[HN Gopher] Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
___________________________________________________________________
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
Author : paavohtl
Score : 512 points
Date : 2023-11-05 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.paavo.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.paavo.me)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, I love the review score histogram over time feature
| too, along with the "Overall reviews" vs "Recent reviews"
| summaries.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| squidsoup wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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..."
| throw3823423 wrote:
| And it gets worse the smaller the market is: There is a
| chance that a youtuber with sufficiently large following
| could actually choose to buy said mac pro, because their
| revenue might be pretty large. But then you look at, say,
| boardgame reviews. Nobody, ever, buys a game. But the number
| of views isn't good enough to dedicate the time to it as
| anything other than a hobby. Thus, anyone posting enough that
| they make it their job is also getting sponsored on top of
| the free product, but nobody wants to tell you that. Thus,
| all you are seeing is 100% ad, just shaped as a review, or as
| entertainment.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Hey, it worked for Jerry Pournelle and Robert Scoble ...
| make3 wrote:
| it should be illegal imho. You straight up shouldn't be allowed
| to tell reviewers what they can and can't review
| perihelions wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Internet now is full of non-journalists ("content creators")
| producing what people substitute for journalism.
| doikor wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 82degC 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 wrote:
| 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...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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/)
|
| An older title, Anno 1404, had a Venice expansion too:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| solardev wrote:
| Have you tried 1800? The grid there is a pretty "soft" one,
| meaning it's more like a visual guide than anything
| enforcing gameplay. It's not that different from zoning and
| road-building in Skylines, where your beneficial buildings
| (like hospitals and police stations and schools) also have
| a limited radius of effectiveness.
|
| Gameplay vid with no commentary, if you wanna see:
| https://youtu.be/jxm_ZroHj3E?si=qDnn1AK1d2kdVAf-&t=68
|
| The campaign might be linear, but the sandbox mode feels
| like a mix of Cities and Civilization to me. It kinda
| scratches that sandbox itch, though the focus on trade (vs
| city-building) got a bit tiresome for me.
|
| I think CS:2 also copied some of the mechanics from 1800
| (like the customizable placement of farms around production
| buildings), trade buildings for lumber, ore, etc.
| solardev wrote:
| PS: 1800 is free this weekend, if you wanna try it
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/916440/Anno_1800/
| mrkeen wrote:
| I heard about city simulator games modelling the number of
| carparks they'd need before deciding to scrap them instead.
|
| If they left them in, it would have been a fun challenge to
| minimise them.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/9/4316222/simcity-lead-desig...
| solardev wrote:
| Parking and traffic is actually a big deal in Cities:
| Skylines too, both 1 and especially 2. Traffic will make a
| lot of areas harder to get to.
|
| The second game adds parking lots of various sizes, parking
| structures both underground and above ground, etc. But it
| also encourages you to build alternative public
| transportation like buses, trolleys, trains, metros, etc.
| (Sadly no bicycles in the 2nd game yet).
| chc wrote:
| Cities: Skylines was sort of a follow-up to Cities In
| Motion, which was entirely about transportation, so that's
| a very essential part of its DNA.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| As someone who played a lot of CiM, CiM2 and C:S: they're
| not as similar as you might expect.
|
| The CiM games were all about public transit, cars played
| a supporting role at best. IMHO, they're the best transit
| games ever made.
|
| In C:S, it's the other way around: managing car traffic
| is imperative (to the point that many recommend
| micromanaging intersections with mods such as TM:PE), and
| transit takes the supporting role (although it's still a
| lot of fun).
| GaggiX wrote:
| No idea why you were downvoted, there are big limitations about
| this game: the zoning made of squares favors grids, lack of
| bike infrastructure, no progress has been made on this, so yes
| cars and grids unless you want dead areas.
| tomcam wrote:
| You know things are rough when... The game ran
| so poorly that Windows Game Bar refused to
| acknowledge there even was a framerate.
| booboofixer wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Isn't GN Canadian? I mean North Americanese.
| Arnavion wrote:
| GN is in the US. Maybe you're thinking of Linus Tech Tips.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Stormgate is using Unreal engine just for the graphics and
| it's doing pretty fine...
| Arelius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is very possible to make a game that runs like shit in
| Unreal. Immortals of Aveum comes to mind.
| spoonjim wrote:
| > 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"
| BillFranklin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| UE5 is no magic bullet.
| Xeamek wrote:
| 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
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 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
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Frost giant is building stormgate, the spiritual successor
| of starcraft 2, with even better/smoother gameplay than sc2
| with Unreal Engine 5, they picked what parts they reused
| such as the renderer and built the underlying stuff from
| scratch, but still
| inoffensivename wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| GeForce Now has been amazing as a mac only user
| solardev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes because you have no other options.
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Dosent really count as it is not rendering on your machine...
| ofc its good there.
| solardev wrote:
| So? That's even better. Doesn't use my battery life or
| create noise & heat. Netflix isn't run on my machine
| either.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Sure, but then it does not have any relevance to the
| article.
| smolder wrote:
| It just uses natural resources to outfit and power data
| center stuff to create heat and noise somewhere further
| away. Netflix... is fairly efficient, though being on-
| demand, perhaps much less so than broadcast TV.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Try not fluoridating the water, defunding the dentistry
| college, and subsidizing sugar, so everyone's teeth fall out.
| Runs much faster then!
| deanCommie wrote:
| The fix fits into a tweet ->
| https://twitter.com/ColossalOrder/status/1716883884724322795
|
| > If you're having issues with performance, we recommend you
| reduce screen resolution to 1080p, disable Depth of Field and
| Volumetrics, and reduce Global Illumination while we work on
| solving the issues affecting performance.
|
| This is all I had to do to get smooth performance on an AMD
| Radeon RX 5700 XT
| kossTKR wrote:
| 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...
|
| 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 wrote:
| I typed something very similar in parallel with you. Guess the
| engineering typically required is no more? At least not here.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of
| business and corners will need to get cut. Insulting
| engineers and describing them as "monkeys" because you are
| unaware of businesses function is quite unwarranted. "Real
| engineers" need to take a real look at themselves!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| "Pay peanuts get monkeys" is a proverb.
|
| > Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out
| of business and corners will need to get cut.
|
| Won't happen. The US barely has any employment laws, and
| so do many other countries of the world.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| What won't happen?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| As long as the government doesn't ban employing people
| for 12 hours and more straight for weeks, and actually
| _enforces_ that ban, there will always be enough
| employers doing so, and enough people willing to go
| through with it "for the credits".
