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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#221

Post by clnq »

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 development times short. Plus, it's a hit-driven industry where payoff is not guaranteed. There are some things you can do (which are usually management-related and not dev-related) to make the game a success, but estimated bookings are rarely on-point. So trade-offs have to be made to de-risk - corners cut where possible, the most expensive part - development - de-prioritized. These are much bigger trade-offs than a single mesh being unoptimized. A single mesh is nothing.

It's a fun fact that this mesh is LOD0, and so is the teeth mesh. But that alone doesn't tank the performance of the game and is probably unlikely to be addressed in lieu of actual performance fixes. The fixation on these meshes in the thread is kind of excessive.

A lot of these comments are quite galvanized so I don't want to add to that - just giving more context.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#222

Post by Tijdreiziger »

chc wrote: post #119
solardev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parking and traffic is actually a big deal in Cities: Skylines too, both 1 and especially 2. Traffic will make a lot of areas harder to get to. The second game adds parking lots of various sizes, parking structures both underground and above ground, etc. But it also encourages you to build alternative public transportation like buses, trolleys, trains, metros, etc. (Sadly no bicycles in the 2nd game yet).

Cities: Skylines was sort of a follow-up to Cities In Motion, which was entirely about transportation, so that's a very essential part of its DNA.

As someone who played a lot of CiM, CiM2 and C:S: they’re not as similar as you might expect.

The CiM games were all about public transit, cars played a supporting role at best. IMHO, they’re the best transit games ever made.

In C:S, it’s the other way around: managing car traffic is imperative (to the point that many recommend micromanaging intersections with mods such as TM:PE), and transit takes the supporting role (although it’s still a lot of fun).

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#223

Post by notatoad »

tinco wrote: post #212
capableweb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bought both when they came out, and the user hostile stuff didn't bother me at all. What killed sim city was most definitely the performance issues. Unless they had a better reason for restricting the maximum city size. And then the fact that skylines had both a larger play area and more fancy city building features was just the killing blow. EA got caught out, thinking they could leisurely bring out an inferior pr…

Yeah, the user-hostile DRM stuff was really just the icing on the cake. people regularly tolerate all that same stuff when the game is actually good. but when the game is shit, it makes it really easy to take a pricipled stance that you're boycotting the game because of DRM.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#224

Post by Filligree »

timeon wrote: post #198

This is not about performance but I find the example to have unrealistic design. The 'city' in the article has population of 1000. That would be village where I live - but it is drown in pretty wide roads and huge amount of parking places.

Cities Skylines, somewhat infamously, only allows American city designs to work. If you want to build something European, you can't.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#225

Post by gamblor956 »

tus666 wrote: post #120
wilg wrote: post #77

It 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…

It's a classic victim of shitty, shitty software developers who blames tools rather than taking ownership. Or shitty software dev companies that push out crap to meet marketing deadlines. Either way, take your money elsewhere.

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.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#226

Post by meepmorp »

vGPU wrote: post #114
ajmurmann wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest…

Sure, but this is Paradox, a company that constantly makes buckets of money on DLC for Stellaris, Europa universalis, crusader kings, etc. I doubt they were about to run out of money. They just had to release a new race of scantily dressed aliens for stellaris and they’d be good for another half a year.

Paradox is just the publisher, it's developed by Colossal Order.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#228

Post by Auracle »

wilg wrote: post #77

It 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…

It's honestly a bit insane.

Just the other night I wanted to know what it'd take to do some AR development for the Quest 3 using Unity. 10 minutes in I was straight up confused. There's AR Foundation, AR Core, AR Kit, and I think at least one other thing. I have no idea the difference between those, if they're even wholly separate. That's on top of using either the OpenXR or Unity plugin for the actual headset.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#229

Post by lozenge »

kossTKR wrote: post #26

This is everything wrong with both (sweatshop) games and programming! This is 180 of how people programmed for the older consoles in the most fun and creative ways to squeeze the most out of smaller hardware. Take a look at this for comparison: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/war-stories-how-crash... Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the sim…

Most of the revenue comes in after, long after release. So it now makes sense to release an unfinished game and use the revenue to pay for the improvements.
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