City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2 | Hacker News Reader

City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2

radical-elements.com

149 pointslexx143 comments

I recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the player's uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.

It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.

It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.

It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possibly can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.

It seems like it was difficult to even get the simulation part of the game (the important part) correct at launch as well.

Only now three years later with Iceflake Studios taking over are we starting to see the game turn a corner and become really solid and having a roadmap with some hope.

I wonder if the dominance of (realtime) 3D rendering we have today is having a bad influence here. I remember old tile-based games (like SimCity or Transport Tycoon), or games with fixed backgrounds feeling much more natural, simply because you can prerender (or simply paint) your desired level of detail without having it affect your runtime compute budget. Of course the cost is less flexibility at runtime, but that cost may be acceptable.

For a modern take on this, look at Factorio. Why can an industrial zone with a population of one look more lively in Factorio than an entire simulated city in Cities Skylines?

soul is probably not a performance limitation; fancy/fluid animations dont hurt frametimes any more than stiff motion. realtime 3d is just so much harder a design space to work in, with too many DoF to properly attend to every parameter.

strong leadership with narrow scope makes the best version of anything.

Even in high-end VFX (previous industry - working on pathtracing renderers), things were often over-the-top in terms of how things were modeled (polycount) or how the lookdev (shader material definitions) were done.

Some of that was due to just human time resource constraints (and assets being modeled for director validation at full screen turn-table resolution, but then just used at 1/8 size in the film), but other times it was just people losing context as to what was "needed" or would even make any difference (unfortunately, often without considering the "cost" - in terms of memory usage and CPU-time for rendering / compositing) - vs look difference.

Then there are questions from the artists like "Why's this rendering so slow, it's 'only' a load of skyscrapers in a city with the camera 0.5 km away?"

You then have a look at what's actually going on, and all the rooms in the skyscrapers have modeled (and lookdev-ed) furniture and things like lamp shades around lights. Which A: is expensive memory-wise and just silly, but also makes light-transport to sample all the lights and light the scene (even with clever NEE light-sampling techniques) stupidly expensive.

Then again, that same building, this time being rendered from about 300m away was very slow to render, and we looked at the BSDF material stack, and there was a homogeneous volumetric scattering layer on the glass windows. Like - WTF - that's insane for a uni-directional path-tracer (and physically wrong). "What's this for, this is why it's so slow.?"

"Oh, it's to represent the algae/dirt on the glass".

"I'm sorry!?"

Ah, it's fun playing older games with pre-rendered cut scenes, where the camera switches from crisp, 1080p60 images at the best available quality (plus mods/additional shaders), to 360p cutschenes with a fixed aspect ratio. It's true that most of the time they have better lightning, but scenes from that era can have visual noise and some "halo" effect around objects in the cutscene.

Most 60fps games with real-time cutscenes do switch to 30fps for them for twice the frame budget, so maybe it wasn't a completely out there idea and did have some basis in reality with simplified game-style cloth sim. Could be that it was normally a bit too expensive for the team player counts but was at least on the edge of feasible with twice the budget.

He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.

Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.

This seems like the logical explanation, it still doesn't run that great even on GeForce Now

I was not familiar with the teeth thing. Link for the lazy:

https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-addresses...

Reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. I hear the individual teeth are simulated so they can be lost in a fight and such.

Yes, except the DF doesn’t compute shadows for all the teeth. Or texture map them, or use a shader to make them look wet and shiny.

Still, if they get knocked out during a fight then your dwarves have to carry them individually to the gravesite afterwards, so it’s not like you should automatically imitate DF when you write your own game.

Will the dwarf's friends and family get upset if any tooth is left unburied? In an evil biome, will a forgotten tooth resurrect and cause trouble?

Teeth cannot rot and therefore won’t cause a negative thought if left unburied. Teeth also cannot GRASP, and therefore cannot be raised by a necromancer as an undead. A skull can be though, with or without the teeth.