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Especially in am industry that sees depressed wages
| because it's the dream job for many.
|
| I'm still not sure what from my original statement won't
| happen.
| chc wrote:
| Game dev in general is that way, but my impression was that
| Colossal Order had traditionally been a little better than
| most. I suppose I may have been mistaken.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| We make faster hardware and software will bloat to consume
| it.[1][2][3]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
| QuickMinuteOats wrote:
| Pardon the snark, but the answer should be obvious: budget and
| deadlines.
|
| Producing well-optimized, "clever" code usually requires
| magnitudes of more time than the simplest, quickest solution.
| Hobbyists line yourself, and a few companies like Nintendo, are
| typically the only ones that can afford to spend time
| optimizing like you describe.
| kossTKR wrote:
| I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a
| day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an
| acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by
| vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove
| the teeth in one go.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Sure. Who is gonna prioritize that? Engineers likely have
| no discretionary time left and are even working weekends.
| Even on a web project I've been on, I had PM complaint
| every meeting about loading times of a admin interface. I
| told them every time that they should than prioritize the
| pagination ticket I had written. After a months of this
| shit, I took time out of my Saturday and just added it. I
| wouldn't have done that if I had already had to work nights
| and weekends.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Working overtime is just insane to me. Why can't you just
| ignore the PM and do it during normal hours?
|
| What are they going to do? Fire you?
| imiric wrote:
| I don't buy that excuse. To me it seems more like game
| developers have become complacent with the powerful hardware
| consumers have at their disposal, especially on PCs, and the
| fact they can always push fixes after the release. Decades
| ago it used to be a major milestone when a game "went gold".
| It meant QA was successful and that the game was fully
| playable. Budget and deadlines also existed back then, but
| there was (usually) much more care taken to ensure a good
| gaming experience, regardless of the hardware. Saying that
| only a few companies can do this successfully today is
| excusing objectively bad development practices.
|
| Consumers should vote with their wallet, and stop preordering
| and falling for preorder bonuses and marketing hype, which is
| another disease affecting modern gaming. Unfortunately,
| publishers know that they can release a lackluster product
| based on hype alone (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077), and then
| spend years "polishing" a game into a state they promised
| before the initial release. The modern gaming industry is
| rife with scams like these to the point that it should be
| heavily regulated. So, no, none of these companies can be
| excused for releasing a garbage product and charging full
| price for it.
| clnq wrote:
| > I don't buy that excuse.
|
| This means you are, sadly, very uninformed. There is a lot
| of rolling with the punches in the games industry, and many
| engineers want to optimize things more, and work OT to do
| so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to do this in
| AAA space on company time).
| imiric wrote:
| > This means you are, sadly, very uninformed.
|
| No, it means that I don't accept budget and deadlines
| being an excuse for delivering a poor experience. As a
| consumer, I'm speculating about the reasons why this
| happens, but my point is that it shouldn't happen at all.
|
| > many engineers want to optimize things more, and work
| OT to do so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to
| do this in AAA space on company time)
|
| Again, this is an industry problem, and not something
| companies should be excused for.
|
| Whether engineers actually care about optimizing or not,
| and whether they crunch or not (as much as I may
| sympathize), is not my concern, and I place equal blame
| on them for delivering a subpar product, whether it's
| under their control or not. Ultimately their names will
| be listed in the credits, and they represent the product
| as much as the publisher. If they don't like the
| environment of a particular studio, they can always
| choose to work elsewhere.
| clnq wrote:
| > I place equal blame on them for delivering a subpar
| product, whether it's under their control or not.
|
| What else is there to say...
|
| > If they don't like the environment of a particular
| studio, they can always choose to work elsewhere.
|
| They like it. The industry just has issues beyond their
| control which are in the process of being solved,
| gradually. No one will drop their dream job to satisfy
| your entitlement right now, sorry to say. You are free to
| not buy the game.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm entitled because I want to buy a product that works
| as advertised?
|
| > You are free to not buy the game.
|
| Yes, I'll continue to do so. I just wish other consumers
| did the same so that this situation can improve. The
| first step is not excusing it when it happens, but
| condemning it.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| Really? Shipping logs with 100k vertices and people with
| individually rendered teeth is an "obvious budget and
| deadlines" issue?
|
| It strikes me as a "how many idiots are in a position to make
| important decisions on this game" issue, or "how generally
| competent is the development team" issue.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason
| Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky
| with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few
| months might sink your company, especially with interest rates
| being high.
|
| Calling out that something is "easy" and "fun" is likely
| insulting to the developers who are frequently working
| 70-80hour weeks sand ruining their family life in the process.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though.
| I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor
| devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget
| wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of
| polishing the core gameplay, _then_ adding the fluff after
| launch.
|
| In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet
| the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder
| where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god
| simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management,
| economy or politics is a joke)
|
| This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of
| effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year
| by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless
| graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two
| months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from
| the game directors and business people.
| habinero wrote:
| Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on
| "useless" features.
|
| Things like this happen because the people giving you money
| have a hard deadline and you ship what you have.
|
| Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult
| to use than expected.
|
| It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better
| first, duh". I promise you, they know.
|
| But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see.
|
| If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do
| [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the
| facts.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years
| ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to
| manage it.
|
| It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in
| making an actually playable game, which indicates that
| the problem is not something inherent but a simple
| product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see
| Creative Assembly's meltdown)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| As scope increases all the organizational challenges
| balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than
| several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of
| domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no
| fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous
| project and ready for the next phase of this new project
| to get to where you need them to start design levels and
| assets? It's much easier to fix if the additional 3 month
| of development is just 3 months cost of living for John
| Romero and John Carmack.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's
| just more bloat. look at old games' credits, you'll find
| maybe even _bigger_ studios (making art and programming
| with limited hardware was much more time-consuming....)
| but they had good gameplay on a much smaller budget.
| Today, studios waste money on analytics, governance
| things and other fluff...
|
| Best case study is Mojang, the company has over 800
| employees but it is literally outperformed in game design
| and update quality/quantity by ten people at Re-Logic.
| (which includes managers and legal as well!)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's
| just more bloat
|
| Are you serious? Teams have increased massively. Super
| Mario Kart for example had less than 20 people working on
| it. That's not even the size of the audio department for
| many modern AAA games
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Terraria started off as a 2D homage to Minecraft...The
| very first release basically was just a 2D version of
| Minecraft. It took a few updates for Terraria to become
| its own thing.
|
| I enjoy both games, especially Terraria, which I have
| played since its original release. But let's not lie to
| ourselves that the volume of content updates for Terraria
| is anywhere close to the updates that Minecraft has
| received. Adding content for a 2D game is a lot easier
| than adding content for a 3D game, even if you're using
| voxels.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| IMO, the parent picked a terrible example. Comparing any
| game to "Minecraft" doesn't make much sense to me. What
| even is Minecraft at this point? There seem to be a
| multiple versions on a multitude of platforms, some on
| the same platform targeting different demographics.
| Different changes are need to keep the different
| demographics hooked. Of course the original was built by
| a single guy which avoided all the organizational
| complexities.
| waveBidder wrote:
| The indies that don't make a viable product, you don't
| see.
| vGPU wrote:
| Sure, but this is Paradox, a company that constantly makes
| buckets of money on DLC for Stellaris, Europa universalis,
| crusader kings, etc. I doubt they were about to run out of
| money. They just had to release a new race of scantily
| dressed aliens for stellaris and they'd be good for another
| half a year.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Paradox is just the publisher, it's developed by Colossal
| Order.
