11 mo. ago • 100%

Stop blaming teeth for Cities: Skylines 2 performance problems, say devs

www.rockpapershotgun.com Stop blaming teeth for Cities: Skylines 2 performance problems, say devs

Cities: Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order have disputed a rumour that its performance woes are being caused by overl…

46 comments

The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn't even the performance issues. It's all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It's so tiring at this point.

Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It's going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you're using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.

People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it's so obvious. "Oh it's the teeth". "If they would have done X". It's honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.

I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order's push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I'm happy they released now.

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- Even just modding I've noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that's equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.
  
  The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the 'alpha wolf'. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I've heard both) is an 'alpha' wolf that's stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.
  
  And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you've been actively developing mods for it.
  
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  This is exactly it. It's more fun to shit on a game release because it gives a sense of superiority. "I know better than everyone else, this game should have been done this way and that way" and bolsters self confidence.
  
  There are without a doubt some really good arguments for things that could be different, but the vast majority of things I read are self aggrandizing people talking about how they all know how it could be better - and that's the arrogance that really bugs me. That any of us who don't know anything about the source code could say at all that it should run better.
  
  Saying "I wish it ran faster" is one thing. Saying "I know it could run better" or "Other games run fast, this one should too", or in regards to this article "lol they did this thing that's so stupid" and just the self backpatting for figuring it out. Software engineering is hard alone. Gaming engineering on top of that is just ridiculous. I have 14 years of software engineering under my belt and I still know they are doing things in this game that I would not be able to. Anyone who says they know better than the engineers are the same as the people who sat in my CS102 class and told other students they were smarter than the professor. You aren't. Everyone knows you aren't. Please stop acting like you are
  
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  That said, there are cases of players noticing emergent behaviour in games! For example: https://twitter.com/JoelBurgess/status/1428008041887281157
  
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- They’ve been experts for longer than a single night, don’t you remember when all anybody said was to jUsT FiX tHe NeTcOdE!
  
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  Bruh change your DNS /s
  
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- To be fair, one doesn't have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
  
  (This is the first I've heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That's a bit strange.)
  
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  There's a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.
  
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  That's not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn't a masarati, when they didn't build a masarati. They built a van. I don't need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.
  
  I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don't think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It's better PR just to be up front and say "Look, those cards just aren't going to cut it. If you can't play day one, we're sorry, but we're excited to see you at your next upgrade" rather than lie and say it'll be fine.
  
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  IIRC there was once some bethesda game where characters teeth being rendered across the map was the actual issue.
  
  edit: on second tought i think it was actually arma2/dayz/pubg or something similar
  
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  I don't think the issue is with people deducing something is wrong with the game. The issue is people sayings "It's definitely the fuel pump - why didn't you give it a larger pipe?" because the windscreen wipers aren't working.
  
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  Recognising an issue vs diagnosing it vs. figuring out a treatment. You can notice chest pains and shortness of breath, perhaps make an educated guess that it could be a heart attack, but it's going to take an expert to diagnose whether that's actually the case and what course of action to take.
  
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  Permanently Deleted
  
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- I give you right about those overnight experts in forums. 100% true. But I would not give too much respect to the developers (unless they were forced to released it early), because they knew the game was not ready to launch. It's even their official statement: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/updates-on-modding-and-performance-for-cities-skylines-ii.1601865/
  
  Cities: Skylines II is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements. With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.
  
  Then why the hell do you release the game? So it's another rushed game and that is you can blame the devs for. That is what upsets me personally the most from all those drama.
  
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  Then why the hell do you release the game?
  
  because they are a business that needs to make money to offset development costs.
  
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  They literally said why. Because a lot of players, like myself, don't care about the performance issues and are happy to play it. That those who wanted to start deserved to get it early, and that by delaying it only punished us. And they're right, like I said I am enjoying it, there's a huge discord of people enjoying it. If some people just absolutely can't handle 30fos then they are welcome to delay it for themselves and not buy it until hardware catches up
  
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- As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable
  
  Not gonna lie, something tells me your opinion would shift within seconds if your computer wasnt working you a little extra magic to make this sentence true.
  
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  Willing to throw my hat into the ring here and say that I haven't even bought it yet because I know my pc can't handle it. I will wait for performance patches (or look at finally upgrading my 5 year old pc)
  
  I also think they've done everything right. They called it out BEFORE release, but released anyway for the subset of players who can play, with the promise of improving it for the rest.
  
