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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

• mrcwinn 3y ago
  I loved every bit of this post, especially the final few sentences. Thank you.
• candiddevmike 3y ago
  > 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.
  • solardev 3y ago
    Alan Wake 2 looks a lot better, though. From the article: > As a comparison similar hardware in Alan Wake 2 — which was released the same week as C:S2 and is considered by some to be the best looking game of this console generation — reaches comparable average framerates with all settings cranked including path tracing, either at 1440p without any upscaling magic or at 4K with some help from DLSS. I think that’s a good illustration of how bizarrely demanding C:S2 is. I love CS:2, but it does run noticeably worse than every other game I have (using GFN's RTX 4080, which normally never lags) with outright stutters lasting a few seconds at a time, interrupting whatever I was doing. And it does that without looking really any better than its predecessor. And even if you turn down all the settings, it still lags quite a lot. I think most people playing city builders don't necessarily demand super-next-gen graphics, but performance that can keep up with the growth of their cities. I still gave CS:2 a positive/thumbs-up review, but I can understand why so many people are frustrated with it. Launching with such a limited number of building options and no editor or mod support was also kinda a let-down. Still, I'm excited about the foundation they've made in 2, and think that it'll be awesome in a few years' time.
    • candiddevmike 3y ago
      This is why steam reviews are nice. It's fine to review something negative out of the gate and review it more favorably once it's in better shape. This helps other people more than rating it positively.
      • solardev 3y ago
        Yeah, I love the review score histogram over time feature too, along with the "Overall reviews" vs "Recent reviews" summaries.
        • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
          I wish there was a way to discount the first month of reviews from the overall score. I assume that the people who buy, play, and review the game immediately are the super fans who have extreme views on what makes the game good.
          • solardev 3y ago
            There is! You can click and drag on the review date graph to any custom timeframe you want. Then it'll calculate the overall rating of just your selected date range for you. I wish I could post an image here for you :( But basically just go down to the reviews, expand the graphs (with "Show Graphs"), and click and drag a box on the left hand one.
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  • squidsoup 3y ago
    Alan Wake 2 performs well on PS5, and I haven’t encountered any “game breaking bugs” (about 3/4 of the way through). There’s no conspiracy, it’s a fantastic game.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
    Some reviewers stand up to this kind of stuff (sometimes at great cost). You can choose to follow and support those reviewers. But the general rule is to simply never pre-order stuff.
  • purpleflame1257 3y ago
    Gamergate, to a certain extent, was indeed about ethics in game journalism. It just got hijacked into culture war bullshit like everything else. But who cares? As long as the sheep keep preordering the music won't stop.
    • DonHopkins 3y ago
      GamerGate was pure unadulterated juvenile misogynistic right wing culture war bullshit from the start, and had absolutely nothing to do with ethics or game journalism, and everything to do with intolerance and harassment and misogyny and abuse, and you know it, so stop trolling.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Regardless of what you think, anytime you talk about games journalism, even a decade later, you risk falling into the horrible black hole. Successful poisoning of the well. I just don't bother with reviews anymore. Stopped reading every gaming website except Gematsu (which rarely reviews) and I follow certain niches of you tubers to see if a game has the right pulse. If I wanna know how a Sonic Game is, why not peer into various sonic you tubers instead of trust which IGN reviewer won/lost the straw?
        • DonHopkins 3y ago
          Maybe you fall into black holes and believe misogynistic conspiracy theories all the time, but I don't. They only successfully poisoned your well, you didn't have to drink the GamerGate kool-aid and declare it a success, because most people in their right mind who aren't misogynistic sexually frustrated incel teenaged boys or angry right-wing Q-Anon man-children can see through it, and don't believe that unmitigated bullshit. There's nothing special about game journalists. Most journalists have always been bought and paid for, but not the way your GamerGate conspiracy theories claim. If you needed Milo Yiannopoulos to "open your eyes" to that for the first time, you weren't paying attention and have been living under a rock or in your mother's basement, and you're getting your bullshit and conspiracy theories from somebody much much worse than game journalists.
  • FireBeyond 3y ago
    > makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too. Agreed. There's such a whole world of unreported 'sponsored' or otherwise products, and streaming is a big part of it. And no-one is immune. When the cheesegrater Mac Pro came out, I watched a lot of videos on it, particularly on YouTube in the photo/video segment - I was planning to get one, and while I had other uses for it, I'd be doing a lot of photo work on it in my recreational time. Quickly I noticed just how many of the big name streamers had launch day or very early access to the Mac Pro and Pro Display. Sure. And then I noticed how each and every one spun it as "I just got mine", "just bought one", and so forth. All organic, they'd have you believe - not a single one said "Apple sent me this". And yet... By "a curious coincidence", every single one had seemingly ordered the exact same spec: an 18 core CPU, 384GB of memory, the Vega II Duo GPU, and 8TB SSD, and the nano-textured ProDisplay. So what, you might think, that might have been the quickest shipping order. Also an $18,000+ computer, $25K with the display. And if you're a photographer, even if you're working on medium format digital, and 100MP images, you in no way shape or form need 384GB of memory, or that GPU. For me, LightRoom / Capture One and Photoshop all barely sweated on my 12 core 192GB W5700X variant. So then Occam's Razor applies. What are the odds that, even of just the 8-10 streamers I watch, they all got exactly the same spec Mac? Or is it that that was the spec Apple was sending to high popularity streamers? Except not a single one even implied that that might have been the case. And I don't doubt that many or all bought their own at some point. But I suspect it was mostly "got one from Apple, talked it up, and then substituted it with my own when it arrived".