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Correction: React/Web technlogy is responsible for all the UI,
| from the loading screens to in-game labels when using road
| tools and everything in-between.
|
| And their implementation of Coherent Gameface is not the reason
| for the performance issues in the game, so not sure how it's
| even relevant.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I think parent meant to imply there is a similarly wasteful
| culture in frontend development so of course they'd use react
| for menus and labels.
| lozenge wrote:
| Most of the revenue comes in after, long after release. So it
| now makes sense to release an unfinished game and use the
| revenue to pay for the improvements.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| That sounds like exactly what happened. I've been in that
| position many times in games I've worked on and seen it
| happen.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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....
| capableweb wrote:
| Not sure what kind of projects you've worked on before,
| but the ones I've been involved in, you wouldn't spend
| time optimizing something taking <1% of render time when
| other parts are heavily affecting the final render time
| for each frame.
|
| Why on earth would they try to optimize how the UI
| renders when they're having big issues elsewhere?
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Sorry, my initial comment probably come off quite
| differently. It's not that "using web UI" is the reason
| why this game has awful performance, that's more like a
| bellwether for the studio's priorities.
|
| It's absolutely not the most important, or even in the
| top 10 most important problems here, but it shows
| _really_ illustratively how much they care about making a
| game which performs in an acceptable way. (which is: not
| that much)
|
| Also, it's not even one or two high-poly models dragging
| the performance down, what I was aiming at is that the
| game suffers from death by a thousand cuts - the LoDs are
| only a part of the issue, almost every part of the game
| is done in a sub-optimal way. So while the UI is not a
| significant part of the frame time, if they fix the most
| glaring performance issues, they will find that there
| won't be a silver bullet, the game is just a pile of
| small performance problems all the way down.
| jsnell wrote:
| > It's not that "using web UI" is the reason why this
| game has awful performance, that's more like a bellwether
| for the studio's priorities.
|
| All it shows is that optimizing something that was
| already fast enough was not a priority. But why would you
| want it to be?
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Respectfully, just take the L on your original comment
| and move on. It's ok to be wrong.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >"These things should literally be banned."
|
| Not "metaphorically", but "literally"? Or are you using
| "literally" in its non-literal sense? And "banned", not
| "discouraged", or simply "ridiculed" like you're trying
| to do?
|
| That is literally (to use the term in its literal sense)
| an extremely brash statement, quite a lot to walk back in
| reverse into the shrubberies. Have you actually tried to
| develop a UI in Unity that approaches the quality you can
| easily (and cheaply and quickly and maintainably)
| implement in a web browser? And have you ever tried to
| find someone to hire who was qualified to do that (and
| then put them to work on the UI instead of the game
| itself), compared to trying to find someone to hire who
| can whip out a high quality performant web user interface
| in a snap, that you can also use on your web site?
|
| Not to mention that you used web tech to call for the
| literal banning of web tech.
| alright2565 wrote:
| The author calls out render passes that take 100us, and
| considers this pass too fast to give a number to.
|
| Why does it matter if it's 5 render calls or 500? The
| developers clearly have plenty of work to do optimizing
| the other 70ms, it doesn't make sense for them to spend
| any time working on this.
| rstat1 wrote:
| "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."
|
| Literally quoted from the article. Standard 2D UI like that
| can be done in as little a single draw call (or so I have
| read, never actually done it)
| lyu07282 wrote:
| If you composite on the CPU I guess? no that
| React/Webpack UI is actually a pretty good solution to
| complex game UIs. It offers great DX while the
| performance penalty is miniscule compared to a huge
| deferred render pipeline. Btw the last Sim City used the
| web platform for UI too.
| rstat1 wrote:
| the last Sim City is not something that should be held as
| a model of what to do here.
|
| Great "DX" now when your building it, but good luck
| maintaining it over the long term.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Valve/Steam should really have some policies around unfinished
| or unpolished games so that they are forced to be marked as
| "early access"
|
| It is absolutely ridiculous that these developers can get away
| with releasing a beta (essentially what it is) and setting the
| full release price without the end user knowing they're a
| guinea pig.
| chc wrote:
| They let you return the game no questions asked if you
| haven't played it for two hours.
| hypeatei wrote:
| True. Marking it early access would just save more peoples
| time and be more explicit about the current state of the
| game.
| athorax wrote:
| Valve/steam should absolutely not be doing that
| hypeatei wrote:
| Why not? They're still able to list the game and sell it.
|
| I don't see the issue with making it more clear to end
| users that they're beta testing a game.
| rychco wrote:
| Why not? There's already a hardware survey & they could
| easily have an opt-in system that reports the user's
| average framerate while playing games. If the average
| hardware specs can't run that game >=60fps >=90% of the
| time on any graphical setting then it's beyond fair to give
| it a "Hardware reports indicate that this game performs
| poorly" label.
| solardev wrote:
| I like that!
| solardev wrote:
| I think their reviews are punishment enough. "Very Positive"
| for CS:1 and "Mixed" for CS:2. And if it improves over time,
| the reviews improve with them!
|
| Cyberpunk was a good example of that. And the graphs make it
| really easy to see how it's changed over time: https://store.
| steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/#a...
| dvaletin wrote:
| Which only incentivize companies to publish unfinished
| products with "will fix it later" ideology.
| solardev wrote:
| Is that a big deal? That's easy to avoid if you don't
| pre-order games and just wait for the day 1 reviews. Even
| if you did end up with a shitty situation, Steam lets you
| refund the games with minimal hassle.
|
| On the other hand, there are players who'd rather have
| the game earlier (like me) than a few months later,
| despite its launch issues.
|
| The alternative approach -- Baldur's Gate 3 being in
| Early Access forever -- is fine too, but damned if that
| wasn't a long wait.
|
| Maybe the compromise is bigger companies being willing to
| release in Early Access more often. That shouldn't be
| limited to just indie companies, but any publisher that
| wants early and broad public feedback.
|
| Especially for a city-builder game (where there isn't
| really a campaign or spoilers), I don't see why not...
| wincy wrote:
| Okay for real, who decided this game could be have the
| acronym CS? Counterstrike has been one of the most played
| games since 2000. I don't even play Counterstrike but it
| has a huge player base compared to this game. And didn't
| Counterstrike 2 literally come out a few weeks ago?
| solardev wrote:
| Heh, good point.
|
| Also, I really wish Apple chose some other name for its
| Game Porting Toolkit... hard to find relevant discussions
| in the sea of "other" GPT talk.
| Dah00n wrote:
| To make matters worse when it just released, the two top
| games on Steam were CS:2 and CS:2.
| jrajav wrote:
| Read the reviews and don't buy it. This works fantastically
| as a punishment already without ham-handed, opaque
| moderation.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Early access is not a "punishment" though. It's a system
| that already exists on Steam.
| joe_guy wrote:
| But when used in the way you're describing, valve forcing
| it in a developer instead of a developer opting in, it
| becomes a form of punishment.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Early Access is a "punishment" purely because game devs
| and publishers use it as an excuse to sell incomplete,
| broken products.
|
| The terrible reputation is self-inflicted and deserved.
| Dah00n wrote:
| If this works fantastically, then why is it at the top
| sellers list?
