Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
blog.paavo.me
blog.paavo.me
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
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.
Although to build DOTS they did poach a lot of ECS and Data-Oriented folks like Mike Acton, who left earlier this year.
Company wasted so much money, then the org shut down for spending $500 per customer per year in maintenance (this was a health insurance company) whereas the main company would only spend $70 per customer per year. You'd think leadership of the org would get fired for this but they were rewarded with other positions within the company to do the same thing.
Unreal. Why do shareholder's put up with this? I guess the healthcare monopoly is the only reason to.
Edit: some companies have >20k employees. My first years at MS (late 90s) had these "war room" like 2x a week, 50 people, multiple VPs in the room, 2h. But there were other groups doing their war rooms too.
> 2 hours
> weekly
Kill me
---
EDIT: also, 200 people for 2 hours is only 100k if average salary is $500k/year
Every project managed by a dedicated servant-leader Six Sigma Kanban certified Scrum ninja-coach project has been a bureaucratic shitshow, with constant cargo culting to agile priniciples and forced ceremonies.
> Every project managed by a dedicated servant-leader Six Sigma Kanban certified Scrum ninja-coach project has been a bureaucratic shitshow, with constant cargo culting to agile priniciples and forced ceremonies.
The engineer-led project sounds more agile than the latter Agile insanity.
No True Scotsmen would do programming this way!
They'll want a new feature, for example new scriptable graphics pipelines which will allow them to modify the core rendering a lot easier. Ok that's fine, but then instead of implementing one they try to implement two, while at the same time completely ignoring the existing pipeline which everyone is currently using. The time to get the new pipelines working properly and onboard everyone is counted in years in this case.
Those features they actually "finished", but there are so many experimental packages that just sit there forever, or work in a half-baked manner.
https://unity.com/features/ui-toolkit
I really love TextMesh Pro and Zoltran's mesmerizing tutorials, I learned a lot about Unity reading his code, and he was totally into what he was doing and hyper productive when he was a highly regarded indie developer, but I got the impression (just guessing, no inside knowledge) that he was wasn't 1/100th as productive working inside Unity as he was on his own, or maybe they put him on something else than he originally went there to do.
It's been my experience that user interface toolkits are often turf war shit shows. I hope he's doing ok there!
https://www.youtube.com/@Zolran/videos
i.e. the classic 9-year-old Unite 14 demo:
Godex is ultimately putting lipstick on a pig. it can improve performance a bit, but ECS isn't some magical optimazation to slap on as a plug-in. cache coherency in the gameplay layer can't fix engine level bottlenecks.
For example, Godot isn't really build around ECS, but the idea of servers which are mostly autonomous game subsystems that can process their area of expertise (rendering, physics etc.) mostly independently, and are loosely coupled to the general game logic.
ECS architectures originate in the PS2/PS3 era, when CPUs were awful. Tiny caches, horrible branch mispredict penalties, slow memory, fragmented memory spaces and lack of a random access storage forced developers to build their games around predictable memory access patterns, that in general resulted in streaming architectures, where data necessary for the game data to be streamed in tiny chunks to be processed.
While generally this is good practice even nowadays, with the advent of superfast CPUs with amazing speculative execution, great branch predictors, and tens of megabytes of cache, this is no longer strictly necessary, especially considering that most modern games haven't really increased that much in terms of stuff going on on the screen compared to say, a decade or two ago. It's still uncommon for the player to fight more than a dozen dudes in an action game.
And in games with thousands of things on screen at the same time, often specialist logic and handling is necessary.
I'd imagine a city simulation involves a lot of graph lookup and traversal, spatial lookups and is generally a hairy and messy affair, not sure how easy it is to adapt that to ECS.
Then again, SimCity and Transport Tycoon simulated complex cities on, by today's standards, very frugal hardware, so city simulation might not even be such a CPU hog.
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.
Edit: Checked the vert & poly counts with Renderdoc. The example scene in the article processes 121 million vertices and over 40 million triangles.
I call this kind of thing the “kilobyte rule” because a similar common problem is shoving tens of megabytes of JSON down the wire to display about a kilobyte of text in a browser.
That’s the opposite of using 10K pixels to render two pixels on the screen.
How many polygons are there with and without e.g. AutoLOD/InstaLOD?
An LLM can probably be trained to simplify meshes and create LOD variants with e.g. UnityMeshSimplifier?
Whinarn/UnityMeshSimplifier: https://github.com/Whinarn/UnityMeshSimplifier :
> Mesh simplification for Unity. The project is deeply based on the Fast Quadric Mesh Simplification algorithm, but rewritten entirely in C# and released under the MIT license.
Mesh.Optimize: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.Optimize.html
Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD
"Unity Labs: AutoLOD - Experimenting with automatic performance improvements" https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-labs-autolod-experim...
InstaLOD: https://github.com/InstaLOD
"Simulated Mesh Simplifier": https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD/issues/4 :
> Yes, we had started work on a GPU-accelerated simplifier using QEM, but it was not robust enough to release.
"Any chance of getting official support now that Unreal has shown off it's AutoLOD?" https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD/issues/71#issu... :
> "UE4 has had automatic LOD generation since it first released - I was honestly baffled when I realized that Unity was missing what I had assumed to be a basic feature.*
> Note that Nanite (which I assume you're referring to) is not a LOD system, despite being similar in the basic goal of not rendering as many polygons for distant objects.
"Unity: Feature Request: Auto - LOD" (2023-05) https://forum.unity.com/threads/auto-lod.1440610/
"Discussion about Virtualized Geometry (as introduced by UE5)" https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2793
UE5 Unreal Engine 5 docs > Rendering features > Nanite: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na...
Unity-GPU-Based-Occlusion-Culling: https://github.com/przemyslawzaworski/Unity-GPU-Based-Occlus...
> This pass is surprisingly heavy as it takes about 8.2 milliseconds, or roughly about far too long, ...
But… why?
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.
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?
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 :)
Optimization is not done throughout the process and later there’s not enough time. Assets are made with bad topology and it would take time to redo them. Or it would take time to write a tool that retopologizes them automatically.