^ and this is why interesting composition of systems is so critical in generating games, <3 df

When the player zooms in to street level on a building it's worth the performance hit to load in more details and do so in a better looking way. When it's zoomed out to view large portions of the city (or the whole thing) then sure, you have to trade off graphical fidelity for performance and usability as the user builds out the city and wants to watch it grow. The amount at a given zoom should be based on the graphics settings, and low should allow for low detail even when zoomed in.

LOD (level of detail) techniques are used by practically every game ever written. It doesn’t mean that the developers can ignore the poly budget.

You are correct but what the article is asking for is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact mods already do what the author is asking for, just not in an automatic way

And how are those mods on baseline performance? Are the mods appropriate for general audience mid range rigs? The tech industry has the capability of pure ray tracing. Game engines don't use it because the audience willing to shell 10k for PC to run it is exceedingly small. They have to target mid range specs to have an audience big enough to make money.

The solution is mods by modders for modders.

It's quite possible to do all that. Most AAA titles do by now. But creating all that detailed content at multiple levels of detail is a big job. GTA VI cost between $1.5 billion and $2 billion to produce. When you do those big zooms, vast amounts of data has to be shuttled in and out of the GPU. VRAM is too expensive to keep it all live.

There are some other current problems. GPU prices have not come down. If you want a big, high-detailed world, you need a few hundred dollars of GPU. GPUs on laptops tend to be underpowered, and if you make the GPU work to its full capacity, it runs down the battery.

One of my interests is technology for large metaverses with high detail and good performance. Everybody who made metaverse noise during the boom failed at that. Second Life, which is a large metaverse with good detail but slow performance, is about as good as it gets. (It's been improving recently; they've hired some good graphics developers.) Improbable's Morpheus/M-Squared [1] looked promising, but the site hasn't been updated in a year and the Discord community seems to have died. They usually run with "cloud rendering" (each user ties up a dedicated gamer PC in a data center), which is too expensive except for special events. Roblox is probably the only other serious US player working on this. Unreal Engine 5 can do big, static worlds that have lots of instancing, but that's achieved using large amounts of preprocessing, optimization, and performance debugging.

The underlying problem is that good simulated cities are about as interesting as real cities. Kind of boring. Second Life has a terrible problem with new users. At the start, you're in a big world the size of Los Angeles with about 40,000 people spread around. You don't know anybody. You have no idea what to do first. There is no obvious goal. There is no built in game. The system itself is completely indifferent to you, like real cities. You can explore the huge user-built world freely, but only when some users organize an activity does much happen. There's a lot going on, but it's hard to find. Those seeking passive entertainment give up quickly.

[1] https://docs.msquared.io/morpheus-platform

Culling details smaller than a pixel isn't even sacrificing quality. It's literally just what rendering is. That's why you don't render a sheet of 10^23 individual atoms.

Much of what is suggested could decrease texture memory usage. If you add a masked dirt material on top of a surface, you can often decrease the resolution of the texture of the base material underneath thanks to the added detail.

As well as the teeth, I understand they had issues along the lines of using preview rendering tech in unity that then was not further developed and dropped from the engine? Causing them to need to write a fair amount of render stuff themselves? .. something similar to that at least I'm sure.

There were, and still are, other problems as well. The teeth were just the most obvious example.

I would say the game should generate some kind of a grand staircase every time a slope is the right shape, but let the player replace it if they wish. Would be even better if the element was chosen based on zoning policies, local ordinances, land value, etc. Soul by default, but infinitely customisable.

Most of the changes replace one model with an equally detailed one, or add a bunch of decals that are cheap in modern engines with clustered rendering.

Adding props is a bit more expensive, but they can be very low detail and still look good from a distance. Something small like a newspaper or plastic bag can be less than 30 polygons with a 64x texture.

Nobody's asking for ray tracing and complicated shaders. Just small tweaks that make a city look more natural.

That's just demonstrably not true, the foliage alone adds a lot of polygons, so do the stairs.

