this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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That's a shame. I played tons of the original game and must've got most of the DLC over the years, but while 2 looked awesome in demo clips, the system specs were outrageous. Above my pay grade lol!
I wonder where the performance bottleneck lies? Is it graphics or modelling the city? I know in the demos it looked almost photo-realistic, but tbh I don't need that. The new gameplay elements like better control over traffic at intersections were the interesting part to me.
Typically, unless it's sheer number of objects drawn (which can be kind of relevant to a city sim, especially if they're plotting individual vehicles on a broad map view), heavy graphics aren't really a source of high CPU load. Inefficient real time modeling of stuff like traffic is a more likely culprit.
Even the old game had a noticeable dip in performance by the time you were building airports and stuff, though it never reached deal-breaker levels for me. I suspect you're right that it's the modelling?
I found after 250k cims it pretty much fell apart.
For what it's worth, I have a machine with less than the recommended specs, and as long as you don't mind spending a little time downgrading settings to Medium/Low, I have a fairly playable framerate, usually between 30 and 50. I've only built a couple cities up to 25,000 population, but it's still been fun.
You won't be disappointed by the road tools, they are everything they promised and more. In 15 minutes I can make interchanges that look like I pulled them out of a mod pack. It's obscene. Traffic control is decent for vanilla, but if you were a power user of TMPE in CS1, you might be a bit underwhelmed.
Overall though, there is a desperate shortage of maps and unique assets. As for the game's systems - economy, education, land value, industry - I can see how they were intended to work, but it seems like a lot of boilerplate was added to make the game playable at release. With time - and mod support, Dear Lord - I think it will greatly improve.
Edit: Infrastructurist is a great showing of how the game still has legs.
Yeah, I love the game, but I'll absolutely admit it was released too early. The simulation is broken in multiple ways, but it appears to be fixable as evidenced by progress in patches and some mods as well. Then again, personally, I'm glad I have the opportunity to play it now rather than waiting another year, even in the state it's in. The cities I've been building are very satisfying, and like you said the road tools are a dream.
shoutout to swamp yankees
Oh interesting, so there's a glimmer of hope at any rate. Thanks for the feedback! Maybe if there's a big steam sale…
What seems to be the issue with a lot of these games is "seamless zoom".
So even if you're all the way zoomed out, it's still rending every tiny detail at the same level you were zoomed in.
All they'd have to do is split it into three levels and only render the one you're in. A fraction of a second delay when you cross a threshold isn't a big deal.
True. That could be deadly with a sim since the amount of detail grows like crazy as you build it up. Even the amount of RAM it would take to store all those polygons sounds insane!
Yeah, I don't know for sure if that's it, but every 4x game that has it tends to get bogged down.
It's just insane because it's for a trivial benefit but every studio seems to think it's worth it. That's the only reason I have doubts, it's such an easy fix surely somone would have noticed.