To paraphrase, "Colossal Order's programmers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
301–310 of 593 posts
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that a number of other Unity-based games have had the same or similar performance issues, including KSP1, the Endless games, and others, it seems the problem is very much that Cities Skylines 2 is hitting up against the performance limits that the Unity engine is capable of without custom modifications to the engine-layer codebase.
I have personally been responsible for optimizing unity games you haven't heard issues like this about ;) This write-up really points the finger at not solving occlusion culling or having good LOD discipline. Give a person a dedicated optimization mandate and you can avoid most of this. One of the first things I do when I'm profiling is to sort assets by tris count and scan for excess. I wonder if they had somebody g…
Occlusion culling and LOD should be handled by the engine, not the game logic, so the write-up really points to the problem being Unity's new and very incomplete rendering pipeline for ECS.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#303It 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 sounds like they need to implement easy to use Level of Detail (LOD) and progressive meshes. 100,000 vertices on far away objects will break most rendering pipelines that do not somehow reduce them. 100,000 complicated matrix interactions instead of the like, 8, it probably takes really far away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#304I 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
Try not fluoridating the water, defunding the dentistry college, and subsidizing sugar, so everyone's teeth fall out. Runs much faster then!
[Chill: it's a tooth joke, not a conspiracy theory.]
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#305While 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…
The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole - it is literally how badly this game performs (or at least performed on launch) on top-tier gaming hardware (namely RTX 4090). I linked a source with the quote.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#306Hey all: this is an interesting article. Can we please discuss what's specifically interesting here?
Threads like this tend to become occasions for responding generically to stuff-about-$THING (in this case, the game), or stuff-about-$RELATED (in this case, the framework), or stuff-about-$COMPARABLE. There's nothing wrong with those in principle but each step into genericness makes discussions shallower and less interesting. That's why the site guidelines include "Avoid generic tangents" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 exam…
That's a very idealistic black-and-white view of the world. A huge number of roles casually use the "engineer" moniker and a lot of people who actually have engineering degrees of some sort, even advanced degrees from top schools, are not licensed and don't necessarily follow rigid processes (e.g. structural analyses) on a day to day basis. As someone who does have engineering degrees outside of software, I have zero…
I have yet to see, with the exception of the software world, engineering with such loose process.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have personally been responsible for optimizing unity games you haven't heard issues like this about ;) This write-up really points the finger at not solving occlusion culling or having good LOD discipline. Give a person a dedicated optimization mandate and you can avoid most of this. One of the first things I do when I'm profiling is to sort assets by tris count and scan for excess. I wonder if they had somebody g…
Occlusion culling and LOD should be handled by the engine, not the game logic, so the write-up really points to the problem being Unity's new and very incomplete rendering pipeline for ECS.
Granted I know next to nothing about game development, but aren't LOD models made by hand?
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#309Perf issues also basically killed the SimCity franchise on PC. Hope they are able to fix things up
I thought it was DRM that killed SimCity (?)
And the name of the DRM was Origin. It was all about some EA executive deciding to force Origin down everyone's throat, and using SimCity as the Astroglide.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that a number of other Unity-based games have had the same or similar performance issues, including KSP1, the Endless games, and others, it seems the problem is very much that Cities Skylines 2 is hitting up against the performance limits that the Unity engine is capable of without custom modifications to the engine-layer codebase.
I have personally been responsible for optimizing unity games you haven't heard issues like this about ;) This write-up really points the finger at not solving occlusion culling or having good LOD discipline. Give a person a dedicated optimization mandate and you can avoid most of this. One of the first things I do when I'm profiling is to sort assets by tris count and scan for excess. I wonder if they had somebody g…
Yeah I mean regardless of any of Unity’s limitations, this is entirely upon the developer.
However, I also find the suggestion that because there are other high profile examples of unity projects with performance issues, it must be a problem with unity.
You don’t hear that about Unreal Engine, despite the fact that there are poorly optimized UE games.
Such a bizarre set of assumptions.