Funny from the title I thought this was going to talk about how Cities Skylines lacks the soul of Maxis’ SimCity games. Skylines always felt sterile and dead. Just a piece of software. SimCity felt like a toybox buzzing with life and charm from buttons in the UI to the people milling about to the jazz soundtrack. There was vision and creative intent beyond just programming some systems. Hell, as much as everyone threw a tantrum over SimCity 2013 I think it still has infinitely more charm than Skylines.

Don’t even get me started on the gameplay loop that just feels like a simulation more than a game that’s been tightly balanced to be challenging. More of a sandbox with no real challenge to grow infinitely.

Different strokes for different folks but it always made me sad seeing Skylines take off and be talked about while the possibility of a true SimCity successor seems to have been buried with Maxis back in Emeryville.

Thinking the same thing. I remember in SimCity 3k that if land values were low, you would end up with shabby looking buildings like the author mentioned, adding to that "soul". Cities feels like "Logistics: the video game" sometimes, it reminds me of that every time I pick it up after a while.

Every time I’ve ever brought up the fact that Cities Skylines (the first one anyway, I haven’t played 2, maybe it’s different) isn’t really much of a game as much as it’s a city painting/traffic management sandbox with very little chance of ever failing, people would inevitably come and hit me with a “That sounds like an amazing time!” Or a “And that’s why it’s better than SimCity!”

For everything else that SimCity 2013 had going against it (and there was a lot), its gameplay actually had challenges to overcome with real decisions to make that had gameplay consequences as you were building out your city. Where you put your utilities mattered. If you didn’t think it through, you were putting your city in jeopardy.

In C:S, it felt like the only real consequence your decisions ever had was that you made more traffic jams to handle. And that’s not even really an obstacle because you could literally raze your entire city and rebuild it with your many millions accrued over time.

But you can’t make a huge city in SimCity (2013), so C:S won.

> Does this look nice to you?

Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.

No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.

Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.

I had the same reaction. Like, add these effects for when your city simulation is simulating what happens when your city is being neglected.

Nah, look at the second set of photos. It’s more lived-in, not all the way apocalyptic. The first photo looks like a render from an architect.

The second set of photos just have more detail. For example, the sidewalks are more detailed instead of just being flat rectangles.

The glorification of disrepair and decay is still very much present though. "Soul" means decayed paint on houses, visible bricks and a huge hole on the pavement that no doubt spread its own unique flavor of disrepair to the car that just drove past it.

Adding more detail is absolutely fine, but this glorification of breakdown doesn't sit well with me at all. I see far too much of it in real life on a daily basis and it seriously made me cringe. It's a problem to be solved, not something to be added in deliberately.

> It's a problem to be solved, not something to be added in deliberately.

Yes, it's romanticizing decay to add thematic and realistic problems to games.

"Soul" means something has a story to tell. It was created for a purpose, it was useful, it may be near its end. There are very clear and obvious dimensions to it that help to immerse you into the game. Details to pick up on, some obvious and some not so obvious.

The opposite, where everything is very clearly manicured, created, is so far from reality that the immersion is more difficult to achieve, or is quickly lost. You never stray far from the fact that you're playing a city game with very rigid rules.

I think this is what the author means by "Soul": objects with details to show something lived, was paid attention to, has story, depth, and scars to prove it.

> "Soul" means something has a story to tell.

That's not soul, that's just... History. Of neglect.

Detail is fine, but deliberately adding disrepair and actually calling it nice is something else entirely. It implies this is desirable.

Real "soul" would have been adding urban decay as a gameplay mechanic. Players would be stretched thin trying to keep up and some areas would naturally decay as a result. That's the realistic city story: I had limited time and resources, and couldn't afford to care about every part of the city, so the neglected ones decayed.

This is the real story, the realistic one. Adding decay just because you like the aesthetic of it is something else. It's like adding CRT filters to modern games.

However you want to label it: you don't get a sense that anything living ever touched the little pixels you're moving around on the screen. There is no 'emotional tug' to help immerse you into the game.

