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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#381

Post by clnq »

eloisant wrote: post #311
clnq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get that you can leave a bunch of things unoptimized, as long as it works fine. What I don't understand is - how did they not notice that the performances was horrible even high end hardware? How did they not decide to take the time to investigate the performances issues and find the causes we're talking about now?

So you know the saying “premature optimization is the root of all evil?” Producers love that statement because it removes half of the complaints around work being rushed.

Optimization is not done throughout the process and later there’s not enough time. Assets are made with bad topology and it would take time to redo them. Or it would take time to write a tool that retopologizes them automatically.

What I’m saying is by the time it’s “time” to optimize, there’s not enough time to optimize. It happens very commonly. But the alternative is taking development slower to do things right. And you simply don’t get investment for schedules like that in most companies. Not to mention that it’s goddamn hard to do when the execs lay off people, ask them to RTO, and induce serious attrition otherwise. Sometimes the team just can’t settle into a good process as people leave it too much. So you’re between a rock and a hard place — on the one hand: attrition and low morals, on the other hand: a tight schedule. This doesn’t apply to Colossal Order from my knowledge, but it does apply to many AAAs.

There is a problem at the root of this - extremely over-ambitious production schedules as norm. Most other things are symptoms. Most of what I described is a symptom.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#382

Post by function_seven »

jameshart wrote: post #357
vGPU wrote: post #102

> This mesh of a pile of logs is similarly only used in the shadow rendering pass, and features over 100K vertices. But… why?

Well, because when you’re modeling a pile of logs, each additional log you add doubles the number of vertices. This is a well known property of log scaling.

I’m too dumb to know if you’re making a math joke or if this is a real 3D modeling thing.

Or both?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#383

Post by Aeolun »

clnq wrote: post #221
vGPU wrote: post #102

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#384

Post by Aeolun »

taneq wrote: post #359
mvdtnz wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. No, mate, stop. The state of C:S2 is well beyond anything we should accept as "completely normal". It's a defective product that should not have been released. Stop normalising this crap.

What trade off would you choose between fixing a performance issue which is somewhat avoidable and fixing a game breaking crash bug? Because the latter gets priority and there’s never enough time to fix all of those before launch, let alone work your way up to closing out every last frame rate drop.

I think if you get 100k poly models in your (city builder) game in the first place (for any but the most amazing wonders) your process has failed spectacularly at some point.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#385

Post by brucethemoose2 »

alkonaut wrote: post #327

Making 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…

> then it just shouldn't ship

Part of the problem is that AAA is just (IMO) too big and expensive. Devs might actually have to ship a broken game around holiday time just to get enough sales to survive.

And the other extreme can be dangerous too, like how Mass Effect Andromeda's development dragged on forever, and EA let it happen because its such a golden IP.

I think the ultimate solution is to just scale down most studios a little bit, so the studio and publisher can afford to delay. Medium sized studios are the sweetspot, especially going forward with GenAI.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#386

Post by athrow »

clnq wrote: post #381
eloisant wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you can leave a bunch of things unoptimized, as long as it works fine. What I don't understand is - how did they not notice that the performances was horrible even high end hardware? How did they not decide to take the time to investigate the performances issues and find the causes we're talking about now?

So you know the saying “premature optimization is the root of all evil?” Producers love that statement because it removes half of the complaints around work being rushed. Optimization is not done throughout the process and later there’s not enough time. Assets are made with bad topology and it would take time to redo them. Or it would take time to write a tool that retopologizes them automatically. What I’m saying is…

Except there really isn’t a better product to back up these issues. There were some important improvements made to the gameplay, traffic system, certain things were reworked, nicer graphics etc. It feels like an iteration and not a ground-breaking game rhat would justify the performance issues we’re seeing.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#387

Post by Aeolun »

function_seven wrote: post #382
jameshart wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, because when you’re modeling a pile of logs, each additional log you add doubles the number of vertices. This is a well known property of log scaling.

I’m too dumb to know if you’re making a math joke or if this is a real 3D modeling thing. Or both?

It’s a joke

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#388

Post by thrillgore »

wilg wrote: post #342
thrillgore wrote: post #246

"And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games." This sadly tracks with my own experiences with Unity's tooling, where DOTS did ship but its i…

DOTS is homegrown isn’t it?

Right, it is. I intended to talk about Bolt and ProBuilder, tools they bought, added to the engine, and then left to rot.

Although to build DOTS they did poach a lot of ECS and Data-Oriented folks like Mike Acton, who left earlier this year.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#389

Post by acdha »

Aeolun wrote: post #383
clnq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

What if we’re more charitable and consider that maybe the modelers assumed that they were doing the most detailed models and someone else would be processing them to produce derivatives for lower zoom levels? It’s rare that something like this happens because nobody knew it was a problem but rather that there is a management dysfunction around priorities and resources.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#390

Post by djbusby »

Sakos wrote: post #375
thrillgore wrote: post #246

"And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games." This sadly tracks with my own experiences with Unity's tooling, where DOTS did ship but its i…

I don't understand how Unity burns through up to a billion in revenue every single year, yet their engine still feels so half-baked and unpolished. Where's all that money going?

Lots of cash can be burned in meetings and by managers of managers. I'm sure my case is not unique here but, meetings that cost $100k are common at $BigCo. And there dozens of those per day.
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