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=englis
| h...
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I wonder if releasing a widely anticipated game unfinished is
| sometimes actually strategically beneficial marketing wise.
| Perhaps it's a marketing dark pattern?
|
| It makes the game stay in people's minds longer because
| people keep coming back to it asking "is it good yet, have
| they fixed it yet?". It kind of feels it has worked like that
| for Cyberpunk. If it's a finished game on launch day people
| will quickly make up their minds if it's for them and then
| move on.
|
| Personally I would be on the fence about buying it even if it
| was good on launch and I would probably not buy it straight
| away. But I might just change my mind if I get reminded of it
| enough times. Then again I felt like that about Cyberpunk as
| well and I still haven't bought it.
| davedx wrote:
| But it's not "half finished"!
|
| It has some performance issues. Not the same thing.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Sure, I should've picked a better word there.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think half-finished is a good way to describe the state
| of day-1 releases of games these days. Look back on other
| games (and non-game software) and measure A. the amount
| of time between when the developer started and the first
| release, and then B. the total amount of time it took to
| get to the final patch. I bet for many, MANY games, A <=
| B/2: They were literally "half-finished" in terms of
| time, on first release.
| solardev wrote:
| I think Cyberpunk was only able to turn itself around
| because the studio got so famous with The Witcher and
| people were willing to give them another chance. If they
| hadn't been famous already, it'd just have been another
| rando shitty game on Steam, of which there are thousands...
|
| But then there are stories No Man's Sky too, which had a
| miraculous turnaround as well. So maybe it can happen
| sometimes...
| bsder wrote:
| The anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners had a significant impact
| on getting people to look at the game again.
|
| That's a black swan that can't easily be replicated.
| Dah00n wrote:
| [delayed]
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Yeah they need to start moderating quality.
| davedx wrote:
| This old chestnut again.
|
| Software is not "essentially a beta" because it doesn't meet
| a bunch of entitled users' arbitrary definitions of
| "finished".
|
| A game having some performance issues doesn't mean you're a
| beta tester.
|
| Did you even buy this game? I suspect not.
| hypeatei wrote:
| No, I didn't buy it because it's $50 and you have to follow
| guides and tricks to get it running optimally. That's not
| what I expect from a game released at full price.
| geraldhh wrote:
| market forces ...
|
| but yea, source2 engine could have used some more love before
| going live
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's stunning and completely unacceptable. This is a product
| that is not fit for purpose. I hope the developers are
| embarrassed by what they have produced.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| This is rarely developers' fault. You can bet they wanted to
| deliver the best product possible, but were not given the
| time needed to do that by upper management.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Why is it impossible that maybe Cities Skylines simply has
| shitty developers?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I didn't blame the developers. I have been involved in
| projects that I'm embarrassed by even though the worst
| decisions were the ones made by upper management (hell I
| worked on the new Jira front end, a continuing source of
| humiliation).
| tlonny wrote:
| > I long for the days of a tuned, polished game engine
| squeezing every inch of performance out of your PC.
|
| Have you heard of Factorio :)
| waveBidder wrote:
| how do they keep finding things to improve in their
| FridayFunFacts? the fame is an absolute gem
| rkagerer wrote:
| Can someone expand on exactly what is meant by "model LOD" in
| this context?
|
| Does the commenter mean they should have implemented a system
| to reduce texture resolution or polygon count dynamically, eg.
| depending on what's in view or how far away it is? That the
| artists should have made multiple version of assets with coarse
| variants removing things like computer cables from desks in
| buildings?
| davedx wrote:
| Yes, that. It's short for "level of detail".
| navjack27 wrote:
| Traditionally that is a thing that is done by modelers for
| video games yes.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Can someone expand on exactly what is meant by "model LOD"
| in this context?
|
| Back in the day, games just had one version of each model,
| that gets loaded or not.
|
| Nowadays, games with lots of models and huge amount of detail
| lets each model have multiple different versions, with their
| own LOD (Level of Detail).
|
| So if you see a tree from far away, it might be 20 vertices
| because you're far away from it so you wouldn't see the
| details anyways. But if you're right next to it, it might
| have 20,000 vertices instead.
|
| It's an optimization technique to not send too much geometry
| to the GPU.
| solardev wrote:
| There were already some great explanations in the replies,
| but here are a few videos too:
|
| Basic overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIkIMgEVnX0
|
| Or a more detailed one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwaS5YuTTA0
|
| It's been a standard technique in video games for... decades
| now.
| Zetobal wrote:
| The last one wasn't better either... most games nowadays have
| game breaking bugs at launch.
| pzlarsson wrote:
| It is astonishing indeed. In the long run I hope software
| catches up with the majority of other industries which has
| already realized that minimizing waste is a good idea. It might
| take a while but unless we get room temperature super
| conductivity or some other revolutionary tech first we will
| start thinking about efficiency again sooner or later.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't remember game engines ever being polished and tuned. If
| you needed optimization it was always on the community to
| figure it out. Usually they'd do a good job though and make it
| go up 10 fold compared to what the game devs came up with.
| rychco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unlikely. The game actually does run, even though it has
| performance issues and bugs. Cyberpunk barely ran on the PS4
| when it launched.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Cyberpunk got delisted by Sony because it literally didn't
| function. It was playable but buggy on pc
| thrillgore wrote:
| Cyberpunk was delisted because CDPR told consumers to request
| refunds.
| Havoc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not sure how the "frontend" (UI) developers have anything
| to do with the assets, but it's a easy scapegoat I guess...
| lamontcg wrote:
| 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.
| paavohtl wrote:
| > So you wound up with things like the teeth.
|
| Author here. The teeth are completely unrelated to the
| simulation and not even really related to pushing maximum
| graphical fidelity. They are just using completely
| unoptimized - possibly stock - character models, which
| include a mouth with teeth even thought the characters
| never open their mouths.
| reactordev wrote:
| But they are also using LOD... as per your article [0].
| So it's quite possible (you have the source, go look)
| that they call this lib with the vertex buffer of the
| mesh in question and get back an LOD3 mesh that's
| decimated and simplified but with the projected UV's.
| This is kinda how Unity wants folks to do "AAA" in Unity.
| Use a high resolution model and decimate LOD's in real-
| time like Unreal Engine does. Only, it doesn't work half
| the time. It requires that the original high poly mesh be
| properly UV wrapped and not vertex shaded. So to further
| throw gas on the fire. It's entirely possible instaLOD is
| the source of a lot of these issues. Combined with what
| you found in the rendering stages.
|
| [0] https://instalod.com/
| paavohtl wrote:
| InstaLOD is only used in the asset pipeline. I haven't
| seen any references to real-time use. Haven't found any
| evidence of real-time decimation either.
|
| To be clear there are LODs, but only for some of the
| meshes.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The teeth certainly aren't helping anything, and
| something has to make a decision not to render them
| somewhere, and they're wasting disk and RAM if nothing
| else.