What I’m saying is by the time it’s “time” to optimize, there’s not enough time to optimize. It happens very commonly. But the alternative is taking development slower to do things right. And you simply don’t get investment for schedules like that in most companies. Not to mention that it’s goddamn hard to do when the execs lay off people, ask them to RTO, and induce serious attrition otherwise. Sometimes the team just can’t settle into a good process as people leave it too much. So you’re between a rock and a hard place — on the one hand: attrition and low morals, on the other hand: a tight schedule. This doesn’t apply to Colossal Order from my knowledge, but it does apply to many AAAs.
There is a problem at the root of this - extremely over-ambitious production schedules as norm. Most other things are symptoms. Most of what I described is a symptom.
The scope of work done for this game was exceptionally large for a company with 40 employees, assuming it was done within the usual AAA timeframe.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
This really smacks of late asset delivery, which probably happened because delivery dates to the rest of the dev team kept being bumped.
Then, by the time the assets were finally delivered, it was recognized they weren't optimized (as expected), but there wasn't any time to fix that.
Or the same thing with an internal asset team.
Although honestly, you'd think after seeing the performance numbers they would have implemented an "above X zoom level, people / anything smaller than this are invisible" sledgehammer fix, until LOD could be properly addressed.
Better to deal with pop-in than have everything be unexpectedly slow.
All this crying when they could have simply returned the product or not buy it at all. Colossal Order themselves warned about the performance before it was even released. There were plenty of reviews that said the same thing.
So to get up in arms about the performance means they are just being exceptionally stupid and entitled, and they should just grow up and stop crying over their toys.
Colossal Order can release whatever garbage they want to. And you can choose to buy it or not, or even buy it and return it (fight for better return policies if you want something positive).
The game runs fine and it's really fun. This "controversy" really drives home for me how detached from reality online discourse often is
It should be better optimized, but calling it "defective" does nothing but make people dismiss your comment.
runs alright for me, too. just alright, but for what it is that's fine.
however it's not really much better than the predecessor, and needs to give me a reason to give up on the HUGE mod community and well documented approaches from CS1.
Case in point: I get 6-10 fps on a 7900XT with the default settings, 17 if I use the lowest preset, all while seeing around 55-ish percent system utilization.
Something is amiss here and the game is definitely not running fine for everyone.
As someone seeing this weird performance issue I wish both sides would focus less on screaming at each other and make it easier to figure out the root cause so everyone can enjoy the game.
Gamedev has many shortcuts, and some things simply fall through the cracks. Some are caught and fixed, some are caught and not fixed, some just aren't caught at all. I imagine it's the 2nd case here; There's a unfortunate large amount of bgs these days caught by QA but not given time to fix before publisher mandates.
This is a cop-out. This doesn't seem like an oversight but rather blatant incompetence. You don't just "not pay attention" to this.
Finding objects with ridiculous triangle counts is one of the easiest things to do when you have known performance issues.
If they didn't have time to do the first, easiest chunk of the work, then something was far more dysfunctional than "it's one of a million things to deal with".
Staying on top of poly count budgets is like game dev 101.
I don't think it's uncommon even outside of gaming for modern software to have these sort of "hidden fires". Games just get a lot more conversation and a lot of niche problems as a 3D real time application.
So I assume you have a better explanation of the excessively slow G-buffer and shadowmap passes?
sounds like someone never worked on a 1000 dev team. random quirks either go unnoticed or are de-prioritized all the time. Most are minor, more and more moderate to major ones are getting through. That's definitely a publisher issue.
It was expected, yes. It does not mean they weren't trying to fix it in the 11th hour. I woildnt be surprised if some core tech was unfinished or inadequate that lead to this.
>instead of going into valve time, they released it anyway, which means that you skipped the entire polish and optimisation part not only for the game itself but for half the engine as well.
Yup, welcome to game development when you have deadlines and no benevolent (or at least, apathetic) dictator paying your bills. It's unfortunate that we can trace this back to the 80's with ET, but this is simply the business realities. Game code isn't mission critical (and until recently, does not care about maintainability), and also isn't what sells the product.
So it never gets the time to be cultivated like other indistries. And people still buy anyway. It's a two way street of apathy and every publisher hopes it can slip under the cracks and not become the next Superman 64. Most manage to slip.
There's not much you can do about it with the current publishing structure, where most funders don't work in nor care about games. And the ones that do still see their money draining whenever the talk of delays come up. That won't be solved except with time as more industry trailblazers retire and shift to management (remember, Todd Howard is only in his 50's. Gabe and Kojima are 60. So many pioneers are still well under retirement age). Or for more truly indie teams to arise and learn how to scale up projects while staying lean. The latter is what I hope to do.
I really think that the performance and scale indie developers can squeeze out puts AAA developers to shame nowadays, and I really hope that that'll continue to happen. All it takes is time, organisation, and a lot of time.
>I really think that the performance and scale indie developers can squeeze out puts AAA developers to shame nowadays, and I really hope that that'll continue to happen. All it takes is time, organisation, and a lot of time.
Yup, I agree. Indies don't tend to have money, so the budget comes from. Elsewhere. We can already utilize some amazing tools to cut down the time of scaling up environments. Not as much with actor assets. But I don't think it's too far off (more just locked off in acedemics white papers).
This is a well known property of log scaling.
Or both?
Also, does that mean that easy fixes are available or is this so core that solutions would require going back to the drawing board?
Cluster cone culling, frustum culling, Automatic occlusion culling, triangle culling, Meshlet occlusion culling, Optimizing culling. On paper sounds impressive, and maybe Colossal Order could learn from those.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
>Unity has a package called Entities Graphics
Well that's news to me. Which means that package probably isn't much older than a year. Definitely way too late for game that far in production to use.
oh, so they rebranded the hybrid renderer. That makes a lot more sense: https://forum.unity.com/threads/hybrid-rendering-package-bec...
I'm fairly certain the hybrid renderer was not ready for production.
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
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.
Even with GFN it's laggy and stutters. Totally agree with the article.
Also way fewer cards needed this way, with users being able to share cards through the day instead of each needing their own.
Basically mainframes all over again :)
I don't think this actually tracks, unless the heat is actually being put to use. You don't need HVACs when you have the machines distributed.
In data centers, sometimes (not always, and perhaps not often?) the heat can be more efficiently handled through central heat exchangers, more efficient commercial HVACs, etc.
