Just wanna give a shout out to the brief mention in the article of Anno 1800. Quite possibly one of the best games I've ever played.
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
361–370 of 593 posts
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#362> This mesh of a pile of logs is similarly only used in the shadow rendering pass, and features over 100K vertices. But… why?
Because it is one of the 1,000,000 things to pay attention to in game development. Someone or some software probably just made a mistake in setting up its LOD. Or some dynamic LODding code didn't properly cull the LOD0 mesh. Or that code couldn't be finished in time. Or it was something else. It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. Budgets are always limiting, and developmen…
> Because it is one of the 1,000,000 things to pay attention to in game development.
This is a cop-out. This doesn't seem like an oversight but rather blatant incompetence. You don't just "not pay attention" to this.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
The studio that made this has like 30 devs.
This doesn't fly with a one man team and not with a 1000. It's just badly done, there's no sugarcoating. Those meshes should never end up in the game files.
Thank you! This is what I was getting at in another comment. This isn't just a case of "oh no, I forgot to switch a button".
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve/steam should absolutely not be doing that
Why not? There's already a hardware survey & they could easily have an opt-in system that reports the user's average framerate while playing games. If the average hardware specs can't run that game >=60fps >=90% of the time on any graphical setting then it's beyond fair to give it a "Hardware reports indicate that this game performs poorly" label.
It's high time telemetry served users tbh. I would 100% opt-in to telemetry if it would tattle on badly made or misbehaving software.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#365It 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…
Can you elaborate on this?
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#366Is 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!).…
Paradox just doesn't do testing. The CEO even admitted it.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#367Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the b…
>Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now". Well, yes, because it doesn't matter. It is on the top seller list on Steam. I agree with you, but we can discuss fixes till our fingers bleed. In the end, the problem is capitalism. https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...
> In the end, the problem is capitalism.
Is this sarcasm? I’m asking seriously. If not, then how is a poorly running game the result of capitalism, and what is the alternative economic model that would produce only high-performance / efficient games?
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#368I 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.]
Water is not fluoridated in most of the world, that’s one of many weird things in the US
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#369Earlier 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'll be really surprised if City Skylines's team didn't have access to Unity's source code.
It's pretty unlikely. A source code license is negotiated with the sales team directly and costs at least USD100k last I heard (the price is not publicly disclosed). They're also reluctant to give source code licenses at all.
Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
#370Perf 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.
Cities were absolutely tiny in Simcity 2013, they were barely neighbourhoods.