|
| Also think that's a distraction from my point, so just
| pretend I wrote "100,000 vertex logpiles" instead of
| teeth.
|
| The teeth are just the most obviously useless unoptimized
| thing they shipped that nobody had the time/will to
| cleanup before launch.
| Havoc wrote:
| That's cool. Didn't realise modders still do that sort of low
| level stuff
| capableweb wrote:
| Considering Paradox/CO are dragging their feet to release
| the modding docs/tools, we don't have much choice if we
| wanna start building our mods today :)
| lawn wrote:
| I wouldn't even care if the graphics were exactly the same as
| in the first game.
|
| It's all about the gameplay.
| huytersd wrote:
| No, we can have both things. Graphics are incredibly important
| to a game, especially for a simulator like this, it really
| helps with the immersion. It's as important as gameplay.
| Havoc wrote:
| > It's as important as gameplay.
|
| Important certainly but colour me unconvinced on equally
| important. If the game play isn't fun on a simulator then it
| isn't much of a game.
|
| People still play chess despite terrible graphics
| cube2222 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Or off, entirely. On my 3080 it seems to cause lots of
| rendering artifacts.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > 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.
| davedx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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".
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I imagine lots of backend developers never really thought about
| what it actually takes to build complex, responsive, performant
| and visually appealing UIs and how the web platform just so
| happened to have matured for decades to make all of that as
| painless as possible. Last time I saw that reaction was someone
| learning about how SpaceX is using it for their flight controls
| in the Dragon capsule.
| mattlondon wrote:
| > I imagine lots of backend developers never really thought
|
| There is a _lot_ of snobbery and arrogance from "pure"
| backend developers who think JavaScript is some limited toy
| language. If it is not C++ or Rust or even Go (...assuming
| they are ok with the GC) then to them it is not worth wasting
| a milliseconds time on while they go off and fetishise over
| their copy semantics for their CRUD website backend.
|
| Modern JavaScript is highly performant and the DX is second-
| to-none (unless you are using anything related to NPM).
| JavaScript and Typescript freed from the NPM nonsense is an
| absolute joy to work with.
|
| I look forward to the _inevitable_ dominance of JavaScript on
| the backend.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| So... Node?
| JCharante wrote:
| Battlefield 1 was using React to render the UI in 2016!
|
| Conference talk by dev:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkf9H3XEMoE
| solardev wrote:
| Just wait for Boeing to start making real cockpits in React...
| starkparker wrote:
| Electron's bad performance really poisoned that well early on.
|
| Gameface's architecture is described in its documentation:
| https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-gameface/integration/te...
|
| Most of its divergence from browser implementations are
| unsurprisingly in font rendering, which is generally a headache
| in games anyway: https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-
| gameface/integration/op...
|
| And in RTL text rendering: https://docs.coherent-
| labs.com/unity-gameface/integration/op...
|
| The Javascript DOM API is a subset, but pretty rich
| considering: https://docs.coherent-labs.com/unity-
| gameface/api_reference/...
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Do MSFS menus use html as well? Because they are 100% the worst
| most laggy menus I've ever used.
| wilg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| This is pretty much a universal thing--whether it's
| software development or home maintenance. It's really
| tempting to kick the can down the road to the point where
| 1.) You HAVE to do something; 2.) It's not your problem
| any longer; or 3.) Something happens that the can doesn't
| matter any more.
|
| I won't say procrastination is a virtue. But sometimes
| the deferred task really does cease to matter.
| throw3823423 wrote:
| It's a matter of letting things degrade so that the
| maintenance becomes outright firefighting. I am currently
| working on a project where a processing pipeline has a
| maximum practical throughput of 1x, and a median day's for
| said pipeline is... 0.95x. So any outage becomes
| unrecoverable. Getting that project approved 6 month from
| now would have been basically impossible. Right now, it's
| valued at a promotion-level difficulty instead.
|
| At another job, at a financial firm I got a big bonus after
| I went live on November 28th with an upgrade that let a
| system 10x their max throughput, and scaled linearly
| instead of being completely stuck. at their 1x. Median
| number of requests per second received in dec 1st? 1.8x...
| the system would have failed under load, causing
| significant losses to the company.
|
| Prevention is underrated, but firefighting heroics are so
| well regarded that sometimes it might even be worthwhile to
| be the arsonist
| piaste wrote:
| Intuitively, "fixing life-or-death disasterss is more
| visible and gets better rewards than preventing them"
| doesn't seem like it should be a unique problem of
| software engineering. Any engineering or technical
| discipline, executed as part of a large company, ought to
| have the potential for this particular dysfunction.
|
| So I wonder: do the same dynamics appear in any non-
| software companies? If not, why not? If yes, have they
| already found a way to solve them?
| dmoy wrote:
| > If yes, have they already found a way to solve them?
|
| A long history of blood, lawsuits, and regulations.
|
| Preventing a building from collapsing is done ahead of
| time, because buildings have previously collapsed, and
| cost a lot of lives / money etc.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I remember my very first day of studying engineering, the
| professor said: "Do you know the difference between an
| engineer and a doctor? When a doctor messes up, people
| die. When an engineer messes up LOTS of people die."
| harimau777 wrote:
| Outside of software, people designing technology are
| engineers. Although by no means perfect, engineers
| generally have more ability to push back against bad
| technical decisions.
|
| Engineers are also generally encultured into a
| professional culture that emphasizes disciplined
| engineering practices and technical excellence. On the
| other hand, modern software development culture actively
| discourages these traits. For example, taking the time to
| do design is labeled as "waterfall", YAGNI sentiment,
| opposition to algorithms interviews, opposition to
| "complicated" functional programming techniques, etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's a very idealistic black-and-white view of the
| world.
|
| A huge number of roles casually use the "engineer"
| moniker and a lot of people who actually have engineering
| degrees of some sort, even advanced degrees from top
| schools, are not licensed and don't necessarily follow
| rigid processes (e.g. structural analyses) on a day to
| day basis.
|
| As someone who does have engineering degrees outside of
| software, I have zero problem with the software engineer
| term--at least for anyone who does have some education in
| basic principles and practices.
| rat9988 wrote:
| I have yet to see, with the exception of the software
| world, engineering with such loose process.
