5 ms·

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

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.
    - Arelius 3y ago
      Fair enough, but Unreal's Renderer isn't the best fit for this sort of game either. And their data based ecss is still behind DOTS for simulation last I checked
  - darklycan51 3y ago
    Stormgate is using Unreal engine just for the graphics and it's doing pretty fine...
    - Arelius 3y ago
      I'm not sure that's super relevant. Firstly, just because they can use Unreal doesnt mean that it isn't causing problems, even you state that they are using it juat for their graphics which inplies challenges. It's a completely different game by a completely different team. And it doesn't appear to be released yet. So it seems very premature to be judging it based on runtime performance.. Now, personally, I would choose yo build an RTS l/Builder in Unreal over Unity over time. But that's almost entirely due to my experience with Unity the company and their antagonistic incentives towards their developers, and the ease in which it is to get source access and little to do with technical engine fit. Honestly, in my professional opinion, the design of Unity is more flexible in this regard, and I'd consider it a reasonable decision to try to use Unity from a technical engine design POV.
solardev 3y ago
This is a sequel to Cities: Skylines 1, which was also written in Unity. It was probably easier to reuse code (and personnel) for the sequel without switching to a totally different engine? Maybe for CS:3 :)
wilde 3y ago
It is very possible to make a game that runs like shit in Unreal. Immortals of Aveum comes to mind.
spoonjim 3y ago
> When did the gaming industry become a place where what people inside the company want matters more than the end user? Happened everywhere. Now if you run an intense company where people are expected to work hard towards ambitious goals or be fired, you’re “toxic”
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  It sounds like you're attempting to carry the water for Elon Musk. Good luck with that. The very definition of a toxic brogrammer, Alex St John literally glorified the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words [1], describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference (which I and my team from Maxis attended, and personally witnessed the slave auction and free silly string and live lions -- not all were caged, some were just tied up): [1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ [offline and banned from archive.org] >"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with." >"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party." Yes, the same Alex St. John who is so incredibly toxic that his own daughter publicly denounced him and his "horrific toddler meltdown" and "toxic waste trash fire": I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech (medium.com/milistjohn): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542568 https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-and-he-is-wrong-about-women-in-tech-4728545e7c0e https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-... >My name is Amilia St. John and I am the daughter of Alex St. John. Yes, that one. For those not following the horrific toddler meltdown my father has been very publicly broadcasting over the past few days, here is a short summary; My father, posted an article recently on venturebeat.com claiming that: >“Many modern game developers have embraced a culture of victimology and a bad attitude toward their chosen vocations.” >and how: >“[he] can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work.” >— The usual self aggrandizing agenda that older generations like to peddle on days when they need to feed their superiority complexes. My father’s article led to a massive outcry from the gaming industry and a subsequent invasion of my father’s blog by the (rightfully) angry internet masses. >On the blog, they uncovered extremely distasteful recruiting slides and supplemental blogs with revolting opinions regarding women, minorities and those with autism in the tech industry. Since these findings, countless others and I have found ourselves at a loss for words how anyone, especially someone in a position of power, can think that it is acceptable to broadcast such offensive material. >As his toxic waste trash fire not only is associated with my last name but also my face, I felt compelled to respond to my father’s sexist, ableist, and racist rants. [...] Alex St John’s Ideas About Game Development Are Terrifying: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-game-development-are-terrifying/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-... >Earlier today you would have seen the story how Alex St. John, the creator of DirectX and founder of WildTangent, came out over the weekend trying to recharacterise the conditions of game development. It’s art, not a job, and game developers shouldn’t be as concerned with stress, work-life balance or fair wages. Those were some of the arguments St. John made, although you should read them within to understand the full context. >St. John also has strong views on who precisely game studios should hire. It’s contained in a presentation called “Recruiting Giants” and suggests, among other things, that coding isn’t actual work, “real” programmers don’t value money and that