  The ones who can play it got lucky, the ones who can't and are all pissed about it are the same ones who would be bitching if it got delayed.
  
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- I don't work in games, but I do work in software and the people you describe are infuriating and have absolutely no idea what it's like to work on a big piece of software. Thanks for the comment.
  
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  You don't understand. I watched a YouTube video/took CS102/have a side project I'm totally going to finish. I totally know just as much as these engineers with 10+ years experience who put the last 5+ years into the project.
  
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- Yup. I've worked with some really great software engineers in the gaming industry, and they don't have a fucking clue how to optimize a game, and it's because optimizing the game doesn't take a clue. It takes legwork, and diagnostics, and digging, and digging, and digging.
  
  It's never what you think, because if it was, it would have been fixed already.
  
  We shipped well optimized games, and we did so because the games were (relatively) small, and our engineers were absolute pro sleuths.
  
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- They’re “overnight performance experts” because there are similar games that run better.
  
  To me it seems that there was a tight schedule and they couldn’t prioritize performance tweaks over features. I mean, if it’s works it works, refactor later so we can jump to the next requirement.
  
  Sum all that up and you won’t know which part of the chain takes most cycles,
  
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- I largely agree with what you're saying but I'm going to add... If you get to the point of release and you're off 300% and not 15% ... you screwed up.
  
  There definitely aren't easy answers to these kinds of problems but there are steps that should be taken along the way to prevent them. Getting to the end and then addressing any and all performance issues is a recipe for disaster.
  
  You don't want to be making major architectural changes at this point in the process. You want to be dealing with hiccups. Throwing hardware at the problem and "optimization" only go so far.
  
  4
Did anyone read the quote. They literally stated this was part of the problem:

We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets.

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- The teeth themselves seemed to have gotten confused in the article. Apparently someone was claiming the life cycle system is simulating tooth growth. The characters overall not being loded is an issue but only in GPU performance, not CPU. I don't know where the major performance issues are on the side of since I've not touched the game but it's why they say it's not the whole issue and the article claims it's not the teeth. Which it's not. It's the characters overall.
  
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  I think they run a lot of compute shader, so that they can offload part of the simulation to the GPU, so anything that reduces the utilization of the GPU could improve performance overall.
  
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"... Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project."

Custom Dentist Minigame DLC confirmed!

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- Either that, or "News Cameraman with Carnage Closeup Mode DLC"...
  
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In Paradox defence they released a patch pretty quickly once it was released to the masses with miriad of different hardware configs.

To be honest, they prob should have just beta early released it.

This way they could have caveated any issues and allowed the feedback to refine the codebase.

£70 ish quid for the premium edition to run like shite takes the biscuit.

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- But yet if they released it Early Access to crowdsource their QA, people would have dogged all over them about "what's with the EA bullshit, just release the full game when it's finished"
  
  Personally, I'm a huge fan of Early Access, I like playing 3/4 finished games and having actual tangible input on the finishing touches. It's made several games that I already really liked in their EA state, into masterpieces.
  
  But your average gamer just wants to buy a game and have it work perfectly. When it doesn't, tantrums happen.
  
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  I feel like if they:
  
  released earlier with Beta: tantrums
  
  delayed to get perf up: tantrums
  
  cut features/details to get perf up: tantrums
  
  released on time w/perf issues: tantrums
  
  I just ignore it. I have a fairly new setup and turned a few things down, so I can get 70 +/- 10 most of the time, but I trust they’re working on it so I can turn them back up later. Perf testing on a huge myriad of different system setups is hard to do. At least they didn’t pull a “here it is, we’re done.” Like some other groups might have. They acknowledged it, they announced the low perf and their continued work, and they released anyway so people who want it and can play it, get to.
  
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  I used to hate early access - why should we pay to test an unfinished game, when that's an actual job that people get paid to do?
  
  but I've come to recognise that it's am important avenue for funding for many developers, and tbh, I don't think any of the early access games I've played have felt "incomplete" - perhaps lacking polish, perhaps in need of more content, but that's true of many full releases, and early access not only gets you these games at a reduced price, it effectively guarantees a large amount of free DLC as the game gets made more complete.
  
  my only real complaint now is sometimes I like early access features which end up getting cut from the finished game.
  
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It was a ridiculous claim to begin with, there's no way they wouldn't see something like that when analyzing with internal tools or doing any performance runs.

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