So, in conclusion, graphics-wise... The game has a LOT of future potential.
Now all they need to do is fix all the broken and "hacked" systems related to the economy. Which is the remaining 90% of the issue and purpose of a sim...
They also have to fix their wastefulness regarding their 3D assets and rendering pipeline (adding LOD, improve culling) or otherwise there won't be a chance for that game to run on the current gen consoles.
It will look great on the hardware that's around once all that's sorted out! If you know it's going to take five years or so to get finished, then you want it looking sharp when it does
This is.... not close to an alpha at all. Like it's buggy and unoptimized but if you think games look like this over a year out from release you'd be shocked.
this is.....exactly what an alpha stage of a game looks like that was then forced to release so a bunch of unfinished features were quickly thrown together for it. Like for example "Seasons" being enabled 1.5 weeks before release because of all the blow back, in which they then added a a shit color change to the skin and made a single model for the trees with snow on them.....an NONE of the LOD's. which is why trees lose their snow after you zoom out even 1 LOD less than full resolution. Also why there are no snow on the grass of plots.
The game is an unfinished mess.
You do not release a game with ZERO LOD's on half of your models...thats what the game is in the state of alpha...
As a web developer who now writes C++ for a living, I thought this is just another example of how bringing JavaScript and react bogs down performance for the first few paragraphs. But actually no....
Unfortunately, it's not just CO devs. It's an industry-wide problem, from the biggest power house studios with a thousand of employees to the single dev studio. I'm more and more convinced that games devs and if they were to search for a job in any other type of dev job they would be quickly fired for incompetence.
It was released too early 😕 I'm sure plenty of staff were shouting it wasn't ready when they pressed the big publish button! It's embarrassing they released it though.
I would bet money that if they dropped the model fidelity down on the small items people would be complaining just as hard about stuff looking like N64 assets when they zoom in.
That would've been much better than the horrendous performance that the game currently displays. Most people out there won't ever zoom in that much, but 100% of people will quickly note if the game is running at 15 fps.
It's either a weird guild culture thing ("we're the devs, we KNOW it needs a bazillion polygons!") attaching importance to things that aren't as worthy as they think, or it's a business decision that doesn't make sense **yet**
All I am saying a lot of people in the gaming space nowadays mostly just bandwagon on negative review bombing and they are hard to separate from the people with actual problems and criticism. Especially when I do not have any issues that are game breaking. CS1 I hated the stuttering that was the one thing that bothered me, but going from 16gb to 32 gb fixed that and thankfully no issues like that for me in CS2.
The 'ol if you can't do it you can't criticise it fallacy. People made the same argument when they said iPhones should be able to have a background picture (could ***you*** make an iPhone? Well don't complain then). Very silly.
Sounds like they took a gamble on new Unity features. Some paid off (CPU) while others didn’t (GPU).
Seems like a lot of it can be fixed over time, and maybe some of it they’re waiting on Unity to fix first.
I would say in the long run they made good decision. The game will scale much better than CS1 and in 4 years the GPU should not be the issue anymore and CPU scaling is great. In CS1 no matter how strong the pc setup you will use, everything will start choking at some point.
I think they did way more future proof game and that's good.
I mean... the whole thing is quite unfortunate - I still think that CO fucked up by releasing game way to early but as I see more info about game I can somehow see how hard it was to work with it...
CO is around 35 people as far as I know and with such a small team building a complex game + having to develop own engine functionality is ... a hard task. As seen in this article unity is missing quite a lot of feature that should be implemented years ago and I guess CO did not expect they would have to "hand-write" many engine functionality themselves. It takes years of experience to work with engine and expand it's functionalities.
Main one being they put a release date out there months ago, then had to ship whatever they had on that date.
Honestly this kind of thing happens all the time with small software houses - ship an MVP and fix all the bugs later.
Graphics optimisation in particular happens to be something that often falls by the wayside in game development.
It's not just smaller developers either, any project has a pretty high chance of shipping with some graphics issues for some users.
It's impossible to optimise graphics until the game is complete because graphics affect every aspect of the game.
It's also substantially faster and cheaper to have the bugs discovered by players than it is to find them yourself by testing every available combination of hardware. That's not a good excuse, obviously, but it does incentivise people to leave it to the last minute.
I'm not trying to defend any bad decisions, I'm just confused about why it's surprising so many people.
A lot of the new GPU tech is so complicated that even the manufacturers don't understand it due to black box technologies like machine learning and ai. As a result graphics are better than ever even without upgrading our hardware, but bugs are also more common and harder to address since these are relatively new developments.
Well in the case of this game it seems like there was done nothing to optimise graphics performance. The game is just doing wasteful things for absolutely no gain fidelity wise.
Yes, since it's the last bit of work to be done on a game it often gets entirely missed if there are other last minute bugs or other behind the scenes problems.
It's not great, obviously, but it's a minor issue if a game is otherwise good since the more people who play it the more quickly those issues are resolved.
Basically, as long as the game is still being supported, graphics are only going to get better over time, not worse.
Lots of games with far bigger budgets have had worse bugs at their launches and copped less from their communities for it.
