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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#421

Post by vore »

mvdtnz wrote: post #89
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #32

It's kind of stunning that a game of this magnitude is able to go out the door without model LOD. I suppose the fact that it runs at all is stunning -- surely you could not get away with this a decade or two ago -- but perhaps it speaks to the incredible capabilities of modern hardware. This feels a bit similar to the Electron criticism, where convenience ultimately trumps performance, and users ultimately don't care…

It's stunning and completely unacceptable. This is a product that is not fit for purpose. I hope the developers are embarrassed by what they have produced.

I think the developers are too overworked to feel embarrassment from a random person on the internet criticizing them.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#422

Post by vore »

hipadev23 wrote: post #236
TonyTrapp wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rarely developers' fault. You can bet they wanted to deliver the best product possible, but were not given the time needed to do that by upper management.

Why is it impossible that maybe Cities Skylines simply has shitty developers?

Because if you've worked on any large scale software project, technical issues like this are almost always because of priorities and timeline.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#423

Post by kristofferR »

cchance wrote: post #410

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

That's the best resolution, it's the one of 49" 32:9 ultrawide monitors like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9.

Look at images of it from the top, that'll help you understand how immersive it is.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#424

Post by hwillis »

acdha wrote: post #389
Aeolun wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

I mean, you shouldn't be charitable. Those clothes drying aren't 20 subdivision wide because they're detailed. The logs have five sides they don't have all those segments along their length because they're detailed. At absolute best, they didn't go back and fix the topology. At worst those were development assets that were thrown together in 5 minutes and then never replaced.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#425

Post by azemetre »

EwanG wrote: post #412
paulddraper wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Two days sounds lucky. I've been in SAFE plans where it took an entire week to plan things, it was unreal. Like you I met people I've never seen or heard of from the company all giving their input on software I'm creating. I'd never see them again until the next SAFE planning, only this time it felt like 1 SWE out of maybe 15 (yes there were only 3 teams of 5 devs, put 100+ in these SAFE meetings) contributed anything meaningful.

Company wasted so much money, then the org shut down for spending $500 per customer per year in maintenance (this was a health insurance company) whereas the main company would only spend $70 per customer per year. You'd think leadership of the org would get fired for this but they were rewarded with other positions within the company to do the same thing.

Unreal. Why do shareholder's put up with this? I guess the healthcare monopoly is the only reason to.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#426

Post by edwardsdl »

EwanG wrote: post #412
paulddraper wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

… and inevitably three weeks later priorities change and it all goes out the window.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#427

Post by promiseofbeans »

gardnr wrote: post #394

I really appreciate the writing style: > This pass is surprisingly heavy as it takes about 8.2 milliseconds, or roughly about far too long, ...

I wish more people would write like this, sprinkling little bits of humor in a somewhat serious piece

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#428

Post by hwillis »

dingnuts wrote: post #411
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.

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

The most common GPU on steam stats is a 3060. The AMD 7800/7700 do 90% and 70% better on benchmarks. So if you have either of those, you're getting nearly twice the FPS that the most common steam user would see.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#429

Post by kristofferR »

vkou wrote: post #358
asylteltine wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drm killed simcity

If SimCity was good, gamers would have held their nose, and played it, DRM or not, just like they did with a million other DRM-heavy AAA titles. It wasn't.

SimCity wasn't just "DRM heavy", it was totally unplayable for the first week after the launch because a ton of people were trying to play it at the same time and being stopped by its overloaded DRM servers.

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/simcity-outage/

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#430

Post by ethbr1 »

Retric wrote: post #344
mvdtnz wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's speculation based on nothing but vibes.

It’s speculation based on these mesh sizes being so arbitrary in the game development process and what’s broken being unnecessarily window dressing for gameplay. It’s the kind of thing that could be delayed to the last minute with some simple placeholder. “Now you might say that these are just cherry-picked examples, and that modern hardware handles models like these just fine. And you would be broadly correct in tha…

Agreed.

This really smacks of late asset delivery, which probably happened because delivery dates to the rest of the dev team kept being bumped.

Then, by the time the assets were finally delivered, it was recognized they weren't optimized (as expected), but there wasn't any time to fix that.

Or the same thing with an internal asset team.

Although honestly, you'd think after seeing the performance numbers they would have implemented an "above X zoom level, people / anything smaller than this are invisible" sledgehammer fix, until LOD could be properly addressed.

Better to deal with pop-in than have everything be unexpectedly slow.

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