Was just trying to offer the GP a way to play the game that actually works :) (Yes, only by inefficiently throwing RTX 4080 power at it, and even then still struggling.)
[Chill: it's a tooth joke, not a conspiracy theory.]
> 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
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...
Is this sarcasm? I’m asking seriously. If not, then how is a poorly running game the result of capitalism, and what is the alternative economic model that would produce only high-performance / efficient games?
It's a bit trite to sum that down to "capitalism", but sure. it's the underlying societal buzzword issue
But there is no pure capitalistic structure nor socialist one. I did already mention it was a trite comparison.
You can argue that's the same under capitalism, just replace "the people" with "customers". In both cases corner cutting is only an issue if there's deception involved, wether that's a Party member using lower quality materials for a construction project, or a video game company spending less time polishing a game. I don't see a problem with releasing unfinished/poorly optimized games as long as it's clearly disclosed. Early releases are basically this.
It's not like Sonic 2006 that is forever broken, sold decently at launch and then cratered the series for the next decade to come.
Those who bought it and played it in 1.0! Many of them never saw the fixed game. They weren’t helped at all by the fact that the game was quite good 6 months later. Worst case they’ll never buy a CDPR game again, best case they’ll buy the games after 6 months (which by the logic of rushing releases is disaster because apparently not selling millions the first holiday season is a failure).
surely, it is the underlying economic system ruining the art of modern video game development!
Part of the problem is that AAA is just (IMO) too big and expensive. Devs might actually have to ship a broken game around holiday time just to get enough sales to survive.
And the other extreme can be dangerous too, like how Mass Effect Andromeda's development dragged on forever, and EA let it happen because its such a golden IP.
I think the ultimate solution is to just scale down most studios a little bit, so the studio and publisher can afford to delay. Medium sized studios are the sweetspot, especially going forward with GenAI.
This makes it a 'race to the bottom' style (or a race to the top?) competition, where higher funding gets you more marketshare, but only against lower funded studios. It's akin to advertising budgets. Mostly a zero sum game in the end.
This is not necessarily true any more. I think smaller studios chipping away for a long time are making better games than most big ones.
The procedural stuff was just a " while we leap of the cliff with no plan" let's make the cost cutters happy who wail because there "abandon working system" for completely different system that's working for a completely different usecase did not work out. Honestly for decisions this clueless and value endangering a whole executive floor should have been let go.
Any small indie studio have to deal with it.
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.
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!
Unreal really excels at action games, but you can absolutely implement custom camera RTS controls and such. Batteries included but replaceable.
The question "does X engine support this kind of game" is a bit.. off. You would be amazed at how many features these engines pack in. However: You would also be amazed at how NOT "plug and play" they are. It still takes a TON of effort and custom code to make a sophisticated game.
Imagine you have a web app written in Ruby using Rails with data stored in Postgres. You have a few hundred tables, millions of rows. Millions of lines of Ruby, CSS, and HTML. Thousands of images carefully exported as JPEG, GIF, or PNG depending on what they contain.
Now imagine being told you need to simultaneously port that to:
- Not run on the web. Instead be a native application using the OS's rendering.
- Not be written in Ruby. Instead using a different language.
- Not use Rails. Instead, use a different application framework.
- Not use Postgres. In fact, don't use a relational database at all. Use an entirely different paradigm for storing data.
- Not use CSS, HTML, and raster images. Instead, everything needs to be, I don't know, vector images and Processing code.
That's about the scale of what moving from one game engine to another can be like. Depending on the game, it's isn't always that Herculean of a task, but if often is. A mature game engine like Unity is a programming language, build system, database, asset pipeline, application framework, IDE, debugger, and set of core libraries all rolled into one. Once you've picked one, moving to another may as well just be creating a whole new game from scratch.
And if you've got a team of experienced Unity developers, some who've been working with C#/Unity for their entire game dev career, switching to C++/Unity isn't the most practical option. While many concepts are similar between engines, you're going to be back at the bottom of the learning cliff for a while.
It sounds like Unity isn't really the problem in this case, it's more about too many polygons, poor use of LOD, and sub-optimal batching (too many draw calls). It was probably more of a time pressure issue than a tech issue, as game development is usually a race against the clock.
to be fair, DOTS 1.0 did "release" in 2022 I believe. IIRC the core came out and the biggest ommision was DOTS animation. But many core parts of DOTS has been deemed "production ready" for about a year now.
>They still don't have an answer for a network stack, and now LOD is broken
broken implies that Unity had a robust LOD system to begin with. That's always been very primitive since Unity's most successful projects were mobile or 2D.
But yes, the Netcode has been in absolute shambles for years. Very confusing since that is the backbone of mobile. I'm guessing there's some popular 3d party they defer to that integrates well with Unity.
However, after reading this, it seems to be mostly a rendering issue with even basic stuff missing, like LOD models or occlusion culling?!? Feels like someone had to optimize the rendering engine after Unity didn't deliver, but skipped the '101 of how to optimize a renderer' in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
Analysis showed that most frame time was lost due to lack of LOD levels and culling - causing the engine to render insanely high amounts of polygons that weren't even visible on screen.
In conclusion it seems that using the brand new engine feature DOTS (which is a perfect match for this game), successfully solved the CPU bottlenecks the first game had.
But because of Unity's DOTS <-> HDPR integration still being WIP (with several key features being experimental/missing) - they had to implement a lot of stuff on their own (including, but not limited to culling), which cost development time and caused the game to be not quite ready at release (explains missing LODs/optimization).
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.
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.
…of course those were all built on Dragonfly/Bitsquid instead of Unity so that might be a clue about where the issue lies.
In a way that sent them straight to the top sellers list on Steam. Sadly, today, it just doesn't matter.
Edit: spelling
Great article @paavohtl!
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.
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.
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.
I won't say procrastination is a virtue. But sometimes the deferred task really does cease to matter.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Of which the Sydney Opera House is one of the better known examples.
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.
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).
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.
Valve?
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.
It’s very rare, this is one of the only places I can imagine something like that happening.
Edit: seems I misunderstood, ignore me
So old products are thrown away while new products with similar functionalities are being created.
Both teams are happy. The users suffer.
not a very strong one until recently. They implemented the FAANG esque "levels" in late 2021. Promotion lines weren't too atypical from FAANG, but the new system was not around long enough to cause the problems people complain about today.