I do like your gameplay mechanic idea, but others may not. A quick filter may not add "soul" for you, but it might for others. It's about emotions and immersion, but it's all obviously illusion.

big flat rectangles isnt less detail. ive seen plenty of lots that look exactly like that with the surface being sort of a grippy stucko. adding detail would be texturing it to show the grit better

breakdown and maintenance is a part of life, and if you want a city to look like it spends a million a month per block on maintenance, thats fine to have as a fantasy for a game. Youre playing a game, entropy doesnt have to apply.

the post is right though, city games always put a layer of fantasy over one of the major costs that a city has - maintenance.

i havent played one since sim city 3k, but i expect theres still no setting up snow clearance routes and how changing the order or amount of plows affects traffic, along with the associated costs to the city.

Decay could be interesting as a gameplay mechanic. Spend money on upkeep or your city turns into that.

Neglect leading to decay is supposed to be a punishment though. Turning it into "soul" makes it desirable.

I think it could be tastefully done. Even well–maintained objects age in real life, and that is often part of the charm.

Consider the 115 year old brick building in a town I used to live in, with the faded remnants of a 50 year old replica of the sign painted on the side by the butcher’s shop that originally owned the building.

+1. Some of the added detail (e.g. more realistic-looking brick) looked great. Some of it was the kind of thing that better depicts "areas you've failed to maintain", iff you want your simulator to have those bits of verisimilitude.

I'd be all for separating "better, more lifelike, more realistic rendering, with interesting variation" from "decay".

Absolutely the second version. The first version looks unrealistic and gets boring fast. Assuming the amount of degradation can be adjusted it's a no brainer to make use of it. In the real world the elements will degrade everything over time..

There's sets where the second photo includes a huge amount of litter (10+ piles, each multiple objects).

There's one where the author explicitly says they want run down buildings, and shows an example of a clean wall -vs- a dirty wall, and a clean wall -vs- one where the paint is decaying.

But there are definitely others where it's lived-in, where it's adding trees and plants and even just parked cars.

It's definitely a mixed bag

I think it's just a matter of what people want from a city builder. Some people play the game to build the city they wish they had. While others play the game to build the city they've already got.

Others play to tame a hostile environment and turn it into a comfortable home that provides for every possible want or need.

All about that traffic management!

> Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature

That's exactly what a city is though.

You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature in a naively idealistic manner.

From the moment an object is constructed it is being pulled into the ground. Maintenance has a far higher cost than initial construction. Relative perfection is inversely proportionate to complexity.

This is the exact same mentality that drives suburban lawn guys crazy when their grass has a brown spot. You are not fully in control.

> You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature

Absolutely. The whole point of a city is to reject all that.

> You are not fully in control.

I know, which is why I don't bother with lawns. I'd rather fill the entire area with solar panels instead.

The whole point of a city is to allow large numbers of people to live in close proximity to each other. Everything else is a choice.

Who would choose to live in a decaying city? Broken down buildings, screwed up roads?

This is stuff you grit your teeth and put up with because it can't be helped. Who would choose to design a city with this decay literally built into it? That's mind boggling.

I just don't let it bother me that much, but to each their own. A city with rounded down corners feels lived in, comfortable even.

Choosing a decaying city might mean lower taxes. Or better health care. Or tax breaks for the elites. You know, things we choose as a collective.

We choose those things in spite of the decay though, not because of it.

What I mean here that it's a trade off.

Literal millions of people live in New York, Athens, London, Berlin, Rome, and tons of other places with various grades of decay visible everywhere. That’s what we usually call a place having a soul.

Seriously doubt people choose to live in the richest cities of the richest nations on Earth specifically because of urban decay.

What YOU see as urban decay, most see as "home".

I don't get what your point is. Are you saying people don't fix and improve their homes?

Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?

To me that sounds like a coping mechanism.

It's very interesting to observe the different perspectives in this thread, which seem to be mutually exclusive. When talking about urban decay, some people think of an artist's loft in a run-down brick factory from the 19th century with Graffiti on the walls and exposed steel beams, others of potholes, trash, and overdue maintenance.

