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It does feel like they bet on Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline and it locked them into a specific way of development that was hard to escape from once it
by bhouston 11mo ago
It does feel like they bet on Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline and it locked them into a specific way of development that was hard to escape from once it proved problematic.
City simulation games (Sim City, Factorio, etc.) are sort of a unique beast in that they have a ton of small scale detail that is animated and and dynamic.
The choice of engine here matters a lot, because engines are often highly optimized for specific assumptions and the assumptions of standard games (mostly static worlds with just a few dynamic entities - a platformer, a first-personal shooter) do not hold.
The studio taking this over should ensure they have some really good low level 3D devs guys on the team and a flexible engine.
I think that a home built engine could work in these cases, but only if you have the right guys for the job.
- bob1029 11mo agoUnity can definitely support scenarios involving 100k+ scene elements. The problem is that you cannot place the art team any meaningful distance away from the development team when using something like ECS. Game objects + components allow for a high degree of decoupling between the art & technology teams, assuming the total # of scene elements is well bounded (<10k). A custom engine is probably not a bad idea for a city builder. I feel like ECS is a good middle ground because you would need some pattern like this anyways and it would serve as a good reference if you decided to go fully custom. I would challenge the notion that we couldn't develop an effective city builder within the constraints of a reasonable # of game objects. Players may be compelled to accept an experience that has a significantly smaller world size if the richness within each unit of world space is much higher.