    • zf00002 3y ago
      I've been getting into sim racing lately and a majority of the youtube reviewers do this thing where they claim it's not a sponsored video but the company sent them the product for free. And that's the same problem when it was magazines publishing glowing reviews of mediocre products just so the gravy train of free stuff doesn't end.
      • FireBeyond 3y ago
        Those would be somewhat better if they made a point (I've seen some in the photography world do it with smaller things) of "and after I go through a review, I'm going to give it away to a viewer/follower..."
  • make3 3y ago
    it should be illegal imho. You straight up shouldn't be allowed to tell reviewers what they can and can't review
    • perihelions 3y ago
      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).
      • jsnell 3y ago
        What's being described isn't an example of conditions being set on the content of the review. It's an embargo date on when a review may be released, and a restriction of what may be publicly disclosed before the review is published. There's nothing wrong about that, and in fact forbidding embargo dates would have a pretty bad outcome. It would result in reviewers getting no early review copies, and having to rush out shoddy reviews ASAP after the release. Likewise the customers would have no access to reviews on the release date, and would either need to wait or buy the game blindly.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    Internet now is full of non-journalists ("content creators") producing what people substitute for journalism.
  • doikor 3y ago
    > Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs There is no terrible performance and the game breaking bugs are very rare (as in none of my ~10 friends who bought the game ran into any of them on their first playthrough). Yes it is a demanding game but it is also one of the best looking games ever made. Yes the game is demanding if you max out everything but as it runs at 30/60 fps in quality/performance modes on PS5/Xbox Series consoles it does run at those (or better) framerates on PCs very easily. Only case when you get bad performance is when you use incompatible hardware (old graphics cards without mesh shader support)
  • gorbachev 3y ago
    It's always been like this. Long before streamers got involved. Video game magazines (the paper ones...remember those?) had the same exact process for reviews. Game publishers expected certain things in return for access to future game releases and most video game magazines cooperated. Every two years or so there was a scandal about either reviewers calling out a game publisher about the bullshit, or a widespread backlash against obviously lacking reviews.
  • wincy 3y ago
    I’m running Alan Wake 2 on an RTX 3080 with a 7800X3D and the first few sections in the forest (don’t think describing forest scenes in Alan Wake 2 is a spoiler here) ran around 30fps, and then the absolutely sumptuous next few levels (man the maps are gorgeous) have been running at 60fps rendered at 1080p upscaled to 1440p. It didn’t seem like turning down settings caused a huge increase in frame rate so I just put everything to max and man it looks great. So you at least feel like there’s a reason your graphics card is running at 82°C and your fans are spinning up. On the other hand, my wife was a huge Cities Skylines 1 player and bounced off the game pretty hard, as the low frame rates doesn’t come with any sort of real upside.
• simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  I don't play videogames, but I am familiar with famous titles like this one. I would have loved to see something really bold, such as Cities set in Venice, and the task is to revamp the city. More interesting, instead of cars, cars, cars...
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  • candiddevmike 3y ago
    There's a game kind of like that, maybe, called Cities in Motion (also published by Paradox...) where you build mass transit for existing cities. Buses, subways, trams, etc. It's narrow focus is pretty fun, while there isn't a Venice city, it's about revamping existing cities kinda.
  • solardev 3y ago
    You might be more interested in the Anno series then, of which 1800 is the most recent release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_1800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_1800 It's set in the early industrial era, so a lot of sails and rails and small colonies exporting things all over. I can't remember if there are cars yet, but if there are, it's not a major focus. Some of the levels have you revamping existing towns, while others let you start from scratch. (Edit: Anno 1800 is actually free to play on Steam this weekend: https://store.steampowered.com/app/916440/Anno_1800/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/916440/Anno_1800/) An older title, Anno 1404, had a Venice expansion too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_1404#Expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_1404#Expansion All of them are playable on Ubisoft+ for $15/mo (I think?), so it's a pretty low-risk investment if you want to try them. If you don't have the hardware, you can also stream them on GeForce Now and, I think, Amazon Luna. Games are super accessible these days!
    • notahacker 3y ago
      I'd love to see something with the flexibility and sandbox nature of Skylines and the historic themes of the Anno series (which has pretty graphics but is ultimately tied to a grid and more about sticking buildings on the right tiles to maximise efficiency than worldbuilding)
• tomcam 3y ago
  You know things are rough when… The game ran so poorly that Windows Game Bar refused to acknowledge there even was a framerate.
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  • booboofixer 3y ago
    > The teeth are not the only problem > this written article from PC Games Hardware (in German) or this video from Gamers Nexus (in Americanese) Humor and a great blog design, made my day.
    • belltaco 3y ago
      Isn't GN Canadian? I mean North Americanese.
      • Arnavion 3y ago
        GN is in the US. Maybe you're thinking of Linus Tech Tips.
• inoffensivename 3y ago
  I spent 40 minutes trying to eke out more than a handful of fps on an empty map with the resolution set at 1080p with Proton Experimental. I gave up and got a refund, I'll try again if they fix the awful performance. I got a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of the first instalment of the game, it's a big bummer that I can't give this one a go
  • solardev 3y ago
    It's pretty playable on GeForce Now, for what it's worth. Still a big laggy, but I was able to play for many hours without major issues... just the occasionally annoying but livable stutter.
    • JCharante 3y ago
      GeForce Now has been amazing as a mac only user
      • solardev 3y ago
        Same. I have a M2 Max and GFN is much much easier than trying to set something up with GPT (Game Porting Toolkit) and Whisky, and much faster & quieter too. An RTX 4080 running in their data center means no local heat and noise.