If every rich city has what you call "urban decay", it seems that's a likely side effect of what makes them rich.

Like the roads actually being used and not closed so they can be constantly repaved.

You make a bit of weed overgrowing a bit of pavement that's slightly broken sound like that scene in Idiocracy when the protagonist looks out of a window for the first time, come on.

The extreme opposite of that would hordes of people (or robots) with nail clippers patrolling everything 24/7. When any tile is even just chipped (or when when the scan shows the wind carried away a few molucules from the surface), it gets replaced. When tiles in that exact same color aren't available anymore, they all get replaced. Heck, when the sun was out and faded the color of something slightly more than areas that were in shade, the whole area has to be rebuilt.

Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second? Every moment they're growing a bit, and they don't remain in the shape determined as well cut by their owner for even an hour! Unless you keep cutting/filing them. But while you are cutting your nails, you can't be cutting your hair, so that's gross. And even if you could, you cannot cut all strands of hair at the same time, it'll always be screwed up.

So of course the answer is somewhere in between, it has to be, and it's probably not the same for everybody.

> The extreme opposite of that would hordes of people (or robots) with nail clippers patrolling everything 24/7.

Hordes of robots constantly and meticulously maintaining entire cities sounds awesome, actually. That's the post scarcity society I dream of.

> Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second?

We only need to choose because we lack the technology. Maybe one day we'll have Deus Ex style nanobot pills we can swallow. They will invisibly and continuously maintain our bodies for us. Nails are just one of countless things they will maintain.

> Who would choose to live in a decaying city? Broken down buildings, screwed up roads?

Decay is a never-ending process, as are the changing architectural tastes of city residents. Only through a continual process of demolition and rebuilding can they be kept at bay.

You see this in real cities everywhere: districts of shiny, antiseptic, newly-built towers, side-by-side with decaying warehouses and brownstones from a hundred years ago. The former are modern, the latter are charming, to be desirable a city needs a balance of the new and the old.

> I know, which is why I don't bother with lawns. I'd rather fill the entire area with solar panels instead.

Agreed. Or xeriscaping, or something better than grass (which is a really low bar to be better than).

> Absolutely. The whole point of a city is to reject all that.

I didn’t realize cities were made with a point to reject entropy and weren’t mostly organic congregations of people for economic reasons

Every single building is a rejection of entropy. We're literally carving out a secure and comfortable space for ourselves to exist inside. It's literally built to withstand and reject the elements, the chaos of the outside universe. Even the stereotypical jungle survivalists create structures to bend the surrounding environment to their benefit instead of allowing them environment to bend them. Structure is the antithesis of entropy.

This is entirely orthogonal to economically efficient concentration. In fact, cities are an extension of it. We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease. This leads to economic efficiency.

> Every single building is a rejection of entropy.

No?

It’s just a building. I’d doubt there’s more than a handful of buildings that were made by hands that were explicitly rejecting entropy and just doing what they needed/wanted in the moment.

Yes. Buildings are structure, and structure is the antithesis of entropy.

Maybe we’re talking past each other.

Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?

Like otherwise if we get down to philosophical bones then life is a rejection of entropy as it orders matter and energy, in which case the discussion is pointless if we’re at that level.

> Maybe we’re talking past each other.

I'm just addressing the point about entropy that you made.

> Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?

I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.

Entropy is a measure of the disorder and disorganization within a system. Any form of structure reduces entropy by definition.

You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:

> We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease.

>I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.

No, you didnt. You said

> > You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature Absolutely.

> The whole point of a city is to reject all that.

Saying the "point" of a city implies intent. You cant motte and bailey back and forth between intent and happenstance.

> You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:

If I am going to engage with your _second comment's_ _second paragraph_ (cause were skipping over your first comment I replied to and the first paragraph of your second comment apparently) that I was replying to, I would probably quibble over you trying to entwine souls and economic efficiency

You seem like you’re on your way to becoming a billionaire, which is one of the worst things I can imagine saying about someone.

