Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.
https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-addresses...
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.
The solution is mods by modders for modders.
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.
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.
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?
strong leadership with narrow scope makes the best version of anything.
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.
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!?"
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.
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.
Opinions be like
"You disagree with me so I can label you in a negative light"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. Or xeriscaping, or something better than grass (which is a really low bar to be better than).
I didn’t realize cities were made with a point to reject entropy and weren’t mostly organic congregations of people for economic reasons
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the clean lines we laid down were persistent, I'd worry we'd planted the seed of something poorly thought out yet permanent.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be all for separating "better, more lifelike, more realistic rendering, with interesting variation" from "decay".
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.
Neglect leading to decay is supposed to be a punishment though. Turning it into "soul" makes it desirable.
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.
Yes, it's romanticizing decay to add thematic and realistic problems to games.
That's exactly what a city is though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't just make stuff 'look nice' without affecting how the player behaves
I had an argument at one point, honest!
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.
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'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 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.
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.
It's truly amazing. It integrated with my ten year old Alienware keyboard and made the lighting ice blue during a snow storm.
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.
It's not an example of the heyday of townbuilders except inasmuch as the existence of the heyday enabled a borderline grift.