The biggest issue IME was that teams were isolated. Maybe DOTS should have talked more with strongly integrating HDRP/URP into its workflow, but DOTS was busy getting off the ground itself. HDRP and URP are two very different teams and they were trying to solve very different problems. Perhaps that was a bad move for the people it was serving, who'd want to have the flexibility to migrate to/from HDRP and URP. There weren't really much product management that was trying to make the engine cohesive, so you end up with a rendering core and a bunch of different plugins with different philosophies and whatnot.
>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.
to some extent, yes. I think the one huge downside of Unity compared to modern companies is its antiquated CI/CD. Getting changes into the core c++ engine took 10x longer than it really needed to. iterations on repo builds were slow because Unity simply didn't cough out the money for proper server farms, and the interface to interact with the status of PRs felt like it was from 2005. Much of DOTS was iterated upon separately on with modern Jira/Github/etc. pipelines and the DOTS repo was very lean (and it was public too... until it wasn't. I think they moved it in 2022?), moving to make a change to the core engine was like traveling back in time 15 years ago.
Legacy code is a pain as is. And Unity definitely needed to revamp some non-feature workflows before it could really dig into the core Unity engine issues.
Or shitty software dev companies that push out crap to meet marketing deadlines.
Either way, take your money elsewhere.
It's not like there's just some "go_slow=true" constant that just needs changing.
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.
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"
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.
It definiitely has much to do with how UE's PR constantly shows off and ships new and exciting features that blend in the engine. Meanwhile, Unity has been criticized for some 6+ years minimum for its package management and lack of cohesion.
The fuck up here is whoever was handling the art assets. You simply do not ship a game with such detailed graphics and no LODs. They must've simply been downloading things off the asset store and throwing them in without any regard for performance.
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.
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.
I know what Open XR is all about but again, it's not clear which you should actually use for development if you're only targeting Quest devices, for instance. A little extra documentation would go a long way.
The same goes for all of the other things so frequently mentioned like their renderers.
what does this mean?
my condolances. the Build iterations and ancient CI workflow was by far the biggest complaint for the teams I was on and talked to. it takes so long getting stuff properly landed into trunk that I can't really blame the teams wanting to break off if possible (it fortunately was for my division).
But I'm guessing it was hard to convince product or execs that dev velocity matters, so we were all just wading in muck. I heard things were improving... but I heard that every month I was there.
>executive leadership wanting to run the company like Adobe
I think I know what you mean by this, but can you clarify?
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.
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/tools/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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...
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.
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
Could be that the integrated the Gameface library incorrectly I guess? Still interested in more details from you.
"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....
Why on earth would they try to optimize how the UI renders when they're having big issues elsewhere?
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.
All it shows is that optimizing something that was already fast enough was not a priority. But why would you want it to be?
I remember back when Apple removed the SD card slot from their phone. It wasn't a deal-breaking change, because their phones had lots of memory built in... but at the time, it seemed to me that the decision makers that did that, would continue to make similar decisions, each one making me unhappier and unhappier. So I bought accordingly. And I feel justified in retrospect.
Way back in the design stages of this game, somebody though that using web tech for their UI was a good idea, and it didn't get vetoed. That indicates bad judgement somewhere in the chain. Who knows whether it's developers, managers, or what... but the best predictor of bad decisions is previous bad decisions. It's at least a dysfunction smell.
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.
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.
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)
Great "DX" now when your building it, but good luck maintaining it over the long term.
Of course, it's a butt ton easier said than done, but if the industry could utilize flash for years after it died, I see a glimmer of hope.
>releasing a game with horrible optimisation like this, either by the store selling the game or by the law
you really want the government to regulate video games because you can't run a frame in 16ms? Talk about a slippery slope.
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.
I don't see the issue with making it more clear to end users that they're beta testing a game.
And user reported benchmarks are the worst metric I can imagine. There is so much work on profiling and inaccuracies among frame counters, I don't want to trust that to some random person on the internet.
>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.
Not really. Framerate isn't everything and I don't think it's a good thing to further enforce. The best selling games still choose to run 30fps and most games running max specs will "perform poorly" by design. That's why most games only give "recommended specs", not specs for every settings.
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...
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...
Publishers care a lot less about review scores, and never cared strongly about user reviews. They were so polarized to begin with that Steam changed it from numeric actors to up/down (or meh). It's a long running game and scores can improve.
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.
CS2 -> Counter Strike 2 C:S2 -> Cities: Skylines 2
The terrible reputation is self-inflicted and deserved.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...
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.
It has some performance issues. Not the same thing.
unpolished =/= unfinished.
But then there are stories No Man's Sky too, which had a miraculous turnaround as well. So maybe it can happen sometimes...
That's a black swan that can't easily be replicated.
In my opinion, Cyberpunk was punked by the gaming industry to harm CD Project Red. I have no proof at all, of course.
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.
but yea, source2 engine could have used some more love before going live
IME, the games industry isn't like other pieces of the tech industry where, say, 30% of devs clock in and clock out, collecting a paycheck. it's much rarer (but not impossible) to find someone still in the industry after 5+ years and not passionate. The churn is enourmous and the kinds of management in there are always pushing to get more out of you.
You don't stick with that because you are low quality or lazy. You do it for the people you work with or the product you work on. Naively, perhaps. But there is certainly fulfillment you get out of it.
I'm a cog and even if I break the machine has plenty of redundancy. Nothing to be ashamed about. I got my experiences, expanded network, compensaion, and war stories, they got my X years of labor. It's all a transaction towards each others' true end goals.
Have you heard of Factorio :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
But who cares? As long as the sheep keep preordering the music won't stop.
I just don't bother with reviews anymore. Stopped reading every gaming website except Gematsu (which rarely reviews) and I follow certain niches of you tubers to see if a game has the right pulse. If I wanna know how a Sonic Game is, why not peer into various sonic you tubers instead of trust which IGN reviewer won/lost the straw?
They only successfully poisoned your well, you didn't have to drink the GamerGate kool-aid and declare it a success, because most people in their right mind who aren't misogynistic sexually frustrated incel teenaged boys or angry right-wing Q-Anon man-children can see through it, and don't believe that unmitigated bullshit.
There's nothing special about game journalists. Most journalists have always been bought and paid for, but not the way your GamerGate conspiracy theories claim.