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone who was a mechanical engineer in the oil
| business, I think you have a very positive view of
| engineering processes in general.
| nostrademons wrote:
| How do you think we got into this climate change mess?
| userinanother wrote:
| Yeah but if you had a release target of dec 15 and it
| crashed dec 1st and you could have brought it home by the
| 7th you would have been a bigger winner. Tragedy
| prevented is tragedy forgotten. No lessons were learned
| dymk wrote:
| Facebook was pretty good about this on the infra teams. No,
| not perfect, but a lot better than the other big companies
| I was exposed to.
|
| If anything, big companies are better about tech-debt
| squashing, and it's the little tiny companies and startups
| that are, on average, spending less time on it.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I think it is a bit tricky to get the incentives right (
| since the bookkeeping people like to quantize everything).
| If you reward finding and fixing bugs too much - you might
| push developers to write more sloppy code in the first
| place. Because then those who loudly fix their own written
| mess gets promoted - and those who quietly write solid code
| gets overlooked.
| xctr94 wrote:
| Goodhart's law at work, or "why you shouldn't force
| information workers to chase after arbitrary metrics".
| Basecamp has been famously just letting people do good
| work, on their terms, without KPIs.
|
| I will preemptively agree that this isn't possible
| everywhere; but if you create a good work environment
| where people don't feel like puppets executing the PM's
| vision, they might actually care and want to do a solid
| day's work (which we're wired for).
| bluedino wrote:
| I spent a few weeks migrating and then fixing a bunch of
| bugs in 20-year old Perl codebase (cyber security had their
| sights set on it). Basically used by a huge amount of
| people to record data for all kinds of processes at work.
|
| Original developer is long gone. Me and another guy are two
| of the only people (we aren't a tech company) who can re-
| learn Perl, upgrade multiple versions of
| Linux/Apache/MySQL, make everything else work like Kerberos
| etc...
|
| Or maybe I'm one of the only people dumb enough to take it
| on.
|
| Either way, nobody will get so much as an attaboy at the
| next department meeting. But, they'll know who to go to the
| next time some other project is resurrected from the depths
| of hell and needs to be brought up to date.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where
| this isn't true?
|
| Valve?
| uolmir wrote:
| From everything I've read Valve has exactly the same
| problem. Stack rating isn't immune. New features still
| get rewarded the most.
| flukus wrote:
| It seems endemic, especially everywhere that's not a
| product company. I think it was mythical man month (maybe
| earlier) that pointed out the 90% of the cost of software
| is in maintenance, yet 50 years on this cost isn't
| accounted for in project planning.
|
| Consultancies are by far the worst, a project is done and
| everyone moves on, yet the clients still expect quick fixes
| and the occasional added feature but there's no one
| familiar with the code base.
|
| Developers don't help either, a lot move from green field
| to green field like locusts and never learn the lessons of
| maintaining something, so they make the same mistakes over
| and over again.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://www.thepeoplespace.com/practice/articles/leadership
| -...
|
| It's very rare, this is one of the only places I can
| imagine something like that happening.
| capableweb wrote:
| The developers of Cities Skylines has less than 50 employees
| in total, it's a small developer based in Finland (Colossal
| Order), I doubt they have those sort of issues at that scale,
| that's usually something that happens with medium/large
| companies.
|
| Edit: seems I misunderstood, ignore me
| wilg wrote:
| Talking about Unity, not Colossal Order.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Unity, not cities skylines.
| thrillgore wrote:
| We're weeks past a very public pricing change that cost Unity
| market reach amidst competitors and open source projects; and
| that led to a CEO change. There are problems beyond what the
| employees can realistically fix.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| It's a combination of team not given enough time amd
| headcount to maintain and develop a product and another
| team's manager wants to grab a fief.
|
| So old products are thrown away while new products with
| similar functionalities are being created.
|
| Both teams are happy. The users suffer.
| tus666 wrote:
| It's a classic victim of shitty, shitty software developers who
| blames tools rather than taking ownership.
|
| Or shitty software dev companies that push out crap to meet
| marketing deadlines.
|
| Either way, take your money elsewhere.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Given that a number of other Unity-based games have had the
| same or similar performance issues, including KSP1, the
| Endless games, and others, it seems the problem is very much
| that Cities Skylines 2 is hitting up against the performance
| limits that the Unity engine is capable of without custom
| modifications to the engine-layer codebase.
| raincole wrote:
| I'll be really surprised if City Skylines's team didn't
| have access to Unity's source code.
| kimixa wrote:
| And do they have the number of engineers with the
| required skills to rewrite half the engine? Especially if
| the reason why they developed using those tools and
| engine is they expected not to have to do it themselves
| in the first place?
|
| It's not like there's just some "go_slow=true" constant
| that just needs changing.
| MrLeap wrote:
| I have personally been responsible for optimizing unity
| games you haven't heard issues like this about ;)
|
| This write-up really points the finger at not solving
| occlusion culling or having good LOD discipline.
|
| Give a person a dedicated optimization mandate and you can
| avoid most of this. One of the first things I do when I'm
| profiling is to sort assets by tris count and scan for
| excess. I wonder if they had somebody go through and
| strategically disable shadowcasting on things like those
| teeth? I am guessing that they made optimization
| "everybody's responsibility" but nobody had it as their
| only responsibility.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Occlusion culling and LOD should be handled by the
| engine, not the game logic, so the write-up really points
| to the problem being Unity's new and very incomplete
| rendering pipeline for ECS.
| vasdae wrote:
| Granted I know next to nothing about game development,
| but aren't LOD models made by hand?
| MrLeap wrote:
| There are tons of answers to this! I'm going to say that
| in projects I've worked on, LODs have been hand made
| about 60% of the time.
|
| There are tools for creating automatic LODs that come
| with their own pro's and con's. A bad LOD chain can
| express itself as really obvious pop-in while you're
| playing the game. There's also these things called
| imposters that are basically flipbook images of an object
| from multiple angles that can be used in place of the
| true 3d geometry at a distance. Those are created
| automatically. They tend to be like 4 triangles but can
| eat more vram because of the flipbook sizes.
|
| Unreal engine has nanite, which is a really fancy way to
| side step needing LOD chains with something akin to
| tessellation, as I understand it. Tech like that is
| likely the future, but it is not accurate to describe it
| as the "way most games are made today"
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| Yeah I mean regardless of any of Unity's limitations,
| this is entirely upon the developer.
|
| However, I also find the suggestion that because there
| are other high profile examples of unity projects with
| performance issues, it must be a problem with unity.
|
| You don't hear that about Unreal Engine, despite the fact
| that there are poorly optimized UE games.
|
| Such a bizarre set of assumptions.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Sounds like every other enterprise software platform. Unity has
| reach the IBM level of "no one gets fired for choosing X," even
| though X only makes the business people happy.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think it's a good thing in the long run, one more reason to
| switch away from Unity to add to the ever growing pile.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| It's honestly a bit insane.
|
| Just the other night I wanted to know what it'd take to do some
| AR development for the Quest 3 using Unity. 10 minutes in I was
| straight up confused. There's AR Foundation, AR Core, AR Kit,
| and I think at least one other thing. I have no idea the
| difference between those, if they're even wholly separate.
| That's on top of using either the OpenXR or Unity plugin for
| the actual headset.
| andybak wrote:
| AR Kit is Apple's thing. AR Core is Google's thing. Neither
| of those are Unity's fault. AR Foundation is a Unity layer to
| present a common interface. Which of my books is a good
| thing.
|
| Open XR is also an an attempt to make a cross platform layer
| for vendor specific APIs. Again not Unity's fault. The Unity
| plugin system is a common interface for all XR devices.
|
| I'd generally support your sentiment but in this case you're
| picking on things where Unity had mostly got it right.