I wish.

>naive

Opinions be like

"You disagree with me so I can label you in a negative light"

Since when is naivety negative? You are born without knowledge. You acquire knowledge throughout existence. Seems pretty natural to me.

It's unpleasant to accuse someone of being naive in a paternalistic fashion that implies "you're wrong, because you don't know any better, but if you knew better you'd agree with me".

The post you replied to embodied a preference. You responded that they were wrong and naive for not wanting to depict cities constantly "being pulled into the ground". Some people playing a simulator do not want the simulator to force unavoidable decay everywhere. This is something for which there is room for a breadth of preferences, not something for which there is a correct and incorrect answer.

TIL biological decomposition is a preference.

This is about a video game.

The state of being naive is not negative.

The presumption of someone assuming "I think I am right and you are wrong and therefore I declare you to be naive" is a negative one.

There are many traits that is perfectly fine to possess, but extremely rude/arrogant/negative/etc to declare as existing in someone else.

Speaking of naivete, you can actually live in a city where the sidewalks are maintained, not sinking into the ground, and where the buildings are washed/painted, where cables are buried, where there is no trash on the street, no graffiti, and where there aren't derelict boarded up buildings with overgrown weeds. Nice areas do exist.

I find it comforting to be reminded that when this little experiment ends, Nature is still vigorous enough to take back over.

If the clean lines we laid down were persistent, I'd worry we'd planted the seed of something poorly thought out yet permanent.

Based citybuilder

I'm so glad I finally encountered neighborhoods with all natural yards right in the middle of cities that make them so much nicer to walk through, apart from the bees.

Instead we have to beg most big cities to install trees at $40k/pop so you aren't getting melted in the texas sun walking your dog.

> No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.

Fwiw this would certainly strike me as soulless. Haven't you ever seen pleasantville or don't worry darling? "Soul" to my ear implies imperfection.

This is the irony of virtual worlds: The sloppiest virtual world looks like the platonic ideal of landscaping we have in the real world.

Cities: Skylines 2 is a particularly rough pick for this concept, since it's one of very few games I need frame generation to run even passably. LLMs seem plenty capable of tweaking existing assets to make a ton of variants, but actually displaying all of those performantly is then an engineering problem.

And without many variants, things like "splotchy wall apartment building" would get old so much faster when there's several square blocks of them instead of bizarrely pristine ones.

Yeah, I was thinking that reading this. This looks great for that one small screen he showed, but if every two story house has the same dilapidated painted brick siding it looks just as bad. Even if its not all, how many repeats are acceptable? It breaks immersion more to have the exact same dilapidated house in more than one location than it does to have perfectly pristine houses everywhere

Literally missing the forest for the trees. You're building a city, not a yard. I don't think making the city look procedurally worn or whatever they mean is trivial either. Feels like complaining about the graphics in Minecraft... That's not the point of the game.

Also the visuals can be misunderstood to be communicating something - e.g. the dirty walls - does that mean my city is bad in some way? Is crime increasing or is the wall being stained by pollution?

You can't just make stuff 'look nice' without affecting how the player behaves

If you’re playing a city builder to min/max but want it somewhat grounded in reality then you have to accept it isn’t an Apple Store on every block IMO. If you want perfect symmetry and cleanliness that’s valid too but it’s the default for most games, so I think they make some good points.

A city builder is a lot of different things to a lot of people. Some people want to feel like their creation is “alive,” and varying degrees of wear and tear can achieve that. It makes the city feel lived in. I wouldn’t say it’s my highest priority but I’d say it’s definitely a valid one.

Also, it's very much a matter of taste. I like the pristine look. I have real life if I want to see dingy, worn down buildings and yards. I don't want that in my fantasy city.

Part of the author's point is that the way the city "feels" is not just part of the game but, for them and for a subset of other players, a key part of the game. We're talking about how to make a city simulator have more verisimilitude with the cities you are simulating!

