Cities: Skylines 2's troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard

When you need to pull data out of a dozen components to keep a renderer in sync, yea that’s not cheap. But there are ways you can flip things around, like have a job that outputs a native array containing condensed info about the entity that will be used for rendering. That avoids non-bursted random data access into the entity, but of course adds some additional complexity.

This approach won’t naively scale to thousands and thousands of GameObjects like all the (boring) “look ECS can do 10000000 entities at once” demos. I get so, so, so tired of “scale” being the only sexy reason why you pick DOTS. Both my games have a resident set of a couple hundred entities at any given time and still, DOTS works great for how we use it.

"You want A game or you want THE game?"

Maybe add a slide showing how much concentrated toward the very best game revenues are.

Game studios want to plan to release a game in X months; the commenter you're replying to wants them to plan to release a game in X + 12 months.

Why not plan on releasing the game in X-6 months? Is their plan to tell shareholders "Our company plans to make $0 in the next 6 months because we want to implement this practice... etc?"

A company can also stagger game releases; work on more than one game simultaneously, offset by 12 months or so. You still get a yearly - or whateverly - release cycle, but you avoid the burnout and the bad press of a rushed release.

You get a stream of cash whenever you launch an even somewhat finished game. You get a mountain of early feedback and real world testing, without the negative PR. And then, when the game is ready, you do the full launch + marketing with (from what I can tell) basically no PR/hype penalty from being in early access, as its a new game as far as the storefronts are concerned.

Maybe I am missing a big drawback, but it seems like such a no brainer. And it clearly works at any scale, see Rimworld (lone dev) and Baldurs Gate 3 (mega dev team), which coincidentally are among the most critically acclaimed games ever.

The opinion of someone who only put in an hour and got bored will be shallow. At best they can complain about new user experience, but that's it. an hour isn't long enough to understand the game systems of a sufficiently deep strategy game

Interactivity changes things. A lower frame rate can also make input feel less snappy, which is obviously something you don't run into in film. The frame rate in a film is constant, so there are no variations or drops as there are in rendered games. Those drops and variations can be more noticeable at lower frame rates, even if they don't affect playability in a simulation game the same way they would in a fast-paced shooter.

Films also naturally have motion blur which makes fast movement look softer and less jerky even at relatively low frame rates.

With that said, frame rates being around 30 probably shouldn't really be that big an issue in a simulation game. People who are used to faster frame rates will notice the difference -- again, games are different than film -- but it shouldn't be that big a thing.

But it's worth noting that if those are the figures people get with new high-end systems, that probably means reasonable but less high-end or slightly older systems will have to settle for even less, to a point where performance could actually be an issue.

Hardware isn’t why there are few macOS games.

Importantly, the game is largely CPU bound and that is something that the Macs are really good at. The game is really bad at taking advantage of high end GPUs but it actually scales reasonably as you go down the tiers precisely because it’s so bad at using the GPU. And yes I know it currently has bugs and comical oversights that thrash the GPU, but it does so pretty equally, seemingly responding better to more VRAM (which makes sense given the nature of their inefficiencies)

I’d also push back on the “anemic” wording. A base M series Mac is probably the best iGPU performance vs Intel/amd iGPUs. And the higher end MBPs (not accounting for value) are very performance competitive against similar form factor laptops. Where they fall behind is when you start comparing against larger desktop replacement laptops or on the desktop end against the top end GPUs. But I wouldn’t call them anemic by any stretch of the imagination either.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming has a surprising number of people you can see messing around with running ports natively. I wouldn’t get a Mac for the express purpose of gaming but they are reasonably capable, and largely held back by lack of software not hardware.

[1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/discussions/560#discuss...

The bigger issue to me is that gaming on Macs has a history of mutual avoidance by both gamers and gamer publishers. Neither want to invest in changing the status quo.