| frozenfoxx wrote:
| I worked at Unity on Build Automation/Cloud Build for nearly a
| decade. Let me assure you, that tech debt is NOT being fixed
| any year soon. It's due to a fundamental disconnect between
| executive leadership wanting to run the company like Adobe
| (explicitly) and every engineer wanting to work like a large
| scale open source project (Kubernetes, Linux, and Apache are
| pretty close in style). The only way anything gets built is as
| a Skunkworks project and you can only do so much without
| funding and executive support.
| LeanderK wrote:
| > run the company like Adobe (explicitly)
|
| what does this mean?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Honestly, automatic LOD generation would solve at least some of
| the performance issues: add the functionality, make it opt-out
| for those that don't need LODs and enjoy performance
| improvements in most projects, in addition to some folks
| getting a simpler workflow (e.g. using auto-generated models
| instead of having to create your own, which could at the very
| least have passable quality).
|
| Godot has this:
| https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/mesh_lod...
|
| Unreal has this (for static meshes):
| https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/static-mesh-automati...
|
| Aside from that, agreed: the multiple render pipelines, the
| multiple UI solutions, the multiple types of programming (ECS
| vs GameObject) all feel very confusing, especially since the
| differences between them are pretty major.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I'm pretty sure unity already has that.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Out of the box, it only has manual LOD support for meshes:
| https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/importing-lod-meshes.html
| (where you create the models yourself)
|
| They played around with the idea of automatic LOD, but the
| repo they had hasn't gotten updated in a while:
| https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD
|
| The closest to that would be looking at assets on the Asset
| Store, for example: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/t
| ools/utilities/poly-f...
|
| An exception to that is something like the terrain, which
| generates the model on the fly and decreases detail for
| further away chunks as necessary, but that's pretty much
| the same with the other engines (except for Godot, which
| doesn't have a terrain solution built in, but the terrain
| plugins do have that functionality). I guess in Unity's
| case you can still get that functionality with bought
| assets, which won't be an issue for most studios (provided
| that the assets get updated and aren't a liability in that
| way), but might be for someone who just wants that
| functionality for free.
| wilg wrote:
| It doesn't which is really annoying.
| araes wrote:
| It sounds like they need to implement easy to use Level of
| Detail (LOD) and progressive meshes. 100,000 vertices on far
| away objects will break most rendering pipelines that do not
| somehow reduce them. 100,000 complicated matrix interactions
| instead of the like, 8, it probably takes really far away.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_meshes
| bhaak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Svea Rike II was pretty bug free, but it was released quite
| some time ago...
| adventured wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It has or will have twelve dozen DLCs or more, so it's a
| Paradox game.
| izacus wrote:
| Most of them.
| frozenfoxx wrote:
| 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.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >Still makes you wonder how they go about their business
|
| In a way that sent them straight to the top sellers list on
| Steam. Sadly, today, it just doesn't matter.
|
| Edit: spelling
| jsyang00 wrote:
| Perf issues also basically killed the SimCity franchise on PC.
| Hope they are able to fix things up
| capableweb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mjrpes wrote:
| The main reason I never purchased was the tiny map size. You
| could barely fit a neighborhood: https://www.reddit.com/r/gam
| ing/comments/19nz93/sim_city_5_2...
| beart wrote:
| I don't recall performance problems being the main concern for
| the last (final) Sim City, but I won't say you are incorrect.
| What I do remember is
|
| 1. shallow game play compared to its predecessors
|
| 2. demand for always online and proven lies about offline play
| not being possible because of the game architecture
|
| 3. invasive DRM, during a time when invasive DRM was on
| everyone's mind
|
| 4. launch issues which, combined with the always-online
| requirement, meant a solid "plop" of a release.
|
| 5. EA was already negatively viewed at the time by many PC
| gamers
|
| It looks like the wikipedia article for the game mentions some
| of these, and other issues.
|
| > SimCity's sixth major release was announced on March 5, 2012,
| for Windows and Mac OS X by Maxis at the "game changers"
| event.[31] Titled SimCity, it was a dramatic departure from
| previous SimCity games, featuring full 3D graphics, online
| multiplayer gameplay, the new Glassbox engine, as well as many
| other feature and gameplay changes. Director Ocean Quigley
| discussed issues that occurred during the development of the
| title, which stemmed from two conflicting visions coming from
| EA and Maxis. EA wanted to emphasize multiplayer, collaborative
| gameplay, with some of the simulation work conducted on remote
| servers, in part to combat piracy. In contrast, Maxis wanted to
| focus on graphical improvements with the new title. Quigley
| described the resultant title as a poor compromise between
| these two objectives- with only shallow multiplayer features,
| and a small city size limit- one quarter of the land area of
| previous titles in the franchise.[2][32]
|
| > The game was released for Windows on March 5, 2013, and on
| Mac in August.[33][34][35] Medium would later refer to the
| release as "one of the most disastrous launches in history".[2]
| The game required a constant internet connection even during
| single-player activity, and server outages caused connection
| errors for many users. Multiplayer elements were "shallow at
| best", with departing players leaving abandoned cities behind
| in public regions. Users were unable to save their game- with
| the servers instead intended to handle this- and so when users
| were disconnected they would often lose hours of progress.[36]
| The game was also plagued by numerous bugs, which persisted
| long after launch.[37]
|
| > The title was heavily criticized in user reviews, and
| developer plans for post-launch updates were scrapped.[2] EA
| announced that they would offer a free game from their library
| to all those who bought SimCity as compensation for the
| problems, and they concurred that the way the launch had been
| set up was "dumb".[38] As a result of this problem, Amazon
| temporarily stopped selling the game in the week after
| release.[39] The always-online requirement, even in single
| play, was highly criticised, particularly after gamers
| determined that the internet connection requirement could be
| easily removed.[40] An offline mode was subsequently made
| available by EA in March 2014, and a mobile port entitled
| SimCity: BuildIt was released later that year.[41][42][43]
|
| > It has been suggested that the poor performance of SimCity
| was responsible for the 2015 closure of Maxis' Emeryville
| studios, and the end of the franchise.[44][45]
| disconcision wrote:
| indirectly. i'd say the largest single early complain about
| simcity 2013 was the small maximum city size you quote, which
| people attributed to perf-related restrictions
| beart wrote:
| Ahh, I was categorizing that under "shallow game play", but
| I can see your point.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Drm killed simcity
| nfriedly wrote:
| I thought it was DRM that killed SimCity (?)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And the name of the DRM was Origin. It was all about some EA
| executive deciding to force Origin down everyone's throat,
| and using SimCity as the Astroglide.
| vGPU wrote:
| > This mesh of a pile of logs is similarly only used in the
| shadow rendering pass, and features over 100K vertices.
|
| But... why?
