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Cities: Skylines 2 boss says they 'completely overestimated' the Unity engine's capabilities (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/citybuilders@sh.itjust.works
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

"Our mistake was to bank on something that was not yet proven," says Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen.

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[–] 29 points 7 months ago (5 children)

How‽ You used Unity for the first game! Why would expect a difference for the second?

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  • [–] [S] 13 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    They also used Unity for Cities in Motion 2, which was a de facto prototype for Cities Skylines.

    I much preferred their own homegrown engine from Cities in Motion 1; although since it is single threaded, it can bring even modern systems to their knees (at 1440+ resolutions) with mods, a map that maxes out the engine and freelook (especially if you do a horizon view of the city).

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    How does Cities in Motion 1 hold up against Cities Skylines 1?

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Cities in Motion 1 is exclusively focused on public transport company management, CiM 2 allows construction of roads/buildings in a more expansive manner (it was clearly a prototype for Cities Skylines), but is still missing much of the gameplay you would expect from a city-builder.

    I really liked CiM 1 because it wasn't made in unity and the euro focus (Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin, but there is also DLC for New York and Tokyo).

    CiM is also very hard and I would argue the data vizualization expansion mod is a must for QoL.

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    • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Didn't independent analysis show that they had awful LODs and such on release, causing massive performance loss? Maybe Unity was supposed to automagically take care of that, but if it didn't work, doing the work manually was always an option. They just chose not to.

    If your game's broke, don't release it. That's like a carpenter blaming his tools for a slanted kitchen cabinet. I don't care if your saw blade had a manufacturing defect, take it back and fix it!

    It'd be a case study in what not to do if publishers didn't make that same mistake over and over again. There is such a thing as unacceptably poor performance and fixing it cannot possibly be more expensive than lost sales revenue.

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago

    The LOD and occlusion issue was actually really funny. People discovered that the game was rendering all of the individual teeth in each citizens mouth all the time, even when the camera was 1000' in the air.

    To say that CS2 shipped in an unfinished state would be an insult to most early access games.

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    • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Former Cities: Skylines 2 boss. As mentioned in the article, a new team took over a few months ago to clean up the mess.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I am curious what their next project will be, I am hoping for Cities in Motion 3 (or an equivalent game with a different name if Paradox owns the trademark to Cities in Motion), but we'll see what happens.

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    • [–] 11 points 7 months ago

    Gee who would have known...

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    [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Making such a complex game on Unity is a suicide.

    They don't give you access to the source files - that alone shall be a red flag.

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    • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*

    I don’t buy it.

    It’s not as bad as Gearbox complaining about Unreal (which they’ve worked on since 2005), but all the coverage I’ve seen points to self-infliction.

    They’ve worked on Unity since at least 2014.

    And other lower budget Unity sim games like Humankind, Timberborn and Ixion (just to name a few) run fine, and look great.

    Now, maybe Unity's overhead and issues is a factor, but it’s not the only one. They messed up.

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    [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    Na, it feels like it's just bug filled garbage to me.

    Feels like they had to much money to work on it by then or it was a completely different team trying to mimic the original.

    Great game don't get me wrong, just soooo buggy it's unplayable, I gave it the good ol college try but the 3rd or 4th time my save was corrupted I bailed.

    I did actually figure out what was causing it it happened every time I switched from low detail to high and you solved it by turning off that feature or something like that it's be years now.

    By that point I was souared on the whole thing and it wasn't like that was the only bug

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