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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#271

Post by flipgimble »

One conclusion is that Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga with pieces in random state of readiness and compatibility. More and more Unity comes out looking like a mismanaged mess that lost its way from the goal of "democratizing game development".

I'm guessing the studio was pressured to release on a hard deadline to make the publisher their promised profits. This game would have been a guaranteed first day purchase for me, but the bad press coverage now made me move on to other games in the limited time I have. So I may check back to see if the updates fixed the pefromance in 6mo or never. What I'm saying is that the person who decided on this release date likely made a long term strategic mistake for short term profit, or was forced to do so by another idiot up the chain.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#272

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

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…

It's a combination of team not given enough time amd headcount to maintain and develop a product and another team's manager wants to grab a fief.

So old products are thrown away while new products with similar functionalities are being created.

Both teams are happy. The users suffer.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#273

Post by ghaff »

Jochim wrote: post #216
ajmurmann wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is pretty much a universal thing--whether it's software development or home maintenance. It's really tempting to kick the can down the road to the point where 1.) You HAVE to do something; 2.) It's not your problem any longer; or 3.) Something happens that the can doesn't matter any more.

I won't say procrastination is a virtue. But sometimes the deferred task really does cease to matter.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#274

Post by solardev »

slimsag wrote: post #169
wilg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm enjoying it too. It's fairly similar to the previous one, and have encountered a few simulation bugs, but I'm happy with it. I'm able to run it okay at 4K.

If I played the old one and enjoyed it, what's the pitch for the new one? e.g. why is it better? On the surface it kinda just looks like the previous one, but I haven't dug into it

The roads/transportation networks are better (baked into the engine more deeply now, such for roundabouts and multi-modal transportation) and the map is much bigger. But honestly CS:1 mods did a "good enough" job at addressing those shortcomings anyway, and CS:2 is missing a lot of the DLC stuff that the first one added. It's got a pretty minimal selection of buildings at this point.

I'd wait a few months/years if I were you. Personally I feel like CS:2 was more of an architectural rewrite (as in the simulation engine) was awesome future potential, but gameplay-wise, modded and DLCed CS:1 just has a lot more actual content.

I still enjoyed CS:2 a lot though, if only because it's been a hot minute since the first game, and I forgot how much I loved this genre.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#275

Post by rstat1 »

lyu07282 wrote: post #121
rstat1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Quite a lot of draw calls are used for the Gameface-powered UI elements, though ultimately these calls are very fast compared to the rest of the rendering process." Literally quoted from the article. Standard 2D UI like that can be done in as little a single draw call (or so I have read, never actually done it)

If you composite on the CPU I guess? no that React/Webpack UI is actually a pretty good solution to complex game UIs. It offers great DX while the performance penalty is miniscule compared to a huge deferred render pipeline. Btw the last Sim City used the web platform for UI too.

the last Sim City is not something that should be held as a model of what to do here.

Great "DX" now when your building it, but good luck maintaining it over the long term.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#276

Post by mvdtnz »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #220
mvdtnz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't blame the developers. I have been involved in projects that I'm embarrassed by even though the worst decisions were the ones made by upper management (hell I worked on the new Jira front end, a continuing source of humiliation).

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#277

Post by MrLeap »

flipgimble wrote: post #271

One conclusion is that Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga with pieces in random state of readiness and compatibility. More and more Unity comes out looking like a mismanaged mess that lost its way from the goal of "democratizing game development". I'm guessing the studio was pressured to release on a hard deadline to make the publisher their promised profits. This game would have been a guaranteed…

> "Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga" Unity has a RELATIVELY firm foundation, and lots of optional out buildings that are short jenga towers. It does take some bonecasting to identify which is which. I would characterize the use of DOTs in a product you mean to ship as _gutsy_. For my projects I'd be liable to first write a compute shader for anything they used DOTs for.

Despite all that, from my reading it doesn't look like CS:2 really got bit too badly for using it. Their perf issues are more broadly explained by poor LOD coverage, treating their addons like black boxes, and no occlusion culling. These are issues that no stack is immune to.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#278

Post by gamblor956 »

Pannoniae wrote: post #161
ajmurmann wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 add…

it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat. look at old games' credits, you'll find maybe even bigger studios (making art and programming with limited hardware was much more time-consuming....) but they had good gameplay on a much smaller budget. Today, studios waste money on analytics, governance things and other fluff... Best case study is Mojang, the company has over 800 employees but…

Terraria started off as a 2D homage to Minecraft...The very first release basically was just a 2D version of Minecraft. It took a few updates for Terraria to become its own thing.

I enjoy both games, especially Terraria, which I have played since its original release. But let's not lie to ourselves that the volume of content updates for Terraria is anywhere close to the updates that Minecraft has received. Adding content for a 2D game is a lot easier than adding content for a 3D game, even if you're using voxels.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#279

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

solardev wrote: post #17
inoffensivename wrote: post #7

I spent 40 minutes trying to eke out more than a handful of fps on an empty map with the resolution set at 1080p with Proton Experimental. I gave up and got a refund, I'll try again if they fix the awful performance. I got a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of the first instalment of the game, it's a big bummer that I can't give this one a go

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.

Dosent really count as it is not rendering on your machine... ofc its good there.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#280

Post by nostrademons »

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…

How do you think we got into this climate change mess?
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