If you needed Milo Yiannopoulos to "open your eyes" to that for the first time, you weren't paying attention and have been living under a rock or in your mother's basement, and you're getting your bullshit and conspiracy theories from somebody much much worse than game journalists.
Pelosi hammer attack accused David DePape tearfully testifies of bizarre plot:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67411189
Giving evidence for more than an hour on Tuesday, Mr DePape said his political transformation started when he was living in a garage without a toilet or shower, playing video games for hours at a time.
He said that in the course of looking up information about video games he became interested in Gamergate, an anti-feminist campaign that targeted prominent women in the gaming world and became a huge online trend starting in 2014. He began listening to right-wing podcasters and watching political YouTube videos.
"At that time I was biased against Trump," Mr DePape said, "but there's, like, truth there. So if there's truth out there that I don't know, I want to know it."
He said he formulated a "grand plan" that involved luring "targets" to the Pelosi home.
[...]
He said he planned to wear an inflatable unicorn costume and upload his interrogation of her online. He was arrested with zip ties and duct tape in his possession.
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".
(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).
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.
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)
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.
It didn’t seem like turning down settings caused a huge increase in frame rate so I just put everything to max and man it looks great. So you at least feel like there’s a reason your graphics card is running at 82°C and your fans are spinning up.
On the other hand, my wife was a huge Cities Skylines 1 player and bounced off the game pretty hard, as the low frame rates doesn’t come with any sort of real upside.
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.
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".
But that's not how web package management works.
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.
Conference talk by dev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkf9H3XEMoE
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/...
Now, there is stuff like imgui of course. But Try writing a very heterogenous UI in something like Qt and then come back to React. There's very little empathy for the machine but it works so well.
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!
You have to remember, Unity usually sets the bar very low for themselves, comparing their ancient Mono implementation (they still use the Boehm GC, written in the 1980s!), and when a shiny new performance 'fix' like Burst/DOTS drops, they proudly proclaim how much faster they managed to make things, never mind a modern .NET implementation, like Microsoft's CoreCLR would achieve the same performance without any proprietary tech, without any code modification.
I don't think Unity had anyone mandating they had to use .NET or C#.
Besides that, they made a bunch of proprietary changes to Mono to make it run on their engine, and to be able to export to literally any platform under the sun.
A lot of platforms, like iOS and consoles have (or had) a strict no-JIT policy, so they needed to come up with statically compiling code to said platforms. One of the methods they used was IL2CCP, which turned .NET bytecode, into horrible looking C++, full of goto-s, weird labels and structs getting passed around.
Considering some platforms had limitations like you had to compile the game solely with the C++ compiler the platform supplied, not sure if they had a better solution, but it's still horribly hacky.
They've been manually syncing up changes from the more recent versions, but I can't really tell, at what pace.
But the thing is, even the official Mono has never really kept pace with MS's implementation, and recently, after the acquisition, Mono was dropped by MS in favor of the CoreCLR.
I don't think it is necessarily a fair or useful comparison. I also wrote several toy 3d engine a few years back, and some where performing better than some "commercial" engine, but it is not hard to do when you don't have to handle cross-platform, and a large number of feature. What is a fairer criticism is that Unity has been unable for the last decade to actually stick to a few features and make them actually mature and production ready. DOTS has been introduced like 4-5 years ago ? And it still feels like a polished tech-demo, not a production ready-system, properly integrated with the rest of the stack. And the same could be said about so many Unity feature. The "legacy" systems are just plain simply more reliable than almost any new feature they started for their replacement.
As for the C++/OpenGL comparison, I could've just recommended any common sense approach using industry standard tools, like Unreal.
I'm just saying, in terms of code performance, DOTS promised a paradigm shift, this cool new way of structuring code and writing a dialect of C# promised heretofore unseen heights of performance. The reality was that Unity Burst code is barely faster than CoreCLR .NET code, and is slower than straightforward no-frills C++ (but at least you get Unity vendor lock-in). This performance matters when you're trying to code a core game system, like procedural shattering, CSG, or inverse kinematics, doing it in regular C# will bite you in the butt. I'd rather do C++ for the few things where performance matters (not to mention, I'm 99% sure that well-tested high performance open-source C++ implementations of the above problems exist), than let Unity take me for a ride with DOTS.
Just take a look at Unreal. I'm pretty sure most of the stuff Unity's still working on wasn't a problem circa UE4 release@2014, and most of their 2014 demos would work in a modern version of Unreal (not sure how much of a breaking change UE5 is, but definitely in the latter UE4 releases).
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.
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.
The game ran so poorly
that Windows Game Bar
refused to acknowledge
there even was a framerate.> 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Except it was hyperbole how Cyberpunk was criticised. Or it wasn't, but it was no worse than most other AAA game, but somehow not all publishers/developers are criticised equally. I completed Cyberpunk and had to reload once because of a bug. That is already much better than Starfield (and every other Bethesda game) and the performance was just fine on my old PC. Something about Cyberpunks massive criticism smells funny.
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. (Edit: Gamers Nexus' video led me to City Planner Plays, which shows just what can be made - the scope of Skylines 2 looks amazing, given my hardware I could probably get into it sooner rather than later!)
Finally a kudos to the author for this in depth, well written article! I really enjoyed it.
I could certainly see why my old system (5800x3d / 3070 / 64) doesn't play it quite as nicely for my son's bigger 3440x1440x60hz monitor though; it certainly made the 4090 busy.
It’s remarkably tone deaf
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.
Then the meme developers in the front end went “lmao JS and CSS for the interface, 100k for a log” and ruined it all
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.
To be clear there are LODs, but only for some of the meshes.
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.
It's all about the 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
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.
This all could easily stem from a couple of key people leaving and chaos breaking loose, or from extreme time pressure by the publishers.
Says who?
In contrast, an AA developer would work with publishers like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital or Team 17, while a III game would have a much smaller scope - like The Witness, The Stanley Parable, or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It is clear that Colossal Order doesn’t work with a small publisher or make games of indie scope.
If you were just sealioning, don’t do that please.
And what is 'sealioning'?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
I'm still not sure what from my original statement won't happen.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
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.
What are they going to do? Fire you?
This is why most non technical business school types can fuck right off, i’ve rarely seen them make anything better.