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Hey, ya gotta have logs /s
| clnq wrote:
| 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.
| eloisant wrote:
| 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?
| tbillington wrote:
| I _guarantee_ they knew about it.
|
| They even posted on social media 1 week before launch
| warning people to expect lower than expected performance,
| and raised the system requirements.
|
| If companies have to decide between prioritising features
| that they've advertised, show stopper bugs, and
| performance, guess which one always takes the back seat :)
| smolder wrote:
| You're right that this kind of stuff is sort of par for the
| course. As in other cases, it's indicative of (IMO) a bad
| development process that they didn't budget the time to
| polish before shipping. I save my games budget for stuff that
| is "done when it's done", not rushed out, mostly out of
| principle.
|
| If you aggressively min-max development cost & time vs
| features, there are big external costs in terms of waste
| (poorly performing software carries an energy and hardware
| cost,) end-user frustration, stress on workers, etc., which
| is how I justify voting with my money against such things.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect
| and in-optimal things.
|
| No, mate, stop. The state of C:S2 is well beyond anything we
| should accept as "completely normal". It's a defective
| product that should not have been released. Stop normalising
| this crap.
| Retric wrote:
| Their point is that specific mesh could be left alone and
| the game still be playable as long as other issues were
| fixed.
|
| Chances are a nearly complete version of C:S2 was playable
| and they "broke it" at the last minute by not finishing the
| optimization process.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| That's speculation based on nothing but vibes.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| It could have been like a hundred vertices and a clever normal
| map. Just insane.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| The studio that made this has like 30 devs.
| harrid wrote:
| This doesn't fly with a one man team and not with a 1000.
| It's just badly done, there's no sugarcoating. Those meshes
| should never end up in the game files.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The default assumption is that the studio is not particularly
| different from the norm of the industry, unless proven to be
| otherwise.
| clnq wrote:
| Colossal Order has about 40 employees, even though they are
| AAA. Here - proven otherwise.
| praptak wrote:
| My humble experience is that this scale of duckup is
| unachievable from line workers being bad at their jobs.
|
| It is easily achievable from bad/misaligned incentives, poor
| leadership, no product vision and probably a dozen other
| organisation problems which make decent workers working on
| stuff that actively makes the end product worse. Think Boeing
| 737 Max.
| misnome wrote:
| To the contrary: I'm sure all the developers worked very hard,
| and very competently.
|
| It sounds like classic mismanagement. Some artists making this
| being told that there will be some automatic culling or LOD
| system so to go wild - it won't affect the end result; and the
| system not being ready or being cut by another part of the
| organisation without the artists ever knowing about it.
|
| I'm sure there were vocal developers who understood the
| problems and advocated for fixing - but a decision was made to
| release anyway; I can't even say wrongly, because games being
| half-finished on release and polished later is not at all
| unusual nowadays even for flagship titles; and they do have a
| track record of supporting their titles for a long time.
|
| I can well imagine a reasonable decision to get money coming in
| now for the cost of a couple of months of low level complaints
| that nobody will remember in a year.
|
| It sucks, but I am willing to bet it's not laziness or people
| being bad at their jobs.
| Geee wrote:
| Lmao. This is often how everything seems from the outside, but
| the inside story is something else. Probably just too much
| work, not enough time.
| coldcode wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Everquest?
| badindentation wrote:
| Runescape?
| theNJR wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| stouset wrote:
| I'm also loving the game. There are a few issues, and
| performance could be better, but all in all it feels like a
| really nice entry with solid bones that should lead towards
| most of these issues being resolved with far less effort than--
| say--Cyberpunk.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The complaints are valid to some extent, but also overblown
| too. People complaining that 30-50 FPS is unplayable need to
| get some perspective on what is and is not playable. And even
| the article here drops some hot hyperbole when it says that the
| game runs worse than CP2077 with max settings and path tracing.
| I've run (tried to run) CP in such a configuration, and I get
| framerates in the _teens_. By contrast I haven 't actually
| bothered to measure the framerate in CS2 because it's perfectly
| smooth for me.
|
| I'm all for holding developers accountable for flawed games,
| but the level of negative hyperbole around CS2 has been a real
| stain on the community.
| paavohtl wrote:
| The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole - it is literally how
| badly this game performs (or at least performed on launch) on
| top-tier gaming hardware (namely RTX 4090). I linked a source
| with the quote.
| sundvor wrote:
| I just got CP2077 along with a new system, where I experience
| frame rates regularly north of 150 - almost always north of
| 100 with PBR, everything maxed out. It runs incredibly smooth
| 100% of the time, and looks completely stunning on my 32"
| 2560x1440x144 monitor. Specs are 4090/7800x3d, 64gb 6000c30,
| 990 pro nvme, bought mostly for being able to run DCS World
| (and iRacing) on triple screens plus Star Citizen. The 4090
| is beast, and absolutely worth it.
|
| I haven't had time or perhaps motivation to load up CS2 much,
| with that superb Cyberpunk story to be explored (and planes
| to fly), but on the initial tutorial I noticed a weirdly low
| fps for what was not a super impressive image.
|
| I installed Skylines 2 through my gamepass; my initial
| thoughts were to come back after some post release patch
| cycles.
|
| It took the CP2077 team a lot of time but they completely
| turned a trainwreck into something rather magic, so I'm
| hoping Skylines 2 will experience the same. I did enjoy the
| original release years ago.
|
| Finally a kudos to the author for this in depth, well written
| article! I really enjoyed it.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cities Skylines, somewhat infamously, only allows American city
| designs to work. If you want to build something European, you
| can't.
| ziddoap wrote:
| 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.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I loved every bit of this post, especially the final few
| sentences. Thank you.
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tons of sandbox games have campaigns. I think Roller Coaster
| Tycoon, for instance, was the perfect example.
| solardev wrote:
| 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...
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| 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
| tuna74 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| iMerNibor wrote:
| To quote from the blog post:
|
| > Unity has a package called Entities Graphics, but
| surprisingly Cities: Skylines 2 doesn't seem to use that.
| The reason might be its relative immaturity and its
| limited set of supported rendering features
|
| I'd hazard a guess their implementation of whatever
| bridge between ECS and rendering is not capable of LODs
| currently (for whatever reason). I doubt they simply
| forgot to slap on the standard Unity component for LODs
| during development, there's got to be a bigger roadblock
| here
|
| Edit: The non-presence of lod'ed models in the build does
| not necessarily mean they don't exist. Unity builds will
| usually not include assets that aren't referenced, so
| they may well exists, just waiting to be used.
| baazaa wrote:
| The author's point is that poor support for DOTS meant the
| devs had to roll their own culling implementation which they
| screwed up.
| olaulaja wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| butz wrote:
| Now imagine performance, if this game could be written by a
| single person in assembly...
| solardev wrote:
| Roundabout Tycoon(tm): Untoothed Edition
| rasz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Without the stupidly implemented front end draining the
| resources you could easily have millions of people in your
| city.
| qwytw wrote:
| Why do you think the UI is causing all the performance
| issues?
| thrillgore wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| DOTS is homegrown isn't it?
| honkycat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| flipgimble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Imo graphics peaked on PS2. All I need is RE4 / FFXII style
| graphics rendered in 4k resolution. Sublime.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| hertzrut wrote:
| Unity is hostile to serious game development
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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...
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