But if you miss the trees for the forest it's bad too. I wouldn't want a building to be represented by a box that says (office) even if it made for a better simulation. Nevermind I just remembered how much time I soent playing dwarf fortress.

I had an argument at one point, honest!

Is “how hard would it be…” followed by an AI image going to be the new way to complain about games? Realistic textures, dynamic boundary rendering, etc would significantly increase the art cost and take a large bite out of the game performance budget for realistic aesthetics when the main audience draw is pushing the scale of the simulation.

Metropolis 1998 seems to understand this. Very excited for it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

Looks like Transport Tycoon

Thanks for the shout out!

For those of you who grew up with the city builder classics, I just announced Jerry Martin (SimCity, The Sims) and Paul Zimmermann (Space Haven, Wildfrost) are the two composers I am working with.

That's an incredible get. As someone who grew up with SimCity (DOS), I thought I'd been hurt too many times (CS:2, SC2013, [..]) to get my hopes up again, but here we are. Wishlisted.

Good luck with the launch!

Unfortunately this seems nauseously US-centric, like most of the genre.

Man Forza Motorsports and Cities Skylines 2 came out within two weeks of each other, and I was so pumped for both. Thinking I'd have two genre-defining games to enjoy for years, it was definitely the most disappointing month of gaming for me.

As a comment on the article: yes, of course - the lack of all the things are symptoms of "this must release now". They fumbled it so badly, a new developer got put on it.

I'm wondering if this might not be addressing the actual problem? A game such as Rimworld, with much lower details in graphics / looking less realistic, feels much more like it has a "soul".

Can highly recommend Tynan Sylvester's book "Designing Games" which also goes a bit into why Rimworld looks like it does.

I'd rather more games move into more abstract directions for portraying game elements, the majority of games should not try to look "realistic".

The author seemed to be a little dismissive of mods in a game that fully expects most players to be playing with mods. Cities skylines 2 not only has a ton of detailing options but it has built-in modding which is what brings out this type of detail work.

Yes, by default it’s a little flat. But also, it’s a city builder. Most of the time you’re not zoomed in this close. And not all players intend to focus on these details.

If you spend a few minutes on YouTube seeking out some of the better cities skylines 2 content creators you’ll see a lot of really excellent detail work.

AI is going to be big here. You previously had to create a few art assets and reuse them. Cities has to be grids of blocks of buildings. You couldn't have an agent go and design a building that curved to the block perfectly. The slope couldn't have some stairs easily.

The author of this created these images with AI and that's exactly the solution for game makers. There may be base assets but AI is pretty damn good at contextually modifying them.

I saw a city sandbox (no simulation, just a kind of zen garden) on a voronoi grid but I forgot what it was called. No AI, and you could build in random shapes.

I think that’s Townscaper. A very relaxing “cozy” city builder with no real goals or challenges. It’s just a fun sandbox that algorithmically generates the city based on your clicks on a voronoi grid.

I don't want to buy an RTX 6000 just to play Sim City.

The next sim city will be some online generation slopfest you pay $10/mo for and you'll love it, you wont own the game or the hardware

Just adapt to it luddite. Thisbis the future resistance is futile.

The author should go play tiny glade. They had a lot of fun doing procedural generation for tiny details. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/

I'd like the AI disclosure to come earlier, though. I was wondering what was giving the "improved" look. May be possible with DLSS5-like tech, and style transfer.

Now, indeed, tthis is a city builder, and I am not necessarily interested in dead leaves when I play one. But what do I know? Most of my experience is with Sim City 2000.

The Division (both first and sequel) did such a good job having a worn/lived in feel to the city terrain. Wandering around the streets at night was such a fun experience. I need to go back and replay. The designers did such a good job.

This sounds like a legit use case for DLSS 5.

Cities Skylines' soul cashed out and was too busy buying sports cars and partying to deliver CS2. Transport Fever 3 looking good though.

this is precisely why GTA 6 is so anticipated.

And why Minecraft became popular (because, with mods you could modify how it looked).

In the past “why don’t games look like my mockup??” was annoying, but at least required some effort / talent. We didn’t know how good we had it.

