Does the game have a campaign mode yet? I'm desperate. I loved C:S 1 for a few hours and then had nothing to do. Just need some kind of challenge mode and I'd be hooked for life.
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
211–220 of 593 posts
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#212Perf issues also basically killed the SimCity franchise on PC. Hope they are able to fix things up
That's a huge misrepresentation of what happened to SimCity. EA released a incredibly user-hostile version of SimCity (always online, microtransations and more) that almost no one liked, and Cities: Skylines was released around that time too.
I bought both when they came out, and the user hostile stuff didn't bother me at all. What killed sim city was most definitely the performance issues. Unless they had a better reason for restricting the maximum city size.
And then the fact that skylines had both a larger play area and more fancy city building features was just the killing blow.
EA got caught out, thinking they could leisurely bring out an inferior product, when a competitor emerged guns blazing.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#213Why 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…
I would argue that UE5 is even less suited to a game like this than Unity is. Unreal certainly has impressive rendering tech, and it has designs towards increasingly becoming a generalist engine, but it is clearly designed with certain genres in mind (i.e. 1st and 3rd person games like RPGs, Shooters, Action games, etc.). A city-builder in UE5 would present a whole host of other challenges, and many of the high-tech…
This for sure.
City builders, and certain classes of RTS are really the last major forms of games that really are very poor fits for modern off the shelf engines.
Honestly, trying to build one in either Unreal or Unity is going to be a painful experience with challenges likely surpassing having just built the engine you need in the first place.
But Engine selection is really only a technical decision less then half the time these days anyways.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Heh, good point.
Also, I really wish Apple chose some other name for its Game Porting Toolkit... hard to find relevant discussions in the sea of "other" GPT talk.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#215> 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.
I’m running Alan Wake 2 on an RTX 3080 with a 7800X3D and the first few sections in the forest (don’t think describing forest scenes in Alan Wake 2 is a spoiler here) ran around 30fps, and then the absolutely sumptuous next few levels (man the maps are gorgeous) have been running at 60fps rendered at 1080p upscaled to 1440p.
It didn’t seem like turning down settings caused a huge increase in frame rate so I just put everything to max and man it looks great. So you at least feel like there’s a reason your graphics card is running at 82°C and your fans are spinning up.
On the other hand, my wife was a huge Cities Skylines 1 player and bounced off the game pretty hard, as the low frame rates doesn’t come with any sort of real upside.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#216Earlier 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…
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.
Top down decision making, typically by non-technical people who often have no idea what software development even involves.
Eventually things get so bad that there's no choice but to abandon feature work to fix them.
The business loses out multiple times. Feature work slows down as developers are forced to waste time finding workarounds for debt and bugs. The improvements/fixes take more time than they would have due to layers of crap being piled on top, and the event that forces a clean up generally has financial or reputational consequence.
Collaborative decision making is the only way around this. Most engineers understand that improvements must be balanced with feature work.
I find it very strange that the industry operates in the way it does. Where the people with the most knowledge of the requirements and repercussions are so often stripped of any decision making power.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#217Earlier 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…
Outside of software, people designing technology are engineers. Although by no means perfect, engineers generally have more ability to push back against bad technical decisions.
Engineers are also generally encultured into a professional culture that emphasizes disciplined engineering practices and technical excellence. On the other hand, modern software development culture actively discourages these traits. For example, taking the time to do design is labeled as "waterfall", YAGNI sentiment, opposition to algorithms interviews, opposition to "complicated" functional programming techniques, etc.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#218Does the game have a campaign mode yet? I'm desperate. I loved C:S 1 for a few hours and then had nothing to do. Just need some kind of challenge mode and I'd be hooked for life.
Campaign mode? It's a sandbox game, like the countless of other sandbox simulators, you make your own goals :)
Otherwise I guess you could ask people for the savegames of almost broken cities and try to rescue them?
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember my very first day of studying engineering, the professor said: "Do you know the difference between an engineer and a doctor? When a doctor messes up, people die. When an engineer messes up LOTS of people die."
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#220It'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…
It's stunning and completely unacceptable. This is a product that is not fit for purpose. I hope the developers are embarrassed by what they have produced.
This is rarely developers' fault. You can bet they wanted to deliver the best product possible, but were not given the time needed to do that by upper management.