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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#291

Post by starkparker »

EMM_386 wrote: post #72

> A brief glance at the JS bundle reveals that they are using React and bundling using Webpack. While this is something that is guaranteed to make the average native development purist yell at clouds and complain that the darned kids should get off their lawn, When I first heard of this as being a thing, my initial reaction was indeed something like "wait what? HTML and CSS in a desktop PC game driving the UI? No, th…

Electron's bad performance really poisoned that well early on.

Gameface's architecture is described in its documentation: https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-gameface/integration/te...

Most of its divergence from browser implementations are unsurprisingly in font rendering, which is generally a headache in games anyway: https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-gameface/integration/op...

And in RTL text rendering: https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-gameface/integration/op...

The Javascript DOM API is a subset, but pretty rich considering: https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-gameface/api_reference/...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#292

Post by solardev »

Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #281
JCharante wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GeForce Now has been amazing as a mac only user

Yes because you have no other options.

There's lots of options? GPT, WINE Crossover, Luna, Boosteroid, Shadow.tech... none of them run as well as GeForce Now, though. Or a dedicated gaming PC.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#293

Post by ajmurmann »

gamblor956 wrote: post #278
Pannoniae wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

IMO, the parent picked a terrible example. Comparing any game to "Minecraft" doesn't make much sense to me. What even is Minecraft at this point? There seem to be a multiple versions on a multitude of platforms, some on the same platform targeting different demographics. Different changes are need to keep the different demographics hooked. Of course the original was built by a single guy which avoided all the organizational complexities.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#294

Post by solardev »

Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #279
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.

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

So? That's even better. Doesn't use my battery life or create noise & heat. Netflix isn't run on my machine either.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#295

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

solardev wrote: post #294
Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So? That's even better. Doesn't use my battery life or create noise & heat. Netflix isn't run on my machine either.

Sure, but then it does not have any relevance to the article.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#296

Post by darklycan51 »

Arelius wrote: post #213
Arialonomus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Frost giant is building stormgate, the spiritual successor of starcraft 2, with even better/smoother gameplay than sc2 with Unreal Engine 5, they picked what parts they reused such as the renderer and built the underlying stuff from scratch, but still

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#297

Post by paavohtl »

reactordev wrote: post #141
paavohtl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

InstaLOD is only used in the asset pipeline. I haven't seen any references to real-time use. Haven't found any evidence of real-time decimation either.

To be clear there are LODs, but only for some of the meshes.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#298

Post by hypeatei »

davedx wrote: post #122
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.

This old chestnut again. Software is not “essentially a beta” because it doesn’t meet a bunch of entitled users’ arbitrary definitions of “finished”. A game having some performance issues doesn’t mean you’re a beta tester. Did you even buy this game? I suspect not.

No, I didn't buy it because it's $50 and you have to follow guides and tricks to get it running optimally. That's not what I expect from a game released at full price.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#299

Post by LeanderK »

frozenfoxx wrote: post #243
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 worked at Unity on Build Automation/Cloud Build for nearly a decade. Let me assure you, that tech debt is NOT being fixed any year soon. It’s due to a fundamental disconnect between executive leadership wanting to run the company like Adobe (explicitly) and every engineer wanting to work like a large scale open source project (Kubernetes, Linux, and Apache are pretty close in style). The only way anything gets buil…

> run the company like Adobe (explicitly)

what does this mean?

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