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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#141

Post by reactordev »

paavohtl wrote: post #132
lamontcg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they are also using LOD... as per your article [0]. So it's quite possible (you have the source, go look) that they call this lib with the vertex buffer of the mesh in question and get back an LOD3 mesh that's decimated and simplified but with the projected UV's. This is kinda how Unity wants folks to do "AAA" in Unity. Use a high resolution model and decimate LOD's in real-time like Unreal Engine does. Only, it doesn't work half the time. It requires that the original high poly mesh be properly UV wrapped and not vertex shaded. So to further throw gas on the fire. It's entirely possible instaLOD is the source of a lot of these issues. Combined with what you found in the rendering stages.

[0] https://instalod.com/

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#142

Post by ajmurmann »

cipheredStones wrote: post #124
Someone1234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

Is it only big companies? The fact that many companies in our industry need to do "bug squash" events because we are unable to prioritize bugs properly speaks books to meet.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#143

Post by darklycan51 »

Arelius wrote: post #30
andybak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UE5 isn't some magic pixie dust and Unity isn't a curse from which it is impossible to recover. Whilst some of the issues here are potentially the fault of DOTS and HDRP not being production ready (in combination at least) there's plenty of blame to go around. Elsewhere other people are making gorgeous and performant games in Unity.

Yeah, and city builders have a very unique set of constraints that would prove to be a misfit for most modern off the shelf engines, And remember, despite Epic's efforts, UE is still a first/third person engine at it's core. I wouldn't nr surprised if the challenges using Unreal would be at least as great if they had chosen that.

Stormgate is using Unreal engine just for the graphics and it's doing pretty fine...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#144

Post by capableweb »

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…

The developers of Cities Skylines has less than 50 employees in total, it's a small developer based in Finland (Colossal Order), I doubt they have those sort of issues at that scale, that's usually something that happens with medium/large companies.

Edit: seems I misunderstood, ignore me

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#145

Post by davedx »

rkagerer wrote: post #113
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?

Yes, that. It’s short for “level of detail”.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#146

Post by doikor »

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.

> Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs

There is no terrible performance and the game breaking bugs are very rare (as in none of my ~10 friends who bought the game ran into any of them on their first playthrough). Yes it is a demanding game but it is also one of the best looking games ever made.

Yes the game is demanding if you max out everything but as it runs at 30/60 fps in quality/performance modes on PS5/Xbox Series consoles it does run at those (or better) framerates on PCs very easily.

Only case when you get bad performance is when you use incompatible hardware (old graphics cards without mesh shader support)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#147

Post by dexwiz »

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…

Sounds like every other enterprise software platform. Unity has reach the IBM level of “no one gets fired for choosing X,” even though X only makes the business people happy.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#148

Post by navjack27 »

rkagerer wrote: post #113
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?

Traditionally that is a thing that is done by modelers for video games yes.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#149

Post by wilg »

capableweb wrote: post #144
Someone1234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The developers of Cities Skylines has less than 50 employees in total, it's a small developer based in Finland (Colossal Order), I doubt they have those sort of issues at that scale, that's usually something that happens with medium/large companies. Edit: seems I misunderstood, ignore me

Talking about Unity, not Colossal Order.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#150

Post by Epa095 »

capableweb wrote: post #144
Someone1234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The developers of Cities Skylines has less than 50 employees in total, it's a small developer based in Finland (Colossal Order), I doubt they have those sort of issues at that scale, that's usually something that happens with medium/large companies. Edit: seems I misunderstood, ignore me

Unity, not cities skylines.
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