets rewarded for new innovative [thing] so every two-three years there's a completely new UI framework or similar.

Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true? I feel like it's just a rule of corporate culture that flashy overpromising projects get you promoted and regularly doing important but mundane and hard-to-measure things gets you PIP'd.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#125

Post by Zetobal »

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…

The last one wasn't better either... most games nowadays have game breaking bugs at launch.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#126

Post by davedx »

worldsayshi wrote: post #104
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.

I wonder if releasing a widely anticipated game unfinished is sometimes actually strategically beneficial marketing wise. Perhaps it's a marketing dark pattern? It makes the game stay in people's minds longer because people keep coming back to it asking "is it good yet, have they fixed it yet?". It kind of feels it has worked like that for Cyberpunk. If it's a finished game on launch day people will quickly make up t…

But it’s not “half finished”!

It has some performance issues. Not the same thing.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#127

Post by jokethrowaway »

ajmurmann wrote: post #97
kossTKR wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. Who is gonna prioritize that? Engineers likely have no discretionary time left and are even working weekends. Even on a web project I've been on, I had PM complaint every meeting about loading times of a admin interface. I told them every time that they should than prioritize the pagination ticket I had written. After a months of this shit, I took time out of my Saturday and just added it. I wouldn't have done…

Working overtime is just insane to me. Why can't you just ignore the PM and do it during normal hours?

What are they going to do? Fire you?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#128

Post by geraldhh »

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.

market forces ...

but yea, source2 engine could have used some more love before going live

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#129

Post by [deleted] »

solardev wrote: post #91
dvaletin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which only incentivize companies to publish unfinished products with “will fix it later” ideology.

Is that a big deal? That's easy to avoid if you don't pre-order games and just wait for the day 1 reviews. Even if you did end up with a shitty situation, Steam lets you refund the games with minimal hassle. On the other hand, there are players who'd rather have the game earlier (like me) than a few months later, despite its launch issues. The alternative approach -- Baldur's Gate 3 being in Early Access forever -- i…

[deleted]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#130

Post by madeofpalk »

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.

Internet now is full of non-journalists ("content creators") producing what people substitute for journalism.
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