working juniors and interns so hard they burn out is “good for them”. [...] Dispelling some myths about the autistic wunderkind programmer: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dispelling-some-myths-about-the-autistic-wunderkind-programmer https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dispelling-some-myths... >In April 2016 Alex St. John, one of the developers behind Microsoft's DirectX technology platform, wrote an article in which he defended eighty hour working weeks, scorned work-life balance and memorably described a porcelain toilet as an "incredibly decadent luxury." St. John’s article was widely criticized for promoting what many consider to be exploitative working practices and attitudes in the video game industry. >In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs." [...]
BillFranklin 3y ago
The model LOD issues described in the article can be fixed without changing engine. It's slightly easier to hire Unity devs to work around Unity issues vs hiring Unreal devs because there are many more Unity devs (Unreal has 13% of the market). Plus Unreal takes a 5% royalty fee on all sales, vs a flat fee for using the Unity engine.
- Arelius 3y ago
  What is that comparing? Beware of sampling mismatch. Due to Unreal's use in AA and AAA and the size of those teams, I wouldn't be surprised to see the statistics reversed when you limit the talent pool to the set of people you need.
- capableweb 3y ago
  I don't think was a huge concern for Colossal Order (the developer of Cities: Skylines) as the team is very tiny and they're not trying to grow like crazy. Seems they're happy being a smaller studio, so having 100,000 Unity devs available on the market VS 10,000 Unreal Engine devs makes less of a different (numbers made up, don't quote me on those)
raytopia 3y ago
UE5 is no magic bullet.
Xeamek 3y ago
What makes You claim that game like this can't be made in Unity? Cause honestly this sound like the typical "Unity bad, UE with their flashy trailers good". But maybe You actually do have a valid reasoning, please share it then
- wetpaws 3y ago
  [dead]
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  The rendering pipeline for DOTS is incomplete. The studio had to implement it. Sounds serious enough to try something else, especially given Unreal has Nanite. I think on the ECS side they're lagging behind though
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Sounds like the biggest problem was an insanely beginner mistake - I’m guessing they had inexperienced interns model most of the buildings so the poly counts are absurd. And no one checked the poly counts before putting them in the game? I’m a little confused how they screwed this up after already shipping Cities 1 which didn’t have any major issues like this
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Unreal is not the panacea The problem is the developers more than the engine choice Most of the AAA released this year had performance problems, most of them were built using Unreal 5
Arialonomus 3y ago
I would argue that UE5 is even less suited to a game like this than Unity is. Unreal certainly has impressive rendering tech, and it has designs towards increasingly becoming a generalist engine, but it is clearly designed with certain genres in mind (i.e. 1st and 3rd person games like RPGs, Shooters, Action games, etc.). A city-builder in UE5 would present a whole host of other challenges, and many of the high-tech rendering features would likely be overkill. Not to mention, Unreal games have notorious performance issues of their own--though there is dedicated effort to resolving those. Unity is designed more as a general engine, but it comes with a lot of baggage in terms of half-baked features and optimization difficulties. As the author mentions they really unlocked their potential with implementation of Unity's ECS framework, but they were still chained to Unity's rendering tech, which has been underdeveloped for several years now. My observation tends to be that simulation games are the ideal case for custom engines. While there are some commonalities across games, compared to many other game genres, they don't get a lot of benefits from standardizations. Sim games often end up kneecapped by trying to conform to existing engine frameworks instead of spinning up something optimized to the way their systems work. It requires a lot more technical know-how than an action-adventure game or a platformer, and the up-front cost to developing your own tech is an order of magnitude compared to using out-of-the-box solutions. I think with the massive success of C:S, Colossal Order was in an excellent position to try something ambitious. Maybe with open-source tools like Godot having more flexibility in their frameworks, where you can just get the parts you want (rendering approach, etc.), it'll be easier in future to develop more specialized custom tech for games.
- Arelius 3y ago
  This for sure. City builders, and certain classes of RTS are really the last major forms of games that really are very poor fits for modern off the shelf engines. Honestly, trying to build one in either Unreal or Unity is going to be a painful experience with challenges likely surpassing having just built the engine you need in the first place. But Engine selection is really only a technical decision less then half the time these days anyways.
  - darklycan51 3y ago

