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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#411

Post by dingnuts »

mvdtnz wrote: post #322
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…

> 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.

Good grief, I have a mid tier AMD card and I'm having a blast with almost 40 hours in the game already. Can we quit with the "defective" propaganda?

The game runs fine and it's really fun. This "controversy" really drives home for me how detached from reality online discourse often is

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#412

Post by EwanG »

paulddraper wrote: post #402
djbusby wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have 5-hour long meetings with 40 people each costing $500/hr?

Let me introduce you to the world of PI planning where two days of every quarter are spent with approximately 100 people (developers, program managers, etc) for each line of business to plan out the next quarter of work - even if 90% of it is continuing the work from the last quarter...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#413

Post by stylepoints »

ajmurmann wrote: post #85
Pannoniae wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch. In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city bui…

None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from the game directors and business people.

And for very good reasons. A huge fraction of players buy the game based on how it looks.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#414

Post by denkmoon »

cchance wrote: post #410

i'm sorry was he benchmarking this at 5120x1440? like seriously do people really game at that resolution?

Yeah, it's referred to as super-ultrawide. There are a reasonable number of monitors out there with this resolution.

It's more for race/flight sim type stuff IMO but if you got it, why not play everything at that res provided it performs well.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#415

Post by chii »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #385
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…

If a studio downsizes, they might be able to survive making lower budget games. And while it's true that if every studio does this, the industry would get better, there's incentive for _one_ studio to pump up their funding and make a super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare.

This makes it a 'race to the bottom' style (or a race to the top?) competition, where higher funding gets you more marketshare, but only against lower funded studios. It's akin to advertising budgets. Mostly a zero sum game in the end.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#417

Post by hypeatei »

FranksTV wrote: post #408
hypeatei wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have a lot of opinions about a game you've never played.

Enlighten me.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#418

Post by djbusby »

paulddraper wrote: post #402
djbusby wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have 5-hour long meetings with 40 people each costing $500/hr?

Sometimes the meet has folk that are even more expensive (not me). Sometimes theres more than 50. Four hours of meetings, six hours of wall-clock

Edit: some companies have >20k employees. My first years at MS (late 90s) had these "war room" like 2x a week, 50 people, multiple VPs in the room, 2h. But there were other groups doing their war rooms too.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#419

Post by brucethemoose2 »

chii wrote: post #415
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If a studio downsizes, they might be able to survive making lower budget games. And while it's true that if every studio does this, the industry would get better, there's incentive for _one_ studio to pump up their funding and make a super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare. This makes it a 'race to the bottom' style (or a race to the top?) competition, where higher funding gets you more marketshare, but on…

> super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare

This is not necessarily true any more. I think smaller studios chipping away for a long time are making better games than most big ones.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#420

Post by [deleted] »

munificent wrote: post #372
capableweb wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet. I can easily see this happening though. Artist starts making assets, asks "What's my budget for each model" and engineering/managers reply with "Do what…

Anyone in management or engineering who tells an artist they have no texture or mesh budget at all gets exactly what's coming to them.

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