Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

blog.paavo.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 593 posts

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#131

Post by ajmurmann »

Pannoniae wrote: post #111
habinero wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

As scope increases all the organizational challenges balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous project and ready for the next phase of this new project to get to where you need them to start design levels and assets? It's much easier to fix if the additional 3 month of development is just 3 months cost of living for John Romero and John Carmack.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#132

Post by paavohtl »

lamontcg wrote: post #123
capableweb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did…

> So you wound up with things like the teeth.

Author here. The teeth are completely unrelated to the simulation and not even really related to pushing maximum graphical fidelity. They are just using completely unoptimized - possibly stock - character models, which include a mouth with teeth even thought the characters never open their mouths.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#133

Post by FireBeyond »

zf00002 wrote: post #117
FireBeyond wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Those would be somewhat better if they made a point (I've seen some in the photography world do it with smaller things) of "and after I go through a review, I'm going to give it away to a viewer/follower..."

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#134

Post by lamontcg »

capableweb wrote: post #60
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.

100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet.

But that means that everything is solvable. There's no need in this game for 100,000 vertices for a logpile, so that should be a relatively straightforward task to fix. And someone can rip out all the teeth and put "Principal Tooth Extraction Engineer" on their resume.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#135

Post by 4gotunameagain »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #105

100,000 vertices for a pile of logs and 10,000 for teeth inside a characters head is hilarious. It blows me away how bad everyone is at their jobs. Imagine spending all day working on something and then you just make it garbage.

Now that's a bit harsh. You don't know what is going on inside that company, and under what environment the development happened.

This all could easily stem from a couple of key people leaving and chaos breaking loose, or from extreme time pressure by the publishers.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#136

Post by huytersd »

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

No, we can have both things. Graphics are incredibly important to a game, especially for a simulator like this, it really helps with the immersion. It’s as important as gameplay.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#137

Post by coldcode »

Any time you try to do something complex you have to start with the state of the art at the beginning of development time; like in this case, you might have to use something not quite ready for prime time, hoping it will improve enough during development. If it doesn't, you have to roll your own, which is often hard to do since you didn't start out that way. I worked on a MMO game engine 10 years after it was released years too early, it was still loaded with horrific code and architecture that was hard to correct or improve since we still had to ship regularly. The engine was designed (if you can call it that) in 1998 and was entirely too complex for that era.

If you only stick to the mature tech, then you may wind up being potentially unable to even produce your (advanced) game. It's always a challenging tradeoff. As long as the game is playable and you make enough to continue improving you might be OK; but of course you might go belly up before you fix it enough.

By the time CS2 makes it to Mac, it might be improved enough to actually play!

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#138

Post by jokethrowaway »

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

The rendering pipeline for DOTS is incomplete.

The studio had to implement it.

Sounds serious enough to try something else, especially given Unreal has Nanite. I think on the ECS side they're lagging behind though

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#139

Post by theNJR »

While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s going on with the tram line.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#140

Post by waveBidder »

tlonny wrote: post #103
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…

> I long for the days of a tuned, polished game engine squeezing every inch of performance out of your PC. Have you heard of Factorio :)

how do they keep finding things to improve in their FridayFunFacts? the fame is an absolute gem
Post reply on HN