Managers with either dev or design experience is the only thing that works.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!)
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
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.
You don't see the thousands of indie games that were never released because the creators screwed it up, or they ran out of money.
Or the indie studios who never made a second game because they didn't recoup their costs.
Indies that fail just fold and you never hear about them. AAA that fail release their games.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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...
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).
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).
Your comment ignores the primary point of their comment, they want to start with an existing city and fix it.
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.
The feature set is far from the same scale as RCT1.
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.
“You" and “users generally” are different things.
They did! EA wanted you to play the game online. They encouraged you to connect your city with other players by making it difficult for cities to be self-sufficient.
I.e., user-hostile design.
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]
It wasn't.
Multi Player SimCity for X11 is now available from DUX Software!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement...
SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation at InterCHI '93:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html
SimCityNet on Sun Workstation:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif
SimCityNet on SGI Workstation:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif
SimCityNet on NCD X Terminal:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
It was all about EA wanting to roll out Origin as their online distribution channel like Steam, and Origin wanting SimCity to be the showcase product that they used to force people to install the Origin downloader in order to play SimCity, and the stubborn insistence that SimCity be "online only" as DRM, and refusal to admit it was a mistake and fix it in response to user demands, all came 100% from Origin, and was forced on Maxis against their will and better judgement.
Then Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw had to take the public flack for that, fall on Origin's sword, and make the false announcement that SimCity wouldn't work offline, even though she opposed it and knew it was bullshit.
And the server meltdowns were all Origin's fault, because they simply didn't have their shit together.
Lucy's a good person who was put in a shitty position by EA management, and she and Maxis and Emeryville Studios and SimCity players and the franchise itself all got screwed and suffered because Origin fucked up, and insisted Lucy and Maxis publically take the responsibility and consequences for Origin's idiotic and stubborn mistakes.
So I wouldn't be shocked and surprised if Cities: Skylines 2 problems with production and shipping before it was ready had more to do with Paradox than Colossal Order.
SimCity Reboot (2012–2014):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity#Reboot_(2012%E2%80%932...
>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]
Lucy Bradshaw:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Bradshaw_(game_developer)
>Bradshaw became senior vice president of Maxis in 2013, after serving as the studio's general manager.[5] Bradshaw oversaw development of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore.[6][7] She encountered controversy due to technical issues with the 2013 reboot of SimCity.[8][9]
Maxis explains what went wrong with SimCity and what the developer is doing to fix it:
https://www.polygon.com/2013/3/9/4081464/simcity-interview-e...
SimCity general manager Lucy Bradshaw on why the game 'is not an offline experience':
https://www.polygon.com/2013/3/15/4109480/simcity-general-ma...
Gridlock Plagues the New Online-Only SimCity:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/arts/video-games/simcity-...
SimCity 4 was the last of statistical city simulators. That is to say, if you put down something like a distressed Ong Condos, the game would go "okay, here's 20,778 people in this node in the transportation network, do some network flow and figure out where they work." Newer titles, including the ill-fated SimCity (2013), are agent-based, where they essentially drop in a person and tell them to figure out where they can go or something like that.
As for why SimCity (2013) was a series-ending failure, it was essentially that at every single juncture, EA choose the stupidest possible option, the one that would most guarantee the failure of the series.
The first failure was in the engine itself. AIUI, the developers who came up with the modeling engine knew it wouldn't scale, and never intended for it to actually power a full-fledged SimCity mainline title. EA decided to tell them that it was going to be that anyways. The simulation just didn't scale; the desultory size of the cities was meant to prevent people from attempting to build anything that would cause the simulation to keel over and die--although it's also clear that the max size limit still was too large for the simulation. This is probably where you're getting your idea of perf issues from.
The most famous issue, though, is EA's requirement that the game have multiplayer features to justify being always online (and thus having more intrusive anti-piracy checks). SimCity doesn't lend itself well to multiplayer functionality, and many people correctly assumed that it was a gimmick to justify anti-piracy. Bizarrely, EA tried to claim for a while that one advantage of always-online was to be able to use more powerful servers to do the simulation calculations, but this was never implemented, and the lie was discovered extremely rapidly.
But the single stupidest decision was that EA never put in place enough server capacity to handle the launch. The game would be EA's first always-online flagship release, which meant it would strain their capacity like nothing else they had released ever did. The lack of capacity was repeatedly highlighted as a potential issue in prerelease, and yet was repeatedly ignored. Problems were reported during beta testing and the press preview period, and were still ignored. And launch day came, people experienced several issues, and it still EA like a few weeks to begin to address the issue.
Oh, and you can't forget all the other regular video game release issues like games being released because they need a release date rather than because they're done and things like that.
You make a lot of great and accurate points (including blaming EA instead of Maxis). But I disagree that SimCity doesn't lend itself well to multiplayer functionality. (And perhaps EA isn't the right company to pull it off properly, being more focused on competition and violence than collaboration and education.)
I agree that it would be difficult to adapt SimCity to competitive play without over-complexifying and spoiling it, but SimCity is ideal for collaborative play, and constructionist education (as envisioned by Seymour Papert and Alan Kay)!
I designed and implemented a collaborative multiplayer version called SimCityNet that I released online in 1993 (with node locked and floating DRM, but that worked offline or on a private network), including text chat and shared whiteboard overlay and voting dialogs and pie menus, which I described in my other post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38155984
Multi Player SimCity for X11 is now available from DUX Software!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement...
SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation at InterCHI '93:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Back when ActiveX was a thing, Mike Perry at Maxis produced a web browser plug-in version of SimCity that was simply integrated with a text chat window, so although you were playing your own local copy of SimCity, you could chat with other users playing their own cities in their own browsers, brag and gossip about your city, ask questions and help each other. It was a huge hit relative to the amount of effort it took to implement, and despite its clunky stripped down user interface, but it demonstrated how essential and engaging communication between players was, even if they couldn't actually affect each others games or share save files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Perry_(game_developer)
http://www.andywest.org/pr/simcity/misc/introduction.html
>Meanwhile SimCity Classic did not die: Maxis/EA has transformed it into a Web game you can play from your browser (after registration). The Web SimCity plays just like the computer game, except that it does not have every feature. Also, since the game is an ActiveX control, you must use Internet Explorer to play it.