      • Unfrozen0688 3y ago
        Yes because you have no other options.
        • solardev 3y ago
          There's lots of options? GPT, WINE Crossover, Luna, Boosteroid, Shadow.tech... none of them run as well as GeForce Now, though. Or a dedicated gaming PC.
      • eppsilon 3y ago
        Does it support Steam mods yet? That's what kept me from using it to play CS1.
• darklycan51 3y ago
  Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become a place where what people inside the company want matters more than the end user? People love to cry about developers not being responsible for the state the gaming industry is at right now, but I disagree, and this is an example. Had they simply responded with "We cannot do it with Unity" management would have had no choice but to switch to Unreal 5.
  • twodave 3y ago
    I think self-preservation probably plays a role here, too. If you think management will just fire you and hire someone who will claim they can build it in Unity, then maybe you decide this isn’t the hill you want to die on.
  • andybak 3y ago
    UE5 isn't some magic pixie dust and Unity isn't a curse from which it is impossible to recover. Whilst some of the issues here are potentially the fault of DOTS and HDRP not being production ready (in combination at least) there's plenty of blame to go around. Elsewhere other people are making gorgeous and performant games in Unity.
    • Arelius 3y ago
      Yeah, and city builders have a very unique set of constraints that would prove to be a misfit for most modern off the shelf engines, And remember, despite Epic's efforts, UE is still a first/third person engine at it's core. I wouldn't nr surprised if the challenges using Unreal would be at least as great if they had chosen that.
      • andybak 3y ago
        DOTS was actually a perfect fit for complex simulations (and the article hinted that it probably had a positive effect on CPU usage) All the issues are around rendering and HDRP - which by the sound of things is still not properly integrated with DOTS.
• kossTKR 3y ago
  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-bandicoot-hacked-the-original-playstation/ 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 simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus. I absolutely hate this way of doing things, because for me all art, all engineering, all creativity is about boundaries, dogmas, and squeezing and optimising the hell out of your _elegant_ systems. I mean even in my small webgl/threejs projects the fun part was getting every last bit of eye candy out of the smallest file sizes i could, simplifying geometry, lowering resolution, while maintaining great looks. 100k vertice log piles and hundreds of people with teeth? 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? Is it 100% shitty work conditions? How could single devs and small studios create relatively large games with love 20 years ago for small money?
  • xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    I typed something very similar in parallel with you. Guess the engineering typically required is no more? At least not here.
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      Pay peanuts get monkeys. Game dev has been infamous for taking in young, fresh college graduates, promise them "credits" and "fun life" and then run them through the grinder for shit pay. And eventually, even those who survived the grinder and ended up living long enough to become seniors burn out, and that's how you get this kind of clusterfuck in the end. Game dev seriously needs to follow the VFX industry and unionize. I have zero trust left in fellow gamers to not buy games from unethical producers.
      • ajmurmann 3y ago
• CooCooCaCha 3y ago
  I hope these issues come from the game being rushed and not from a lack of rendering expertise. Luckily it seems like there are pretty simple reasons for the poor performance so I'm hopeful they can at least do something even if they don't have a ton of rendering expertise.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    I think the guess in the article is pretty close to the truth, I've seen stuff like that happen countless of times. You make a bet on a early technology (Unity DOTS + ECS in this case) which gives you a lot of benefits but also, it's immature enough that you get a bunch of additional work to do, and you barely have time to get everything in place before publisher forces you to follow the initial deadline.
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      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 straightforward task to fix. And someone can rip out all the teeth and put "Principal Tooth Extraction Engineer" on their resume.
      • capableweb 3y ago
        > 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 whatever you want, we'll automatically create different LODs later" and the day gold master is being done, the LOD system still isn't in place so the call gets made to just ship what they have, otherwise publisher deadline will be missed.
• xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  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. I wonder how this will play out in the long run. Bizarre and at least for me, equally sad. I long for the days of a tuned, polished game engine squeezing every inch of performance out of your PC.
  • Pannoniae 3y ago
    Don't forget the part where they use web tech and waste draw calls like crazy on the UI. These things should literally be banned. edit: not web tech should be banned, but releasing a game with horrible optimisation like this, either by the store selling the game or by the law
    • chc 3y ago
      Using web tech for the UI isn't a problem here. The article, when measuring the performance impact of different rendering phases, describes the time the UI requires as "an irrelevant amount of time."
    • capableweb 3y ago
      Where are you getting this from? I'm literally sitting with the game open right now with the Chrome Devtools connected to it, and I'm seeing no unnecessary modifications on the DOM side of things. Could be that the integrated the Gameface library incorrectly I guess? Still interested in more details from you.
      • Pannoniae 3y ago
        Directly from the article: "The last remaining draw calls are used to render all of the different UI elements, both the ones that are drawn into the world as well as the more traditional UI elements like the bottom bar and other controls. Quite a lot of draw calls are used for the Gameface-powered UI elements, though ultimately these calls are very fast compared to the rest of the rendering process. " With this minimalistic, flat-style soulless UI, the correct number of draw calls spent on UI should be single digits....
• rychco 3y ago
  Much like Cyberpunk on it's release, this will hopefully be de-listed from the various digital storefronts & all customers issued a refund in full.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    Unlikely. The game actually does run, even though it has performance issues and bugs. Cyberpunk barely ran on the PS4 when it launched.
