Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#241

Post by andybak » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:23 PM UTC

Auracle wrote: post #228

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.

AR Kit is Apple's thing. AR Core is Google's thing. Neither of those are Unity's fault. AR Foundation is a Unity layer to present a common interface. Which of my books is a good thing.

Open XR is also an an attempt to make a cross platform layer for vendor specific APIs. Again not Unity's fault. The Unity plugin system is a common interface for all XR devices.

I'd generally support your sentiment but in this case you're picking on things where Unity had mostly got it right.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#242

Post by butz » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:26 PM UTC

Now imagine performance, if this game could be written by a single person in assembly...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#243

Post by frozenfoxx » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:26 PM UTC

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…

I worked at Unity on Build Automation/Cloud Build for nearly a decade. Let me assure you, that tech debt is NOT being fixed any year soon. It’s due to a fundamental disconnect between executive leadership wanting to run the company like Adobe (explicitly) and every engineer wanting to work like a large scale open source project (Kubernetes, Linux, and Apache are pretty close in style). The only way anything gets built is as a Skunkworks project and you can only do so much without funding and executive support.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#244

Post by ajkjk » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #218

ajkjk wrote: post #211

Does the game have a campaign mode yet? I'm desperate. I loved C:S 1 for a few hours and then had nothing to do. Just need some kind of challenge mode and I'd be hooked for life.

Campaign mode? It's a sandbox game, like the countless of other sandbox simulators, you make your own goals :) Otherwise I guess you could ask people for the savegames of almost broken cities and try to rescue them?

Tons of sandbox games have campaigns. I think Roller Coaster Tycoon, for instance, was the perfect example.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#245

Post by pzlarsson » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

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 is astonishing indeed. In the long run I hope software catches up with the majority of other industries which has already realized that minimizing waste is a good idea. It might take a while but unless we get room temperature super conductivity or some other revolutionary tech first we will start thinking about efficiency again sooner or later.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#246

Post by thrillgore » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

"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 implementation rots on the vine like every other tool they acquired. The company is woefully mismanaged, its been mismanaged, and given the very public pricing incident from a few weeks back, they aren't focusing on improvements to the engine, but on any way to scrap money from its users.

Bevy's ECS implementation is really good, and I want to see it succeed here, in addition to Godex.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#247

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #157

davedx wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s not “half finished”! It has some performance issues. Not the same thing.

Sure, I should've picked a better word there.

I think half-finished is a good way to describe the state of day-1 releases of games these days. Look back on other games (and non-game software) and measure A. the amount of time between when the developer started and the first release, and then B. the total amount of time it took to get to the final patch. I bet for many, MANY games, A ≤ B/2: They were literally "half-finished" in terms of time, on first release.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#248

Post by ziddoap » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

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.

A general rule of thumb I always used was to take take whatever the in-game population says and multiply it by 10 to get a closer match between the size/complexity of the city and what the population would more realistically be.

If I recall correctly, there was even a few mods that did a similar re-balancing of the population numbers in the first game.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#249

Post by badindentation » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

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…

Runescape?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#250

Post by clnq » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #239

clnq wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Agai…

> I place equal blame on them for delivering a subpar product, whether it's under their control or not.

What else is there to say...

> If they don't like the environment of a particular studio, they can always choose to work elsewhere.

They like it. The industry just has issues beyond their control which are in the process of being solved, gradually. No one will drop their dream job to satisfy your entitlement right now, sorry to say. You are free to not buy the game.