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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#191

Post by brucethemoose2 »

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 there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true?

Valve?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#192

Post by piaste »

throw3823423 wrote: post #158
cipheredStones wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's a matter of letting things degrade so that the maintenance becomes outright firefighting. I am currently working on a project where a processing pipeline has a maximum practical throughput of 1x, and a median day's for said pipeline is... 0.95x. So any outage becomes unrecoverable. Getting that project approved 6 month from now would have been basically impossible. Right now, it's valued at a promotion-level dif…

Intuitively, "fixing life-or-death disasterss is more visible and gets better rewards than preventing them" doesn't seem like it should be a unique problem of software engineering. Any engineering or technical discipline, executed as part of a large company, ought to have the potential for this particular dysfunction.

So I wonder: do the same dynamics appear in any non-software companies? If not, why not? If yes, have they already found a way to solve them?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#193

Post by stouset »

theNJR wrote: post #139

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 goin…

I’m also loving the game. There are a few issues, and performance could be better, but all in all it feels like a really nice entry with solid bones that should lead towards most of these issues being resolved with far less effort than—say—Cyberpunk.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#194

Post by [deleted] »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #138
Xeamek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#196

Post by bigstrat2003 »

theNJR wrote: post #139

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 goin…

The complaints are valid to some extent, but also overblown too. People complaining that 30-50 FPS is unplayable need to get some perspective on what is and is not playable. And even the article here drops some hot hyperbole when it says that the game runs worse than CP2077 with max settings and path tracing. I've run (tried to run) CP in such a configuration, and I get framerates in the teens. By contrast I haven't actually bothered to measure the framerate in CS2 because it's perfectly smooth for me.

I'm all for holding developers accountable for flawed games, but the level of negative hyperbole around CS2 has been a real stain on the community.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#197

Post by capableweb »

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?

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

Back in the day, games just had one version of each model, that gets loaded or not.

Nowadays, games with lots of models and huge amount of detail lets each model have multiple different versions, with their own LOD (Level of Detail).

So if you see a tree from far away, it might be 20 vertices because you're far away from it so you wouldn't see the details anyways. But if you're right next to it, it might have 20,000 vertices instead.

It's an optimization technique to not send too much geometry to the GPU.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#198

Post by timeon »

This is not about performance but I find the example to have unrealistic design.

The 'city' in the article has population of 1000. That would be village where I live - but it is drown in pretty wide roads and huge amount of parking places.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#199

Post by moffkalast »

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…

I think it's a good thing in the long run, one more reason to switch away from Unity to add to the ever growing pile.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#200

Post by ajmurmann »

mschuster91 wrote: post #174
ajmurmann wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What won't happen?

As long as the government doesn't ban employing people for 12 hours and more straight for weeks, and actually enforces that ban, there will always be enough employers doing so, and enough people willing to go through with it "for the credits".

Especially in am industry that sees depressed wages because it's the dream job for many.

I'm still not sure what from my original statement won't happen.

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