  • asylteltine 3y ago
    Cyberpunk got delisted by Sony because it literally didn’t function. It was playable but buggy on pc
    • thrillgore 3y ago
      Cyberpunk was delisted because CDPR told consumers to request refunds.
• Havoc 3y ago
  The odd thing is I doubt a single sky line fan thought “what this really needs is graphics so intensive I can’t build a big city” It’s remarkably tone deaf
  • capableweb 3y ago
    I also doubt any of the developers were aiming for that too. I've been looking through the decompiled code for the purposes of modding for the last few days, wrapping my head around their ECS/DOTS code, and the game has a much better foundation for a scalable simulation than CS1 ever had, even after years of optimizations.
    • MagicMoonlight 3y ago
      I bet whoever worked on the actual simulation worked really hard for years to make it run efficiently. Then the meme developers in the front end went “lmao JS and CSS for the interface, 100k for a log” and ruined it all
      • capableweb 3y ago
        Not sure how the "frontend" (UI) developers have anything to do with the assets, but it's a easy scapegoat I guess...
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      What probably happened is that certain dev teams built ridiculous things on top of the ECS/DOTS code to see how much they could push the detail. So you wound up with things like the teeth. Which was probably some internal demo-driven development that everyone 'wow'd at the fact that it could be done. Times 100x or something like that. With nobody owning overall performance or whoever owned the overall performance didn't have any management support before launch because it was deprioritized. Nobody gets promoted for ripping out someone else's perf-expensive features and being the bad guy, you get promoted for building new clever features on top of the shiny new engine.
      • 3y ago
• cube2222 3y ago
  Tip for those wanting to play it: change resolution scaling from dynamic to constant. I have a 3080 and it basically moves it from "unplayable 10fps in the main menu" to "works just fine, no issues in game" with medium-high graphics.
  • stouset 3y ago
    Or off, entirely. On my 3080 it seems to cause lots of rendering artifacts.
  • dawnerd 3y ago
    That’s not what fixes it. Disable motion blur and depth of field. Depth of field kills the menu in particular.
• EMM_386 3y ago
  > A brief glance at the JS bundle reveals that they are using React and bundling using Webpack. While this is something that is guaranteed to make the average native development purist yell at clouds and complain that the darned kids should get off their lawn, When I first heard of this as being a thing, my initial reaction was indeed something like "wait what? HTML and CSS in a desktop PC game driving the UI? No, that shouldn't be ... ". But then I used Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, was amazed by the graphics and performance ... and learned about how the complex and detailed cockpit gauges are using WASM/HTML/JS for rendering. No React, but still the "web technologies". It dawned on me that this is apparently not exactly the weird, strange, bad performing, wrong-use-case, "why would you ever" thing I originally saw it as. Because it was working fine in that complex scenario.
  • solardev 3y ago
    Just wait for Boeing to start making real cockpits in React...
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  • davedx 3y ago
    All sorts of industries use web tech to render UIs. Even SpaceX used it in Dragon. People just have preconceptions and biases, and gamers are horrendously intolerant of everything and anything that doesn’t fit their world view of “how things should be”.
    • EMM_386 3y ago
      > All sorts of industries use web tech to render UIs. Even SpaceX used it in Dragon. When I realized this was performant enough to drive a 747's entire cockpit while the simulator moved along at a high FPS and with incredible visuals, and was now a thing that was being selected for "state of the art" AAA games ... from there I did my homework. So that led to reading all about SpaceX Dragon UI, as you mention, and all the myraid of other places this is used. I did feel like I was too far outside the loop, having been a software engineer and working with these technologies for quite a while by that point. "quite a while" being the pre-JavaScript-existing years. I just wasn't working on projects that such a thing would meet a requirement. Now? I still have no use for it but I find it incredible that everything in this entire pipeline has become so optimized and reliable. Apparently to the point you can suggest running a spacecraft's user interface and not leave everyone staring at you, blank-faced and not sure how to respond. Instead, possible responses can now include "sounds good".
• wilg 3y ago
  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 reporting process.
  • Someone1234 3y ago
    It makes one wonder what their internal employee incentives are and if they're problematic. 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. Although I feel like wanting to start-a-new is a common tech problem, where there are problems and everyone wants to just reboot to "fix" it rather than fixing it head-on inc. backwards compatibility headaches.
    • cipheredStones 3y ago
      > 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 important but mundane and hard-to-measure things gets you PIP'd.
      • ajmurmann 3y ago
        Is it only big companies? The fact that many companies in our industry need to do "bug squash" events because we are unable to prioritize bugs properly speaks books to meet.
        • Jochim 3y ago
          Top down decision making, typically by non-technical people who often have no idea what software development even involves. Eventually things get so bad that there's no choice but to abandon feature work to fix them. The business loses out multiple times. Feature work slows down as developers are forced to waste time finding workarounds for debt and bugs. The improvements/fixes take more time than they would have due to layers of crap being piled on top, and the event that forces a clean up generally has financial or reputational consequence. Collaborative decision making is the only way around this. Most engineers understand that improvements must be balanced with feature work. I find it very strange that the industry operates in the way it does. Where the people with the most knowledge of the requirements and repercussions are so often stripped of any decision making power.
• bhaak 3y ago
  Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? And only the former gets somewhat addressed over time. I really wonder how they develop at that place. And what kind of QS they have.I think even applying a crude pareto would improve their games a lot. Edit: I stand corrected. I wasn't aware that Paradox is also a publisher and even such a big company (over 600 employees!). Still makes you wonder how they go about their business.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    Svea Rike II was pretty bug free, but it was released quite some time ago...