I also designed and produced two different educational versions of SimCity/Micropolis, one an OLPC XO-1 Laptop interface for kids (X11/Cairo/PyGTK/Sugar) and one a web client/server interface (Python/TurboGears/AMF/OpenLaszlo/Flash) for an online community around shared multiplayer games and a storytelling platform. I completed MVP first-cuts, shipping the single player X11 version on the OLPC, and a web interface supporting multiple players sharing simulations running on the server.
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/turbogea...
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/laszlo/m...
I haven't fully completed the long term plans for the web based version, because Sugar never panned out then Flash died, and I didn't have the resources or support.
Finding support for developing educational software is tough, and I'd rather contribute new stuff to a truly free open educational community inspired by Seymour Papert's philosophy, like Snap!, than sharecrop on EA's intellectual property.
I believe Seymour Papert's collaborative constructionist educational ideas can be applied to other city simulators, many other types of games, and especially visual programming environments like Snap!
It's fortunate that SAP supports Jens Mönig to continue building on top of the block based visual programming ideas that he, Brian Harvey, John Maloney, Yoshiki Ohshima, Alan Kay, the MIT Media Lab Scratch project, and others developed:
https://faberllull.cat/en/resident.cfm?id=38258&url=jens-mon...
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
Plan for developing Micropolis for OLPC:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
Micropolis for OLCP Sugar User Interface:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...
Notes on adapting Micropolis to the OLPC Sugar user interface:
Core Ideas:
Activities, not Applications
First cut:
Integrate the current TCL/Tk version of Micropolis to run as a simple activity within Sugar.
Restructure the multi-window TCL/Tk code to run in a single full screen window.
Implement a simple activity-oriented tiled window management interface.
Disable advanced features like multiple editor and map windows,
that require more sophisticated window management.
Instead of using a traditional multi-window management approach,
Make a simple wrapper around it that makes it appear in the Sugar user interface as an activity, like eToys does.
Long term:
Implement activity specific modes that reconfigure the user inteface (like Eclipse "perspectives").
- build/edit oriented interface
- query/analysis oriented interface
- financial oriented interface
- communication/coordination oriented interface
- dynamic zone finder analysis
- grid of several overall map views, each configured to show a different overlay.
- grid of several close-up map views, each centered on a different parts of the city (or tracking a player's cursor)
Collaboration: Enhance multi player mode to support sharing activities.
Both publishing your game for others to clone and play themselves (massively single player, like Spore),
and letting others join in your game (like the current cooperative multi-player mode)).
Multi player inte
Expression: Enhance chat, journaling, storytelling, and personalization aspects of the game.
Journaling: Record all events (both user edits and simulation events), chat messages and drawings.
Checkpoint the game state, and implement the ability to deterministically replay time stamped
editing events into the simulation, so you can fast forward and rewind from any checkpoint to
any step of the simulation.
Enable players to write newspaper articles about the cities, with live links to a snapshot
of the simulation and a place on the map, related to the story. Other players could browse
their published newspapers about the history of a city, and jump into that history at any time
from any story.
Iteration: Checkpoint game save files, allowing players to rewind history, and try "what-if" experiments.
Presence is Always Present
First cut:
Enhance the current X11 based multi player interface to support presence, the grid network, and messaging.
The current multi player interface runs a single Micropolis process on one laptop,
which connects to the local X server, and/or several other X servers on laptops over the net.
Rewrite the "Add User" dialog to be grid-network aware.
Instead of asking for an X server DISPLAY screen, provide a list of friends on the network.
Send an invitation to play to friends on the network.
Rewrite the built-in chat interface to integrate with the chat system used by Sugar.
Improve the shared "white board" overlay, so kids can draw on the map in different colors,
enable and disable different overlays, save overlays with the map, add text to overlays, etc.
Implement location based chat, by overlaying people icons and chat bubbles on the map.
Each player has a people icon "cursor" that they can move around the map (which follows
their selected editing cursor), and their chat messages show up in bubbles overlayed on the map.
When you select an editing tool, you can type what you're doing with the tool,
other people will be able to watch you, and make comments on what you're doing.
Long term:
Rewrite Micropolis in terms of Python/GTK/Cairo, and take full advantage of the Sugar libraries and services.
Support sharing, mentoring, colaboration, voting, political dialogs, journaling, etc.
Develop Micropolis into a exemplary, cutting edge demonstration of all that's great about Sugar.
Tools of Expression
Micropolis is great at supporting personal expression, interpretation and storytelling,
and leveraging what the player already knows to make connections to new knowledge,
and stimulating conversation, debate and analytical thinking.
Develop a web based "Wikipedia" oriented interface to Micropolis, supporting colaboration, discussion,
annotation, history journaling, and branching alternative histories.
Journaling
The "Micropolis Journal" could be realized as a web-based
newspaper-like interface.
Expose the multi player user interface through the web, instead of
using X11.
Automatically generate a newspaper for any particular time in a
city's history, from the simulator events and state, combined with
user written articles and chat messages.
The newspaper has sections that present automatically generated
snapshots of the information displayed in the various dialogs
(graph, evaluation, chat, notices, etc), and stories about
significant events (both user-generated and simulation-generated).
Enrich the city save file with metadata including the chat and
event journal, overlays, snapshots at different points in time (in
a branching "what-if" tree structure), etc.
In the Python version of Micropolis it will be easy to implement a
web server based interface that lets users read the city's
newspaper through the web browser, automatically inserting
pictures of the map corresponding to particular events in time. An
article about pollution going down could show a before and after
overall map with the polution overlay, and stuff like that.
Plug in modules to the simulator that analyze the state of the
city and generate events for the newspaper to write articles
about, including interesting stastical information and other
parameters to insert into the story template.
Implement "online surveys" that let newspaper readers vote on proposals
(expose the voting interface to web based users).
Use OpenLaszlo to develop a rich graphical AJAXian web service
based Micropolis interface, eliminating the need for the X11
interface, and enabling all kinds of interesting interface
customizations and mash-ups with other web services.
OLPC-Notes.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...
PLAN.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
https://web.archive.org/web/20110611185928/http://www.donhop...
