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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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!?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

Based citybuilder

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

Looks like Transport Tycoon

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.