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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#231

Post by rasz »

coldcode wrote: post #137

Any time you try to do something complex you have to start with the state of the art at the beginning of development time; like in this case, you might have to use something not quite ready for prime time, hoping it will improve enough during development. If it doesn't, you have to roll your own, which is often hard to do since you didn't start out that way. I worked on a MMO game engine 10 years after it was release…

Not implementing any LOD is not 'state of the art', its 'let me just click here and import those assets we bought from middleware company as is with no processing or inspection'.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#232

Post by unihd2kno »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#233

Post by uolmir »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #191
cipheredStones wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft has a similar problem where nobody gets promoted from fixing bugs or maintaining stuff, everyone gets rewarded for new innovative [thing] so every two-three years there's a completely new UI framework or similar. Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true? I feel like it's just a rule of corporate culture that flashy overpromising projects get you promoted and regularly doing im…

> Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true? Valve?

From everything I've read Valve has exactly the same problem. Stack rating isn't immune. New features still get rewarded the most.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#234

Post by beart »

disconcision wrote: post #188
beart wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall performance problems being the main concern for the last (final) Sim City, but I won't say you are incorrect. What I do remember is 1. shallow game play compared to its predecessors 2. demand for always online and proven lies about offline play not being possible because of the game architecture 3. invasive DRM, during a time when invasive DRM was on everyone's mind 4. launch issues which, combined wit…

indirectly. i'd say the largest single early complain about simcity 2013 was the small maximum city size you quote, which people attributed to perf-related restrictions

Ahh, I was categorizing that under "shallow game play", but I can see your point.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#236

Post by hipadev23 »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #220
mvdtnz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#237

Post by perihelions »

make3 wrote: post #93
candiddevmike wrote: post #2

> Quite a few YouTubers and streamers got early access to the game, but they were explicitly forbidden to talk about performance until the regular review embargo was lifted. This, along with games like Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs, makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too.

it should be illegal imho. You straight up shouldn't be allowed to tell reviewers what they can and can't review

Strong agree. It should be core FTC rulemaking to prohibit this; it's a form of advertisement masquerading as independent review.

(If the subject of the review sets conditions on its content, to restrain the reviewer from discussing their negative observations, it has the character of an advertisement. The subject is enforcing editorial control; thus, they have partial authorship/editorship of their own "review". Either you sign your name to your *ad*, or, the reviewer signs their name to their unburdened conscience—there is no in-between).

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#238

Post by solardev »

coldcode wrote: post #137

Any time you try to do something complex you have to start with the state of the art at the beginning of development time; like in this case, you might have to use something not quite ready for prime time, hoping it will improve enough during development. If it doesn't, you have to roll your own, which is often hard to do since you didn't start out that way. I worked on a MMO game engine 10 years after it was release…

Everquest?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#239

Post by imiric »

clnq wrote: post #208
imiric wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that excuse. To me it seems more like game developers have become complacent with the powerful hardware consumers have at their disposal, especially on PCs, and the fact they can always push fixes after the release. Decades ago it used to be a major milestone when a game "went gold". It meant QA was successful and that the game was fully playable. Budget and deadlines also existed back then, but there was…

> I don't buy that excuse. This means you are, sadly, very uninformed. There is a lot of rolling with the punches in the games industry, and many engineers want to optimize things more, and work OT to do so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to do this in AAA space on company time).

> This means you are, sadly, very uninformed.

No, it means that I don't accept budget and deadlines being an excuse for delivering a poor experience. As a consumer, I'm speculating about the reasons why this happens, but my point is that it shouldn't happen at all.

> many engineers want to optimize things more, and work OT to do so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to do this in AAA space on company time)

Again, this is an industry problem, and not something companies should be excused for.

Whether engineers actually care about optimizing or not, and whether they crunch or not (as much as I may sympathize), is not my concern, and I place equal blame on them for delivering a subpar product, whether it's under their control or not. Ultimately their names will be listed in the credits, and they represent the product as much as the publisher. If they don't like the environment of a particular studio, they can always choose to work elsewhere.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#240

Post by raincole »

gamblor956 wrote: post #225
tus666 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll be really surprised if City Skylines's team didn't have access to Unity's source code.
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