Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#371

Post by honkycat » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:21 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #351

honkycat wrote: post #267

Unity has been stalling on it's DOTS and network stack re-implementation for like 5 years now. There is no excuse other than leadership are cashing the checks and squeezing the juice out of the company until they close it, which would make sense looking at their semi-recent merger and poor behavior by the CEO. Seriously, I was looking into Unity at the start of Covid while laid off, and DOTS was "around the corner" e…

When reading sections of the article about Unity's permanently experimental features, I was wondering why they didn't use a different engine (probably because their expertise is in Unity). Does Unreal for example have support for this kind of game? Oh and I have to mention the cascaded shadow mapping: "taking about 40 milliseconds or almost half of total frametime. ". - 40ms is 25fps all by itself!

unreal absolutely does have support for this type of game. It is really a smattering of different loosely coupled tools that you can bring into the project, or roll your own. The star is absolutely the rendering engine and visual programming tools IMO.

Unreal really excels at action games, but you can absolutely implement custom camera RTS controls and such. Batteries included but replaceable.

The question "does X engine support this kind of game" is a bit.. off. You would be amazed at how many features these engines pack in. However: You would also be amazed at how NOT "plug and play" they are. It still takes a TON of effort and custom code to make a sophisticated game.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#372

Post by munificent » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #186

lamontcg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet. But that means that everything is solvable. There's no need in this game for 100,000 vertices for a logpile, so that should be a relatively straightforwar…

> 100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet. I can easily see this happening though. Artist starts making assets, asks "What's my budget for each model" and engineering/managers reply with "Do what…

Anyone in management or engineering who tells an artist they have no texture or mesh budget at all gets exactly what's coming to them.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#373

Post by drstewart » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

Dah00n wrote: post #341

alkonaut wrote: post #327

Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the b…

>Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now". Well, yes, because it doesn't matter. It is on the top seller list on Steam. I agree with you, but we can discuss fixes till our fingers bleed. In the end, the problem is capitalism. https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...

The problem is European capitalism, as the game developer here is Finnish and publisher is Swedish. Important clarification since you seem very invested in calling out the US in every other post of yours, so I'm sure you appreciate the calling out of systemic European failures here.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#374

Post by mcmoor » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:40 PM UTC

Dah00n wrote: post #341

alkonaut wrote: post #327

Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the b…

>Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now". Well, yes, because it doesn't matter. It is on the top seller list on Steam. I agree with you, but we can discuss fixes till our fingers bleed. In the end, the problem is capitalism. https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...

I've learnt that (initial) success of a sequel is 95% because of its prequel. True performance may be seen if it has another sequel, or DLC, or heck, another 3 months.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#375

Post by Sakos » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:41 PM UTC

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…

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?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#376

Post by munificent » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:42 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #351

honkycat wrote: post #267

Unity has been stalling on it's DOTS and network stack re-implementation for like 5 years now. There is no excuse other than leadership are cashing the checks and squeezing the juice out of the company until they close it, which would make sense looking at their semi-recent merger and poor behavior by the CEO. Seriously, I was looking into Unity at the start of Covid while laid off, and DOTS was "around the corner" e…

When reading sections of the article about Unity's permanently experimental features, I was wondering why they didn't use a different engine (probably because their expertise is in Unity). Does Unreal for example have support for this kind of game? Oh and I have to mention the cascaded shadow mapping: "taking about 40 milliseconds or almost half of total frametime. ". - 40ms is 25fps all by itself!

Unless you've worked in games, it's really hard to understand just how massively tied to the engine a game is.

Imagine you have a web app written in Ruby using Rails with data stored in Postgres. You have a few hundred tables, millions of rows. Millions of lines of Ruby, CSS, and HTML. Thousands of images carefully exported as JPEG, GIF, or PNG depending on what they contain.

Now imagine being told you need to simultaneously port that to:

- Not run on the web. Instead be a native application using the OS's rendering.

- Not be written in Ruby. Instead using a different language.

- Not use Rails. Instead, use a different application framework.

- Not use Postgres. In fact, don't use a relational database at all. Use an entirely different paradigm for storing data.

- Not use CSS, HTML, and raster images. Instead, everything needs to be, I don't know, vector images and Processing code.

That's about the scale of what moving from one game engine to another can be like. Depending on the game, it's isn't always that Herculean of a task, but if often is. A mature game engine like Unity is a programming language, build system, database, asset pipeline, application framework, IDE, debugger, and set of core libraries all rolled into one. Once you've picked one, moving to another may as well just be creating a whole new game from scratch.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#377

Post by alkonaut » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:43 PM UTC

Dah00n wrote: post #341

alkonaut wrote: post #327

Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the b…

>Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now". Well, yes, because it doesn't matter. It is on the top seller list on Steam. I agree with you, but we can discuss fixes till our fingers bleed. In the end, the problem is capitalism. https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...

That’s still not a sufficient condition for success. Longer term the studio brand will be hurt, not least.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#378

Post by bluescrn » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:43 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #351

honkycat wrote: post #267

Unity has been stalling on it's DOTS and network stack re-implementation for like 5 years now. There is no excuse other than leadership are cashing the checks and squeezing the juice out of the company until they close it, which would make sense looking at their semi-recent merger and poor behavior by the CEO. Seriously, I was looking into Unity at the start of Covid while laid off, and DOTS was "around the corner" e…

When reading sections of the article about Unity's permanently experimental features, I was wondering why they didn't use a different engine (probably because their expertise is in Unity). Does Unreal for example have support for this kind of game? Oh and I have to mention the cascaded shadow mapping: "taking about 40 milliseconds or almost half of total frametime. ". - 40ms is 25fps all by itself!

Unity's killer feature is its C# support. It's enabled small teams to do far more in less time that they could ever hope to do using C++, and avoiding some of the nastier types of bugs that C++ game developers have to deal with.

And if you've got a team of experienced Unity developers, some who've been working with C#/Unity for their entire game dev career, switching to C++/Unity isn't the most practical option. While many concepts are similar between engines, you're going to be back at the bottom of the learning cliff for a while.

It sounds like Unity isn't really the problem in this case, it's more about too many polygons, poor use of LOD, and sub-optimal batching (too many draw calls). It was probably more of a time pressure issue than a tech issue, as game development is usually a race against the clock.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#379

Post by Sakos » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

mjrpes wrote: post #354

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.

The main reason I never purchased was the tiny map size. You could barely fit a neighborhood: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19nz93/sim_city_5_2...

Was that a performance limitation or a conscious design choice because of their "cloud" feature?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#380

Post by mardifoufs » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #337

mardifoufs wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure unity already has that.

Out of the box, it only has manual LOD support for meshes: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/importing-lod-meshes.html (where you create the models yourself) They played around with the idea of automatic LOD, but the repo they had hasn't gotten updated in a while: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD The closest to that would be looking at assets on the Asset Store, for example: https://assetstore.unity.com/pa…

Ok that's pretty surprising. I didn't know it was still this bad