7 ms·

That's speculation based on nothing but vibes.

by mvdtnz 3y ago

Retric 3y ago
It’s speculation based on these mesh sizes being so arbitrary in the game development process and what’s broken being unnecessarily window dressing for gameplay. It’s the kind of thing that could be delayed to the last minute with some simple placeholder. “Now you might say that these are just cherry-picked examples, and that modern hardware handles models like these just fine. And you would be broadly correct in that, but the problem is that all of these relatively small costs start to add up, especially in a city builder where one unoptimized model might get rendered a few hundred times in a single frame. Rasterizing tens of thousands of polygons per instance per frame and literally not affecting a single pixel is just wasteful, whether or not the hardware can handle it. The issues are luckily quite easy to fix, both by creating more LOD variants and by improving the culling system. It will take some time though, and it remains to be seen if CO and Paradox want to invest that time, especially if it involves going through most of the game’s assets and fixing them one by one.” IE: The the game would have looked nearly complete even if none of these meshes where in use. Meanwhile the buildings themselves are optimized.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Agreed. This really smacks of late asset delivery, which probably happened because delivery dates to the rest of the dev team kept being bumped. Then, by the time the assets were finally delivered, it was recognized they weren't optimized (as expected), but there wasn't any time to fix that. Or the same thing with an internal asset team. Although honestly, you'd think after seeing the performance numbers they would have implemented an "above X zoom level, people / anything smaller than this are invisible" sledgehammer fix, until LOD could be properly addressed. Better to deal with pop-in than have everything be unexpectedly slow.

That's speculation based on nothing but vibes.

by mvdtnz 3y ago

That's speculation based on nothing but vibes.

It’s speculation based on these mesh sizes being so arbitrary in the game development process and what’s broken being unnecessarily window dressing for gameplay. It’s the kind of thing that could be delayed to the last minute with some simple placeholder. “Now you might say that these are just cherry-picked examples, and that modern hardware handles models like these just fine. And you would be broadly correct in that, but the problem is that all of these relatively small costs start to add up, especially in a city builder where one unoptimized model might get rendered a few hundred times in a single frame. Rasterizing tens of thousands of polygons per instance per frame and literally not affecting a single pixel is just wasteful, whether or not the hardware can handle it. The issues are luckily quite easy to fix, both by creating more LOD variants and by improving the culling system. It will take some time though, and it remains to be seen if CO and Paradox want to invest that time, especially if it involves going through most of the game’s assets and fixing them one by one.” IE: The the game would have looked nearly complete even if none of these meshes where in use. Meanwhile the buildings themselves are optimized.

ethbr1 3y ago
Agreed. This really smacks of late asset delivery, which probably happened because delivery dates to the rest of the dev team kept being bumped. Then, by the time the assets were finally delivered, it was recognized they weren't optimized (as expected), but there wasn't any time to fix that. Or the same thing with an internal asset team. Although honestly, you'd think after seeing the performance numbers they would have implemented an "above X zoom level, people / anything smaller than this are invisible" sledgehammer fix, until LOD could be properly addressed. Better to deal with pop-in than have everything be unexpectedly slow.