  • adventured 3y ago
    > Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? It's not a Paradox game, they're the publisher. Colossal Order is the developer. It's a small developer out of Finland, 30-50 employees.
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      It has or will have twelve dozen DLCs or more, so it's a Paradox game.
      • getwiththeprog 3y ago
        I think that the Paradox model IS DLC. They definateley comprimise user experience through their money-grabbing, and this cash above quality bleeds through to the way their games are published. They blur the line between developer and publisher.
  • izacus 3y ago
    Most of them.
  • frozenfoxx 3y ago
    I mean unrelated since Paradox is the publisher, but Gauntlet ran like greased lightning, Helldivers ran like greased lightning, Magicka 2 ran like greased lightning… …of course those were all built on Dragonfly/Bitsquid instead of Unity so that might be a clue about where the issue lies.
• jsyang00 3y ago
  Perf issues also basically killed the SimCity franchise on PC. Hope they are able to fix things up
  • capableweb 3y ago
    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.
    • tinco 3y ago
      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 product, when a competitor emerged guns blazing.
      • notatoad 3y ago
        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.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > I bought both when they came out, and the user hostile stuff didn't bother me at all. “You" and “users generally” are different things.
      • lmkg 3y ago
        > Unless they had a better reason for restricting the maximum city size. They did! EA wanted you to play the game online. They encouraged you to connect your city with other players by making it difficult for cities to be self-sufficient. I.e., user-hostile design.
• vGPU 3y ago
  > This mesh of a pile of logs is similarly only used in the shadow rendering pass, and features over 100K vertices. But… why?
  • Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    Hey, ya gotta have logs /s
  • clnq 3y ago
    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.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • eloisant 3y ago
      I get that you can leave a bunch of things unoptimized, as long as it works fine. What I don't understand is - how did they not notice that the performances was horrible even high end hardware? How did they not decide to take the time to investigate the performances issues and find the causes we're talking about now?
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  100,000 vertices for a pile of logs and 10,000 for teeth inside a characters head is hilarious. It blows me away how bad everyone is at their jobs. Imagine spending all day working on something and then you just make it garbage.
  • 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    Now that's a bit harsh. You don't know what is going on inside that company, and under what environment the development happened. This all could easily stem from a couple of key people leaving and chaos breaking loose, or from extreme time pressure by the publishers.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      The default assumption is that the studio is not particularly different from the norm of the industry, unless proven to be otherwise.
      • clnq 3y ago
        Colossal Order has about 40 employees, even though they are AAA. Here - proven otherwise.
        • MichaelZuo 3y ago
          > even though they are AAA Says who?
          • clnq 3y ago
            They have a large publisher (Paradox Interactive) who prescribes their schedules. They also made bet bookings from Cities: Skylines that put them quite evidently in AAA. Finally, they release the games for all major platforms. All together, this describes a AAA game developer. In contrast, an AA developer would work with publishers like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital or Team 17, while a III game would have a much smaller scope - like The Witness, The Stanley Parable, or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It is clear that Colossal Order doesn’t work with a small publisher or make games of indie scope. If you were just sealioning, don’t do that please.
• coldcode 3y ago
  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 released years too early, it was still loaded with horrific code and architecture that was hard to correct or improve since we still had to ship regularly. The engine was designed (if you can call it that) in 1998 and was entirely too complex for that era. If you only stick to the mature tech, then you may wind up being potentially unable to even produce your (advanced) game. It's always a challenging tradeoff. As long as the game is playable and you make enough to continue improving you might be OK; but of course you might go belly up before you fix it enough. By the time CS2 makes it to Mac, it might be improved enough to actually play!
  • rasz 3y ago
    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'.
  • solardev 3y ago
    Everquest?
  • badindentation 3y ago
    Runescape?
• theNJR 3y ago
  While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s going on with the tram line.
  • wilg 3y ago
    I'm enjoying it too. It's fairly similar to the previous one, and have encountered a few simulation bugs, but I'm happy with it. I'm able to run it okay at 4K.
    • slimsag 3y ago
      If I played the old one and enjoyed it, what's the pitch for the new one? e.g. why is it better? On the surface it kinda just looks like the previous one, but I haven't dug into it
      • capableweb 3y ago
        I've played a lot of CS1 (and recently, lots of CS2), here are the biggest improvements for me: - The simulation is much deeper than before, not basically just statistics on a page - The game plays slightly harder, more management needed in order to have a proper budget. But like in the first, that disappears once you have 100/200K citizens, as it's hard to fuck up the budget at that stage. - The control of roads is a lot better, compared to vanilla CS1. Nowhere near modded CS1, but it'll easily get there with some time, the foundation of CS2 is a lot stronger and easier to extend - Able to build bigger cities will less lag compared to CS1. I'm sure this will improve even more in the future. Going ECS I'm sure made a huge difference in simulation performance.
      • solardev 3y ago
        The roads/transportation networks are better (baked into the engine more deeply now, such for roundabouts and multi-modal transportation) and the map is much bigger. But honestly CS:1 mods did a "good enough" job at addressing those shortcomings anyway, and CS:2 is missing a lot of the DLC stuff that the first one added. It's got a pretty minimal selection of buildings at this point. I'd wait a few months/years if I were you. Personally I feel like CS:2 was more of an architectural rewrite (as in the simulation engine) was awesome future potential, but gameplay-wise, modded and DLCed CS:1 just has a lot more actual content. I still enjoyed CS:2 a lot though, if only because it's been a hot minute since the first game, and I forgot how much I loved this genre.
