Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.
> Can someone expand on exactly what is meant by "model LOD" in this context?
Back in the day, games just had one version of each model, that gets loaded or not.
Nowadays, games with lots of models and huge amount of detail lets each model have multiple different versions, with their own LOD (Level of Detail).
So if you see a tree from far away, it might be 20 vertices because you're far away from it so you wouldn't see the details anyways. But if you're right next to it, it might have 20,000 vertices instead.
It's an optimization technique to not send too much geometry to the GPU.
> 100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet.
I can easily see this happening though.
Artist starts making assets, asks "What's my budget for each model" and engineering/managers reply with "Do whatever you want, we'll automatically create different LODs later" and the day gold master is being done, the LOD system still isn't in place so the call gets made to just ship what they have, otherwise publisher deadline will be missed.
Considering Paradox/CO are dragging their feet to release the modding docs/tools, we don't have much choice if we wanna start building our mods today :)
I've played a lot of CS1 (and recently, lots of CS2), here are the biggest improvements for me:
- The simulation is much deeper than before, not basically just statistics on a page
- The game plays slightly harder, more management needed in order to have a proper budget. But like in the first, that disappears once you have 100/200K citizens, as it's hard to fuck up the budget at that stage.
- The control of roads is a lot better, compared to vanilla CS1. Nowhere near modded CS1, but it'll easily get there with some time, the foundation of CS2 is a lot stronger and easier to extend
- Able to build bigger cities will less lag compared to CS1. I'm sure this will improve even more in the future. Going ECS I'm sure made a huge difference in simulation performance.
That's a huge misrepresentation of what happened to SimCity. EA released a incredibly user-hostile version of SimCity (always online, microtransations and more) that almost no one liked, and Cities: Skylines was released around that time too.
The developers of Cities Skylines has less than 50 employees in total, it's a small developer based in Finland (Colossal Order), I doubt they have those sort of issues at that scale, that's usually something that happens with medium/large companies.
Not sure what kind of projects you've worked on before, but the ones I've been involved in, you wouldn't spend time optimizing something taking <1% of render time when other parts are heavily affecting the final render time for each frame.
Why on earth would they try to optimize how the UI renders when they're having big issues elsewhere?
> Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus.
Correction: React/Web technlogy is responsible for all the UI, from the loading screens to in-game labels when using road tools and everything in-between.
And their implementation of Coherent Gameface is not the reason for the performance issues in the game, so not sure how it's even relevant.
I also doubt any of the developers were aiming for that too.
I've been looking through the decompiled code for the purposes of modding for the last few days, wrapping my head around their ECS/DOTS code, and the game has a much better foundation for a scalable simulation than CS1 ever had, even after years of optimizations.
I think the guess in the article is pretty close to the truth, I've seen stuff like that happen countless of times. You make a bet on a early technology (Unity DOTS + ECS in this case) which gives you a lot of benefits but also, it's immature enough that you get a bunch of additional work to do, and you barely have time to get everything in place before publisher forces you to follow the initial deadline.
Where are you getting this from? I'm literally sitting with the game open right now with the Chrome Devtools connected to it, and I'm seeing no unnecessary modifications on the DOM side of things.
Could be that the integrated the Gameface library incorrectly I guess? Still interested in more details from you.