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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#551

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

Hopefully this dynamic creates a cascading market crash to wipe out all the biggest players and force the industry back to its proper size.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#552

Post by paulddraper »

spenczar5 wrote: post #465
paulddraper wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AWS has (or had) a weekly 2-hour operational status meeting. It has over 200 people in it, a mix of distinguished and principal engineers, very senior managers, etc. That meeting easily crossed the $100k-per-pop threshold. Worth it, though, that was actually a pretty great institution.

> 200 people

> 2 hours

> weekly

Kill me

---

EDIT: also, 200 people for 2 hours is only 100k if average salary is $500k/year

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#553

Post by Tangurena2 »

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?

I was involved in a large software project with a large financial institution. Every weekday, there was an hour long status meeting. Based on what my company billed my time at (and presuming the other 40 companies billed their staff time likewise), that morning status call cost about $50k.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#554

Post by red-iron-pine »

psunavy03 wrote: post #405
intelVISA wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agile shaman took the wheel

Agile done properly is literally the opposite of this. Big Important Exec spouting Agile terms they don't understand and cluelessly forcing top-down crap on the teams, more likely. Normalize your story points, prole! Daddy needs metrics!

> Agile done properly

No True Scotsmen would do programming this way!

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#555

Post by red-iron-pine »

beowulfey wrote: post #546
hwillis wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a 1660Ti. I get 40+ fps on 1080p. It's functional. Now, whether it is really any better than the previous generation is the more relevant question in my opinion. There are a few things improved, and a whole lot missing. The performance issues are only a small fragment of the game's issues.

yeah this here is the real point.

runs alright for me, too. just alright, but for what it is that's fine.

however it's not really much better than the predecessor, and needs to give me a reason to give up on the HUGE mod community and well documented approaches from CS1.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#556

Post by nvm0n2 »

torginus wrote: post #520
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…

Tbh, there are many ways to skin a cat, using ECS is not necessary to ship a performant game, not is it necessarily the modern thing to do. It's one of the many architectural patterns you can build a game on top of, and has many advantages as well as detractors. For example, Godot isn't really build around ECS, but the idea of servers which are mostly autonomous game subsystems that can process their area of expertis…

Sure, but surely a city simulation is the perfect textbook use case for a cache-friendly architecture like ECS?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#557

Post by nvm0n2 »

torginus wrote: post #489
Varriount wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I never knew Unity used its own CLR implementation. Any idea why?

I think its implementation is a fork of a 2006-era Mono (a clean room reverse engineered .NET implementation). After a few releases, they had a falling out with the Mono team over licensing, meaning they got stuck on an old release. Besides that, they made a bunch of proprietary changes to Mono to make it run on their engine, and to be able to export to literally any platform under the sun. A lot of platforms, like i…

Which platforms require you use a single C++ compiler?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#558

Post by DonHopkins »

animal531 wrote: post #528
Sakos wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Their worst problem (compared to Epic) is that they don't finish projects. They'll want a new feature, for example new scriptable graphics pipelines which will allow them to modify the core rendering a lot easier. Ok that's fine, but then instead of implementing one they try to implement two, while at the same time completely ignoring the existing pipeline which everyone is currently using. The time to get the new pi…

They hired the TextMesh Pro dude Zoltran, what must have been six or so years ago, with the promise that he'd integrate TextMeshPro into the "new" UI system, which I was looking forward to. I was just recently reading Unity's web page about what's new in the UI system, which announced that TextMesh Pro is finally built in! That took a while.

https://unity.com/features/ui-toolkit

I really love TextMesh Pro and Zoltran's mesmerizing tutorials, I learned a lot about Unity reading his code, and he was totally into what he was doing and hyper productive when he was a highly regarded indie developer, but I got the impression (just guessing, no inside knowledge) that he was wasn't 1/100th as productive working inside Unity as he was on his own, or maybe they put him on something else than he originally went there to do.

It's been my experience that user interface toolkits are often turf war shit shows. I hope he's doing ok there!

https://www.youtube.com/@Zolran/videos

i.e. the classic 9-year-old Unite 14 demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#559

Post by nvm0n2 »

rat9988 wrote: post #307
ghaff wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's common to start constructing buildings before the design is even complete. And there can be huge "tech debt" disasters in civil engineering. Berlin Airport is one famous example.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#560

Post by brucethemoose2 »

3seashells wrote: post #486
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…

EA were the culprit for those delays by forcing bioware to use frostbite. Blame rests solidly with some synergies savings suitsuperman.

Going by the allegations in the reports, it wasn't just frostbite. Bioware chose to dump a lot of time into features like procedural generation (and having to use Frostbite exhasterbated this problem even more).
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