• bob1029 3y ago
  The whole industry seems in need of a major reset event (aka true competition). We wasted a LOT of innovation tokens on VR, ray tracing, battle royales, etc. The availability of OSS and COTS engines has been an uplift on paper, but brought with it an entire new universe of downsides with regard to actual player experiences. For better or worse, I believe that a higher barrier to entry is a good thing for a major creative effort like a video game or feature length film. Both of these typically require involving more than 1 human in a deep, passionate way. You really want to make sure you have the right vision & people or it's going to turn out shit. Would you rather have 30 kinda meh games you can play for ~20-50 hours each, or 2 super incredible games that have endless replay value? At a certain point, the value proposition goes discontinuous with this form of entertainment. In my view, you should always seek this criticality and consider how severe the economics are if you fail to reach it. You can't necessarily plan to build something that will last as long as WoW from the beginning, but you can certainly ask yourselves "is this still fun to play?" on a daily basis. I'm not saying we go back to the abacus, but there is a price to be paid for the level of abstraction we are operating with today. You stop thinking about things and they leak into the player feel. When you are working on top of a physics engine that you separately tuned for 1000 hours under extreme duress, you know exactly when something isn't quite right and can do something about it immediately. Every COTS engine is a very leaky abstraction that turns into a titanic disaster the moment you desire things like bespoke multiplayer or platform functionality. I also think there is a vertical ownership crisis in the industry. When you have all of your assets being produced in a separate silo, you should expect a very manufactured look & feel when they are combined with the rest of the product. Less content would probably feel like a lot more if we'd slow down a bit and re-integrate the artists, developers, testers, etc. under fewer hats.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• timeon 3y ago
  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.
  • Filligree 3y ago
    Cities Skylines, somewhat infamously, only allows American city designs to work. If you want to build something European, you can't.
    • anticensor 3y ago
      Cities:Skylines 2 actually supports mixed use zoning and has fixed the parking problem. No more pocket cars.
  • ziddoap 3y ago
    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.
• ajkjk 3y ago
  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.
  • capableweb 3y ago
    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?
    • ajkjk 3y ago
      Tons of sandbox games have campaigns. I think Roller Coaster Tycoon, for instance, was the perfect example.
  • solardev 3y ago
    Have you tried the mods yet? I had a lot of fun coming up with my own goals, like perfect happiness without cars (using only transit, bicycles, and walking paths), or flood-proof cities (the hydro simulation is pretty fun to mess around with), or rebuilding a city after an asteroid (or maybe fifty...) hit it...
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  DOTS is the brain child of Mike Action. See his 2014 CppCon "Data-Oriented Design and C++" [1]. But Mike has left Unity, according to his twitter. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
  • tuna74 3y ago
    The same Mike Action that claimed that 30 fps games sold better than 60 fps games using a very questionable data set (excluding sports games etc).
  • frogblast 3y ago
    Despite the original post talking about DOTS rough edges, I didn't see anything in that article that actually suggested DOTS was the cause: that would cause CPU overhead, but it seems like they simply have a bunch of massively over-detailed geometry, and never implemented any LOD system. Maybe they could have gotten away with this with UE5's Nanite, but that much excessive geometry would have brought everything else to its knees.
    • iMerNibor 3y ago
      > Maybe they could have gotten away with this with UE5's Nanite Exactly. If unity actually delivered a workable graphics pipeline (for the DOTS/ECS stack, or at all keeping up with what UE seems to be doing) these things probably wouldn't be an issue.
      • frogblast 3y ago
        DOTS/ECS has nothing to do with geometry LODs. Those are purely optimizing CPU systems. Even if DOTS was perfect, the GPU would still be entirely geometry throughput bottlenecked. Yes, UE5 has a large competitive advantage today for high-geometry content. But that wasn’t something Unity claimed could be automatically solved (so Unity is in the same position as every other engine in existence apart from UE5). The developer should have been aware from the beginning of the need for geometry LOD: it is a city building game! The entire point is to position the camera far away from a massive number of objects!
• olaulaja 3y ago
  For a bit of reference, a full frame of Crysis (benchmark scene) was around 300k vertices or triangles (memory is fuzzy), so 3-10 log piles depending on which way my memory is off and how bad the vertex/triangle ratio is in each.
  • ReactiveJelly 3y ago
    Sounds right. I remember seeing "1M Triangles" in the performance HUD and thinking, that's crazy, a million triangles. Probably very few shared vertices once you account for edge splits, billboards, etc.
  • paavohtl 3y ago
    Author here: I never bothered counting the total vertices used per frame because I couldn't figure out an easy way to do it in Renderdoc. However someone on Reddit measured the total vertex count with ReShade and it can apparently reach hundreds of millions and up to 1 billion vertices in closeups in large cities. Edit: Checked the vert & poly counts with Renderdoc. The example scene in the article processes 121 million vertices and over 40 million triangles.
    • jiggawatts 3y ago
      “If you’ve used more triangles than there are pixels on the screen, you’ve messed up.” I call this kind of thing the “kilobyte rule” because a similar common problem is shoving tens of megabytes of JSON down the wire to display about a kilobyte of text in a browser.
      • Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
        I'd think today's problem is tens of megabytes of JavaScript to display a couple kilobytes of text.
      • kgabis 3y ago
        Well, not anymore, Epic's Nanite is basically a triangle per pixel rendering.
• butz 3y ago
  Now imagine performance, if this game could be written by a single person in assembly...
  • solardev 3y ago
    Roundabout Tycoon™: Untoothed Edition
  • rasz 3y ago
    Code is not the problem here, assets are. Even Chris Sawyer had an artist assigned for Transport Tycoon, otherwise you would end up with programmer art.