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.
  - Arelius 3y ago
    Fair enough, but Unreal's Renderer isn't the best fit for this sort of game either. And their data based ecss is still behind DOTS for simulation last I checked
- darklycan51 3y ago
  Stormgate is using Unreal engine just for the graphics and it's doing pretty fine...
  - Arelius 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's super relevant. Firstly, just because they can use Unreal doesnt mean that it isn't causing problems, even you state that they are using it juat for their graphics which inplies challenges. It's a completely different game by a completely different team. And it doesn't appear to be released yet. So it seems very premature to be judging it based on runtime performance.. Now, personally, I would choose yo build an RTS l/Builder in Unreal over Unity over time. But that's almost entirely due to my experience with Unity the company and their antagonistic incentives towards their developers, and the ease in which it is to get source access and little to do with technical engine fit. Honestly, in my professional opinion, the design of Unity is more flexible in this regard, and I'd consider it a reasonable decision to try to use Unity from a technical engine design POV.

solardev 3y ago

This is a sequel to Cities: Skylines 1, which was also written in Unity. It was probably easier to reuse code (and personnel) for the sequel without switching to a totally different engine? Maybe for CS:3 :)

wilde 3y ago

It is very possible to make a game that runs like shit in Unreal. Immortals of Aveum comes to mind.

spoonjim 3y ago

> When did the gaming industry become a place where what people inside the company want matters more than the end user? Happened everywhere. Now if you run an intense company where people are expected to work hard towards ambitious goals or be fired, you’re “toxic”

DonHopkins 3y ago
It sounds like you're attempting to carry the water for Elon Musk. Good luck with that. The very definition of a toxic brogrammer, Alex St John literally glorified the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words [1], describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference (which I and my team from Maxis attended, and personally witnessed the slave auction and free silly string and live lions -- not all were caged, some were just tied up): [1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ [offline and banned from archive.org] >"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with." >"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party." Yes, the same Alex St. John who is so incredibly toxic that his own daughter publicly denounced him and his "horrific toddler meltdown" and "toxic waste trash fire": I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech (medium.com/milistjohn): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542568 https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-and-he-is-wrong-about-women-in-tech-4728545e7c0e https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-... >My name is Amilia St. John and I am the daughter of Alex St. John. Yes, that one. For those not following the horrific toddler meltdown my father has been very publicly broadcasting over the past few days, here is a short summary; My father, posted an article recently on venturebeat.com claiming that: >“Many modern game developers have embraced a culture of victimology and a bad attitude toward their chosen vocations.” >and how: >“[he] can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work.” >— The usual self aggrandizing agenda that older generations like to peddle on days when they need to feed their superiority complexes. My father’s article led to a massive outcry from the gaming industry and a subsequent invasion of my father’s blog by the (rightfully) angry internet masses. >On the blog, they uncovered extremely distasteful recruiting slides and supplemental blogs with revolting opinions regarding women, minorities and those with autism in the tech industry. Since these findings, countless others and I have found ourselves at a loss for words how anyone, especially someone in a position of power, can think that it is acceptable to broadcast such offensive material. >As his toxic waste trash fire not only is associated with my last name but also my face, I felt compelled to respond to my father’s sexist, ableist, and racist rants. [...] Alex St John’s Ideas About Game Development Are Terrifying: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-game-development-are-terrifying/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-... >Earlier today you would have seen the story how Alex St. John, the creator of DirectX and founder of WildTangent, came out over the weekend trying to recharacterise the conditions of game development. It’s art, not a job, and game developers shouldn’t be as concerned with stress, work-life balance or fair wages. Those were some of the arguments St. John made, although you should read them within to understand the full context. >St. John also has strong views on who precisely game studios should hire. It’s contained in a presentation called “Recruiting Giants” and suggests, among other things, that coding isn’t actual work, “real” programmers don’t value money and that working juniors and interns so hard they burn out is “good for them”. [...] Dispelling some myths about the autistic wunderkind programmer: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dispelling-some-myths-about-the-autistic-wunderkind-programmer https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dispelling-some-myths... >In April 2016 Alex St. John, one of the developers behind Microsoft's DirectX technology platform, wrote an article in which he defended eighty hour working weeks, scorned work-life balance and memorably described a porcelain toilet as an "incredibly decadent luxury." St. John’s article was widely criticized for promoting what many consider to be exploitative working practices and attitudes in the video game industry. >In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs." [...]

