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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#201

Post by Arelius »

darklycan51 wrote: post #143
Arelius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm not sure that's super relevant.

Firstly, just because they can use Unreal doesnt mean that it isn't causing problems, even you state that they are using it juat for their graphics which inplies challenges.

It's a completely different game by a completely different team. And it doesn't appear to be released yet. So it seems very premature to be judging it based on runtime performance..

Now, personally, I would choose yo build an RTS l/Builder in Unreal over Unity over time. But that's almost entirely due to my experience with Unity the company and their antagonistic incentives towards their developers, and the ease in which it is to get source access and little to do with technical engine fit. Honestly, in my professional opinion, the design of Unity is more flexible in this regard, and I'd consider it a reasonable decision to try to use Unity from a technical engine design POV.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#202

Post by dmoy »

piaste wrote: post #192
throw3823423 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, hav…

> If yes, have they already found a way to solve them?

A long history of blood, lawsuits, and regulations.

Preventing a building from collapsing is done ahead of time, because buildings have previously collapsed, and cost a lot of lives / money etc.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#204

Post by Dalewyn »

adventured wrote: post #96
bhaak wrote: post #78

Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? And only the former gets somewhat addressed over time. I really wonder how they develop at that place. And what kind of QS they have.I think even applying a crude pareto would improve their games a lot. Edit: I stand corrected. I wasn't aware that Paradox is also a publisher and even such a big company (over 600 employees!).…

> Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? It's not a Paradox game, they're the publisher. Colossal Order is the developer. It's a small developer out of Finland, 30-50 employees.

It has or will have twelve dozen DLCs or more, so it's a Paradox game.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#205

Post by wincy »

solardev wrote: post #62
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 think their reviews are punishment enough. "Very Positive" for CS:1 and "Mixed" for CS:2. And if it improves over time, the reviews improve with them! Cyberpunk was a good example of that. And the graphs make it really easy to see how it's changed over time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/#a...

Okay for real, who decided this game could be have the acronym CS? Counterstrike has been one of the most played games since 2000. I don’t even play Counterstrike but it has a huge player base compared to this game. And didn’t Counterstrike 2 literally come out a few weeks ago?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#206

Post by gorbachev »

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.

It's always been like this. Long before streamers got involved. Video game magazines (the paper ones...remember those?) had the same exact process for reviews. Game publishers expected certain things in return for access to future game releases and most video game magazines cooperated.

Every two years or so there was a scandal about either reviewers calling out a game publisher about the bullshit, or a widespread backlash against obviously lacking reviews.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#207

Post by solardev »

JCharante wrote: post #180
solardev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty playable on GeForce Now, for what it's worth. Still a big laggy, but I was able to play for many hours without major issues... just the occasionally annoying but livable stutter.

GeForce Now has been amazing as a mac only user

Same.

I have a M2 Max and GFN is much much easier than trying to set something up with GPT (Game Porting Toolkit) and Whisky, and much faster & quieter too. An RTX 4080 running in their data center means no local heat and noise.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#208

Post by clnq »

imiric wrote: post #112
QuickMinuteOats wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't buy that excuse.

This means you are, sadly, very uninformed. There is a lot of rolling with the punches in the games industry, and many engineers want to optimize things more, and work OT to do so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to do this in AAA space on company time).

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#209

Post by Dalewyn »

joe_guy wrote: post #94
hypeatei wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early access is not a "punishment" though. It's a system that already exists on Steam.

But when used in the way you're describing, valve forcing it in a developer instead of a developer opting in, it becomes a form of punishment.

Early Access is a "punishment" purely because game devs and publishers use it as an excuse to sell incomplete, broken products.

The terrible reputation is self-inflicted and deserved.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#210

Post by izacus »

bhaak wrote: post #78

Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? And only the former gets somewhat addressed over time. I really wonder how they develop at that place. And what kind of QS they have.I think even applying a crude pareto would improve their games a lot. Edit: I stand corrected. I wasn't aware that Paradox is also a publisher and even such a big company (over 600 employees!).…

Most of them.
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