  • MagicMoonlight 3y ago
    Without the stupidly implemented front end draining the resources you could easily have millions of people in your city.
    • qwytw 3y ago
      Why do you think the UI is causing all the performance issues?
      • Nition 3y ago
        I think they mean the visuals as a whole.
  • Krssst 3y ago
    Release date: 2043. The feature set is far from the same scale as RCT1.
• thrillgore 3y ago
  "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.
  • wilg 3y ago
    DOTS is homegrown isn’t it?
    • thrillgore 3y ago
      Right, it is. I intended to talk about Bolt and ProBuilder, tools they bought, added to the engine, and then left to rot. Although to build DOTS they did poach a lot of ECS and Data-Oriented folks like Mike Acton, who left earlier this year.
  • Sakos 3y ago
    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?
    • djbusby 3y ago
      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.
      • paulddraper 3y ago
• honkycat 3y ago
  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" even THAT far back! They still don't have an answer for a network stack, and now LOD is broken? LMAO. Unity has been a dirty word for me for a number of years. This is the pay-off for dismissing people's concerns and insisting it will buff out eventually.
  • kristianp 3y ago
    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!
    • honkycat 3y ago
      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.
    • munificent 3y ago
      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.
• flipgimble 3y ago
  One conclusion is that Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga with pieces in random state of readiness and compatibility. More and more Unity comes out looking like a mismanaged mess that lost its way from the goal of "democratizing game development". I'm guessing the studio was pressured to release on a hard deadline to make the publisher their promised profits. This game would have been a guaranteed first day purchase for me, but the bad press coverage now made me move on to other games in the limited time I have. So I may check back to see if the updates fixed the pefromance in 6mo or never. What I'm saying is that the person who decided on this release date likely made a long term strategic mistake for short term profit, or was forced to do so by another idiot up the chain.
  • MrLeap 3y ago
    > "Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga" Unity has a RELATIVELY firm foundation, and lots of optional out buildings that are short jenga towers. It does take some bonecasting to identify which is which. I would characterize the use of DOTs in a product you mean to ship as _gutsy_. For my projects I'd be liable to first write a compute shader for anything they used DOTs for. Despite all that, from my reading it doesn't look like CS:2 really got bit too badly for using it. Their perf issues are more broadly explained by poor LOD coverage, treating their addons like black boxes, and no occlusion culling. These are issues that no stack is immune to.
    • asdff 3y ago
      If your stack merely had "run the production code on a typical user environment" as part of the process, you'd have caught this ahead of release though.
• Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  Imo graphics peaked on PS2. All I need is RE4 / FFXII style graphics rendered in 4k resolution. Sublime.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• cratermoon 3y ago
  To paraphrase, "Colossal Order's programmers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
• dang 3y ago
  Hey all: this is an interesting article. Can we please discuss what's specifically interesting here? Threads like this tend to become occasions for responding generically to stuff-about-$THING (in this case, the game), or stuff-about-$RELATED (in this case, the framework), or stuff-about-$COMPARABLE. There's nothing wrong with those in principle but each step into genericness makes discussions shallower and less interesting. That's why the site guidelines include "Avoid generic tangents" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• hertzrut 3y ago
  Unity is hostile to serious game development
• alkonaut 3y ago
  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 bugs - the game is still quite hollow (cough, Starfield). A game like this should of ocourse have a continous perf process and if it doesn't run ok (min 30fps on median hardware 60 on enthusiast hardware for example) then it just shouldn't ship. I wish more studios would stop having crunchtime for meaningless deadlines such as holiday seasons. Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now".
  • Dah00n 3y ago
    >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&hidef2p=1&filter=topsellers&ndl=1 https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...
    • christophilus 3y ago
      > In the end, the problem is capitalism. Is this sarcasm? I’m asking seriously. If not, then how is a poorly running game the result of capitalism, and what is the alternative economic model that would produce only high-performance / efficient games?
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        I don't think it's sarcastic. The game runs poorly because it needed more time for optimizations. It doesn't get more time for optimiztions because the publisher said it needed to ship now. The publisher can say that it needs to ship because they can advertise for good launch sales, because the a large portion of the customer base will buy it at launch as long as there aren't obvious showstoppers. It's a bit trite to sum that down to "capitalism", but sure. it's the underlying societal buzzword issue
• dimgl 3y ago
  Just wanna give a shout out to the brief mention in the article of Anno 1800. Quite possibly one of the best games I've ever played.
  • sundvor 3y ago
    I bought it based on this comment, on sale now at Steam! It looks great, thanks.
• gardnr 3y ago
  I really appreciate the writing style: > This pass is surprisingly heavy as it takes about 8.2 milliseconds, or roughly about far too long, ...
  • promiseofbeans 3y ago
    I wish more people would write like this, sprinkling little bits of humor in a somewhat serious piece
    • getwiththeprog 3y ago
      You might then like RockPaperShotgun and The Register
      • promiseofbeans 3y ago
        Thanks!
• ok_computer 3y ago
  This is my favorite video using the poor rendering in the game to make cool art effects. Full disclosure there may be an artistic license and post processing but it’s hilarious you can get these visuals in a modern game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ13OFmRF-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ13OFmRF-4
  • LtdJorge 3y ago
    Wrong video? I think that one is using Mirror's Edge Catalyst
    • pierrec 3y ago
      That right there is the city from the original Mirror's Edge (2008). I can tell from having played it a lot. And what a great idea for a music video.