BillFranklin 3y ago

The model LOD issues described in the article can be fixed without changing engine. It's slightly easier to hire Unity devs to work around Unity issues vs hiring Unreal devs because there are many more Unity devs (Unreal has 13% of the market). Plus Unreal takes a 5% royalty fee on all sales, vs a flat fee for using the Unity engine.

Arelius 3y ago
What is that comparing? Beware of sampling mismatch. Due to Unreal's use in AA and AAA and the size of those teams, I wouldn't be surprised to see the statistics reversed when you limit the talent pool to the set of people you need.
capableweb 3y ago
I don't think was a huge concern for Colossal Order (the developer of Cities: Skylines) as the team is very tiny and they're not trying to grow like crazy. Seems they're happy being a smaller studio, so having 100,000 Unity devs available on the market VS 10,000 Unreal Engine devs makes less of a different (numbers made up, don't quote me on those)

raytopia 3y ago

UE5 is no magic bullet.

Xeamek 3y ago

What makes You claim that game like this can't be made in Unity? Cause honestly this sound like the typical "Unity bad, UE with their flashy trailers good". But maybe You actually do have a valid reasoning, please share it then

wetpaws 3y ago
[dead]
jokethrowaway 3y ago
The rendering pipeline for DOTS is incomplete. The studio had to implement it. Sounds serious enough to try something else, especially given Unreal has Nanite. I think on the ECS side they're lagging behind though
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

coffeebeqn 3y ago

Sounds like the biggest problem was an insanely beginner mistake - I’m guessing they had inexperienced interns model most of the buildings so the poly counts are absurd. And no one checked the poly counts before putting them in the game? I’m a little confused how they screwed this up after already shipping Cities 1 which didn’t have any major issues like this

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Unreal is not the panacea The problem is the developers more than the engine choice Most of the AAA released this year had performance problems, most of them were built using Unreal 5

Arialonomus 3y ago

I would argue that UE5 is even less suited to a game like this than Unity is. Unreal certainly has impressive rendering tech, and it has designs towards increasingly becoming a generalist engine, but it is clearly designed with certain genres in mind (i.e. 1st and 3rd person games like RPGs, Shooters, Action games, etc.). A city-builder in UE5 would present a whole host of other challenges, and many of the high-tech rendering features would likely be overkill. Not to mention, Unreal games have notorious performance issues of their own--though there is dedicated effort to resolving those. Unity is designed more as a general engine, but it comes with a lot of baggage in terms of half-baked features and optimization difficulties. As the author mentions they really unlocked their potential with implementation of Unity's ECS framework, but they were still chained to Unity's rendering tech, which has been underdeveloped for several years now. My observation tends to be that simulation games are the ideal case for custom engines. While there are some commonalities across games, compared to many other game genres, they don't get a lot of benefits from standardizations. Sim games often end up kneecapped by trying to conform to existing engine frameworks instead of spinning up something optimized to the way their systems work. It requires a lot more technical know-how than an action-adventure game or a platformer, and the up-front cost to developing your own tech is an order of magnitude compared to using out-of-the-box solutions. I think with the massive success of C:S, Colossal Order was in an excellent position to try something ambitious. Maybe with open-source tools like Godot having more flexibility in their frameworks, where you can just get the parts you want (rendering approach, etc.), it'll be easier in future to develop more specialized custom tech for games.

Arelius 3y ago
This for sure. City builders, and certain classes of RTS are really the last major forms of games that really are very poor fits for modern off the shelf engines. Honestly, trying to build one in either Unreal or Unity is going to be a painful experience with challenges likely surpassing having just built the engine you need in the first place. But Engine selection is really only a technical decision less then half the time these days anyways.
- darklycan51 3y ago