>Educational Multi Player SimCity for Linux Proposal
>Submitted by dhopkins on Sat, 2004-02-07 14:27. C Cellular Automata Pie Menu Applications SimCity TCL Game Design
>Back in March 2002, Maxis told me they were interested in supporting the educational use of products like SimCity. Earlier, I had developed a multi player version of SimCity, which runs on Linux/X11, and was scriptable in TCL. Educators and researchers from Columbia University, MIT, IBM, Xerox and other educational and commercial institutions were excited about gaining access to this version of SimCity, and adapting it to teach and stimulate students' interest in urban planning, computer simulation and game programming.
>So I wrote this proposal and presented it to Maxis, but nothing ever became of it. But recently, Will Wright has been pushing EA to relicense SimCity under the GPL, so the OLPC project can use it. So it may eventually see the light of day!
[...]
More SimCity stuff from my old Drupal blog:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110611162810/http://www.donhop...
https://web.archive.org/web/20111109132608/http://www.donhop...
It's more for race/flight sim type stuff IMO but if you got it, why not play everything at that res provided it performs well.
Look at images of it from the top, that'll help you understand how immersive it is.
That resolution is still fewer pixels than a simple 4k display, which modern games seem to drive at 60fps quite regularly if you buy beefy hardware. A graphical gore fest like Doom runs at over 100fps on 4k on the card the author has, so a mostly static city builder should also operate fine at a resolution like that.
1. Optimization do not bring profit.
2. Bad code make developers' life easier.
3. Hardware nowadays is fast enough that we no need to concern about efficiency.
Otherwise I guess you could ask people for the savegames of almost broken cities and try to rescue them?
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.
If I recall correctly, there was even a few mods that did a similar re-balancing of the population numbers in the first game.
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.
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.
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.
All the issues are around rendering and HDRP - which by the sound of things is still not properly integrated with DOTS.
And their data based ecss is still behind DOTS for simulation last I checked
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.
Maybe for CS:3 :)
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”
The very definition of a toxic brogrammer, Alex St John literally glorified the benefits of slavery and Microsoft's imperialistic dominance of game developers in his own words [1], describing his infamous Toga Party / Roman Orgy / Slave Auction he threw in the Spartan Stadium at the 1996 Computer Game Developer Conference (which I and my team from Maxis attended, and personally witnessed the slave auction and free silly string and live lions -- not all were caged, some were just tied up):
[1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/03/06/bunnygate-pt-2/ [offline and banned from archive.org]
>"Sex, violence and debauchery were all hallmarks of a great Roman “orgy” and I wanted to come as close to capturing that experience as I could get away with."
>"The slave auction was also a special occasion. The Roman guards were rounding up the losers from the gladiatorial events and anybody who was offending a “senator” or Cleopatra and throwing them in the slave pit. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected from the party, Gillian returned to the stage to auction them to the audience for the gold they had won in the games. Gillian could set any base price she wanted for a “specimen”, if the audience wouldn’t pay the price the slave would be “thrown to the lions”. We had configured a “pit” full of foam to one side of the stage and directly in front of the first caged lion. A failed slave would be marched to the edge of the pit at spear point and pushed in by the praetorian guard where they would fall into box full of foam below the audiences line of sight. Then a huge video clip of lions tearing up a wildebeest and roaring would be played on the big screens on either side of the stage accompanied by the sounds of screaming. Down in the foam pit we had a collection of fake bloody body parts that somebody would toss up in the air during the lion feeding. Of course the “victim” was then allowed to sneak out the back and return to the party."
Yes, the same Alex St. John who is so incredibly toxic that his own daughter publicly denounced him and his "horrific toddler meltdown" and "toxic waste trash fire":
I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech (medium.com/milistjohn):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542568
https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-...
>My name is Amilia St. John and I am the daughter of Alex St. John. Yes, that one. For those not following the horrific toddler meltdown my father has been very publicly broadcasting over the past few days, here is a short summary; My father, posted an article recently on venturebeat.com claiming that:
>“Many modern game developers have embraced a culture of victimology and a bad attitude toward their chosen vocations.”
>and how:
>“[he] can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work.”
>— The usual self aggrandizing agenda that older generations like to peddle on days when they need to feed their superiority complexes. My father’s article led to a massive outcry from the gaming industry and a subsequent invasion of my father’s blog by the (rightfully) angry internet masses.
>On the blog, they uncovered extremely distasteful recruiting slides and supplemental blogs with revolting opinions regarding women, minorities and those with autism in the tech industry. Since these findings, countless others and I have found ourselves at a loss for words how anyone, especially someone in a position of power, can think that it is acceptable to broadcast such offensive material.
>As his toxic waste trash fire not only is associated with my last name but also my face, I felt compelled to respond to my father’s sexist, ableist, and racist rants. [...]
Alex St John’s Ideas About Game Development Are Terrifying:
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-...
>Earlier today you would have seen the story how Alex St. John, the creator of DirectX and founder of WildTangent, came out over the weekend trying to recharacterise the conditions of game development. It’s art, not a job, and game developers shouldn’t be as concerned with stress, work-life balance or fair wages. Those were some of the arguments St. John made, although you should read them within to understand the full context.
>St. John also has strong views on who precisely game studios should hire. It’s contained in a presentation called “Recruiting Giants” and suggests, among other things, that coding isn’t actual work, “real” programmers don’t value money and that working juniors and interns so hard they burn out is “good for them”. [...]
Dispelling some myths about the autistic wunderkind programmer:
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dispelling-some-myths...
>In April 2016 Alex St. John, one of the developers behind Microsoft's DirectX technology platform, wrote an article in which he defended eighty hour working weeks, scorned work-life balance and memorably described a porcelain toilet as an "incredibly decadent luxury." St. John’s article was widely criticized for promoting what many consider to be exploitative working practices and attitudes in the video game industry.
>In the ensuing outrage, a PowerPoint presentation written by St. John surfaced which included a slide in which he referred to engineers with Asperger syndrome as being "the holy grail" of hires. "They work like machines," he wrote, "don’t engage in politics, don’t develop attitudes and never change jobs." [...]
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
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
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
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.
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.
I'd more compare it with something like Dyson Sphere Project, which can scale from a few factories & conveyor belts to many planets and thousands of things (resources, drones, belts, arms, whatever) on-screen at once. It's also made in Unity and has great performance and terrific graphics.