I wish Nvidia’s DLSS 5 focused on this for games instead of “improving” character faces.

The problem with stairs might be getting people to negotiate them smoothly. The Sims (up to version 3, anyway) didn't want to deal with collisions on stairs, there's no animation for squeezing past or turning around, so Sims approaching stairs spend a lot of time slowly getting out of one another's way to decide who's going to use the stairs first, and waiting for other Sims to finish so that the next Sim can embark. If you throw a party in a house with stairs, some guests can spend the entire time stuck in the stair queue, and then they go home and complain that the party was no fun.

Frostpunk (only played first) did a decent job with this. It’s all coal fire power and heavy industrial buildings, very grounded and pragmatic, so it’s all dirty and loud and belching flames/smoke. It was somewhat obvious given the setting but regardless it works so well. The city feels very alive.

Also the paths in the snow that are gradually disappearing when left unused.

Decent? I couldn't quit the game and finished my first (and only) run at 5am.

It's truly amazing. It integrated with my ten year old Alienware keyboard and made the lighting ice blue during a snow storm.

Personally (apparently like you) I didn’t have any desire to re-play the game, but boy was that first play-through enjoyable! They really did well in making you feel the intended vibe with the visuals, sound effects, bits of dialogue etc

Same experience here. Amazing first run, but it's not really a city-builder you replay constantly, it's more of a solved puzzle game once you finish the run. Definitely worth playing though.

It is a puzzle game. The survival part is so strong you simply can't play it as a sandbox.

It has been a few years since I fired it up so I decided to temper my memory in case it was rose tinted lol I do remember feeling super invested and feeling like the place was my own creation

I booted Cities: Skylines II and opened HN to scroll while it loaded up, and the first headline I see is this ;-;

How's the sequel now, is it... playable? Good enough to replace CS1 (which I imagine a lot of folks are still playing)?

So basically we just need to make it more realistic. I agree.

I am fine with games showing an abstraction of the real world instead of simulating every detail. I am also fine with other games simulating every detail.

Sim City on SNES felt like it had a soul. The music was fantastic. I was never great at it but the slow pace was super cozy to let play in the background.

If we define soul as the visual artifacts of the history of the people involved then our search for perfection is going to leave us miserable.

Another reason SimCity 4 is still be best one of these to be made.

What I really would like to see from city builders would be cities that look like non-US cities.

There was a big heyday a decade ago with town builders, like Banished, Farthest Frontier, Manor lords and a bunch of ancient history ones. It seems to have died out again the last few years. And I don't know any that replace simcity or cities skyline 1. The only city sim I play nowadays is Soviet Workers Republic, some combination of those words.

Maybe we'll get a million new city sims with the ai goldrush that have unique takes.

Think I gave up on actual city sims with massive scale.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic! That's actually the best one available if you're more interested in the simulation than the aesthetics, even with the jank.

Manor Lords was only released early access in 2024, and has been 99% hype. The developer put in the bare minimum to gameplay then spent months and months on random visual stuff like "walk through your town in 3d" mode. It's only recently that it became remotely worthwhile.

It's not an example of the heyday of townbuilders except inasmuch as the existence of the heyday enabled a borderline grift.

Check out timberborn. Its the best new town builder. It's like banished but mixed with fluid dynamics. Water is a scarce resource and you have to manage flooding and droughts. You can also damn the wrong thing and flood your village

One small but charming game is Urbek City Builder. Has voxel graphics and less of a simulation and more of a radius placement system. Not very well known but it's one I've really enjoyed.

I don’t really think aesthetic details can create soul where there is no soul. Somehow I can’t imagine a world where games cost millions of dollars to produce yet also have soul mechanically injected by following some art director’s design-language protocol.

This makes no sense to me. There are plenty of games that feel soulful and alive, even gave that are 40+ years old with meager graphics have managed it.

i think he's saying that you can't add the soul, and that soul can't be boiled down to "the graphics are uninteresting".

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