    • hombre_fatal 3y ago
      They are referring to the video's focus on low-detail game assets that are only rendered in the distance. Though apparently something the game in TFA sorely lacks.
    • ok_computer 3y ago
      Wrong video on my part.
• cchance 3y ago
  i'm sorry was he benchmarking this at 5120x1440? like seriously do people really game at that resolution?
  • denkmoon 3y ago
    Yeah, it's referred to as super-ultrawide. There are a reasonable number of monitors out there with this resolution. It's more for race/flight sim type stuff IMO but if you got it, why not play everything at that res provided it performs well.
  • ihuman 3y ago
    That's two 1440p 16:9 monitors next to each other
  • kristofferR 3y ago
    That's the best resolution, it's the one of 49" 32:9 ultrawide monitors like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9. Look at images of it from the top, that'll help you understand how immersive it is.
    • paavohtl 3y ago
      Author here! That's my exact monitor. I actually started writing a blog post about it earlier this year when I got it, but didn't manage to finish it yet. It also has its own share of technical issues, though overall it is the best monitor I've ever seen or used.
  • stefan_ 3y ago
    He is explicitly not benchmarking, just exploring the render pipeline.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    To me, that seems like an absolutely amazing resolution for many games. Very rarely do you need more pixels in the vertical direction (most games will just end up rendering sky or ground) when left to right are all you really need. That resolution is still fewer pixels than a simple 4k display, which modern games seem to drive at 60fps quite regularly if you buy beefy hardware. A graphical gore fest like Doom runs at over 100fps on 4k on the card the author has, so a mostly static city builder should also operate fine at a resolution like that.
• akasakahakada 3y ago
  Let's see how much of these still hold up. 1. Optimization do not bring profit. 2. Bad code make developers' life easier. 3. Hardware nowadays is fast enough that we no need to concern about efficiency.
• torginus 3y ago
  Unity is a clown engine. I remember some guy benchmarked DOTS, against plain old C++ code with OpenGL, just like your dad used to write, and it was no contest, DOTS couldn't keep up. You have to remember, Unity usually sets the bar very low for themselves, comparing their ancient Mono implementation (they still use the Boehm GC, written in the 1980s!), and when a shiny new performance 'fix' like Burst/DOTS drops, they proudly proclaim how much faster they managed to make things, never mind a modern .NET implementation, like Microsoft's CoreCLR would achieve the same performance without any proprietary tech, without any code modification.
  • Varriount 3y ago
    Huh, I never knew Unity used its own CLR implementation. Any idea why?
    • heywhatupboys 3y ago
      Unity is older than the Core runtime. They had to use Mono as their base.
      • fulafel 3y ago
        Assuming they had C# or .NET as a constraint. I'd wager not, they just wanted something that would work for "scripting".
        • geon 3y ago
          C# and their own custom clr language was the only supported languages, so yes.
          • fulafel 3y ago
            There were lots of other languages with support available. I don't think Unity had anyone mandating they had to use .NET or C#.
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  So the game uses extremely detailed models, then fails to have an intelligent way of abstracting/culling away those things that will never make it into pixels, is that a fair summery? Also, does that mean that easy fixes are available or is this so core that solutions would require going back to the drawing board?
  • sbergot 3y ago
    We can only speculate one the difficulty of the fixes. I am not an expert but I believe culling and LoD are two big things for engines. Not being able to use existing implementations is really unfortunate. I guess the "tricks" are well-known but I don't think the implementation is easy.
    • Ciantic 3y ago
      I'm not a GPU programmer, but I became interested to dig out what is the state of art of culling, and found out Arseny Kapoulkine [1] has implemented those in MIT licensed C++ code base: Cluster cone culling, frustum culling, Automatic occlusion culling, triangle culling, Meshlet occlusion culling, Optimizing culling. On paper sounds impressive, and maybe Colossal Order could learn from those. https://github.com/zeux/niagara https://github.com/zeux/niagara
• CellFin 3y ago
  [flagged]
• Stevvo 3y ago
  Unity has built in profilers that show exactly what Renderdoc + NSight do, and far more. The blame lies squarely with the studio for failing to do basic optimization that is required for any game. The many issues with Unity's engine development and features are unrelated.
• kookamamie 3y ago
  The real summary: Unity is used as rendering engine and various rendering options are toggled on without much worry about the big picture. Add in some Unity "packages" and the patchwork of rendering things with unpredictable (and hard-to-fix) performance is ready.
• hooby 3y ago
  The TL;DR: Analysis showed that most frame time was lost due to lack of LOD levels and culling - causing the engine to render insanely high amounts of polygons that weren't even visible on screen. In conclusion it seems that using the brand new engine feature DOTS (which is a perfect match for this game), successfully solved the CPU bottlenecks the first game had. But because of Unity's DOTS <-> HDPR integration still being WIP (with several key features being experimental/missing) - they had to implement a lot of stuff on their own (including, but not limited to culling), which cost development time and caused the game to be not quite ready at release (explains missing LODs/optimization).
• davbo 3y ago
  Laundry boys is a superb name for clothes pegs Great article @paavohtl!
• arendtio 3y ago
  I am surprised that the issues are so basic. When I heard, that Cities Skylines 2 had a bad performance I expected something like they were using the GPU for graphics as well as for the simulation, but didn't have a good scheduler or so (something new/unproven). However, after reading this, it seems to be mostly a rendering issue with even basic stuff missing, like LOD models or occlusion culling?!? Feels like someone had to optimize the rendering engine after Unity didn't deliver, but skipped the '101 of how to optimize a renderer' in the first place.
• Frankclarassa 3y ago
  [dead]