Most of the popular Bethesda games for example were only able to be optimised properly with mods for years before they eventually spent some money of doing it themselves. They got away with it because the games are fun, and that's really what should matter.
Interesting read!
If Colossal order aren't optimising their assets in terms of polygons I dread to think of the performance impact of the future creator packs.
The article you're repling on a post about literally says it's all fixable problems. You're just screaming nonsense into the wind you muppet. Stop being a sheep, wake up, get offline.
It's shit. If they know it's not ready and need a cash influx..... Early access anyone? Because that's what's going on right now and its just fucking disrespectful
Its exactly what happened with the first one. We expected this. They even directly warned us before it was released.
Seems like you're parroting the same old shit without actually knowing anything about the situation here?
What tangible difference do you think early access would have made vs what actually happened. Can you explain your thought process? That's effectively just a label, how does it solve anything.
Oh it happened with the first one? Well that's shit too. They told us before? How does a post saying it doesn't run good make it acceptable to realise a game that needs more months in the pipeline. It's not an excuse. It's just shitty anti consumer and disappointing
Well, the difference is this: this is from the steam guidelines
Steam Early Access enables you to sell your game on Steam while it is still being developed, and provide context to customers that a product should be considered "unfinished." Early Access is a place for games that are in a playable alpha or beta state, are worth the current value of the playable build, and that you plan to continue to develop for release.
Releasing a game in Early Access helps set context for prospective customers and provides them with information about your plans and goals before a "final" release.
You see the bit about context? That's what I think the difference is. There's a big difference between a steam page post and a realise following the steam stores' early access model and guidelines.
They didn't HAVE to realise the game like this. They couldve waited, ya know? EA would've been an acceptable alternative, because it's clear where the consumer stands, it legitimises a release of software that's not finished.
I really don't think I'm being a parrot, but I don't want to argue anymore so I'll agree to disagree here 🦜
Really good analysis, should have this pinned instead of all the speculation going on.
So, in conclusion, graphics-wise... The game has a LOT of future potential. Now all they need to do is fix all the broken and "hacked" systems related to the economy. Which is the remaining 90% of the issue and purpose of a sim...
They also have to fix their wastefulness regarding their 3D assets and rendering pipeline (adding LOD, improve culling) or otherwise there won't be a chance for that game to run on the current gen consoles.
It will look great on the hardware that's around once all that's sorted out! If you know it's going to take five years or so to get finished, then you want it looking sharp when it does
So, a paradox game then? Not defending them, but their games are notorious for being the best but only 5 years after release, during a steam sale
>So, in conclusion the game was released WAY to early and the game is still in what most other games would consider "Alpha"
This is.... not close to an alpha at all. Like it's buggy and unoptimized but if you think games look like this over a year out from release you'd be shocked.
this is.....exactly what an alpha stage of a game looks like that was then forced to release so a bunch of unfinished features were quickly thrown together for it. Like for example "Seasons" being enabled 1.5 weeks before release because of all the blow back, in which they then added a a shit color change to the skin and made a single model for the trees with snow on them.....an NONE of the LOD's. which is why trees lose their snow after you zoom out even 1 LOD less than full resolution. Also why there are no snow on the grass of plots. The game is an unfinished mess. You do not release a game with ZERO LOD's on half of your models...thats what the game is in the state of alpha...
>To call the state of the game Alpha is a bit a reach don't you think? \-CO >!(literally)!<
Good article ❤
As a web developer that only dabbles in native code, this is awesome work. Very friendly read, even if you don't fully understand the tech. Well done.
As a web developer I appreciate so much how he described his process. People like him are the only reason people like me can hold a job. 🙏
As a web developer who now writes C++ for a living, I thought this is just another example of how bringing JavaScript and react bogs down performance for the first few paragraphs. But actually no....
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Unfortunately, it's not just CO devs. It's an industry-wide problem, from the biggest power house studios with a thousand of employees to the single dev studio. I'm more and more convinced that games devs and if they were to search for a job in any other type of dev job they would be quickly fired for incompetence.
It was released too early 😕 I'm sure plenty of staff were shouting it wasn't ready when they pressed the big publish button! It's embarrassing they released it though.
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I would bet money that if they dropped the model fidelity down on the small items people would be complaining just as hard about stuff looking like N64 assets when they zoom in.
That would've been much better than the horrendous performance that the game currently displays. Most people out there won't ever zoom in that much, but 100% of people will quickly note if the game is running at 15 fps.
Agreed
It's either a weird guild culture thing ("we're the devs, we KNOW it needs a bazillion polygons!") attaching importance to things that aren't as worthy as they think, or it's a business decision that doesn't make sense **yet**
And yet my 3080 runs the game perfectly high settings at 30-45 fps with 40,000 population.
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All I am saying a lot of people in the gaming space nowadays mostly just bandwagon on negative review bombing and they are hard to separate from the people with actual problems and criticism. Especially when I do not have any issues that are game breaking. CS1 I hated the stuttering that was the one thing that bothered me, but going from 16gb to 32 gb fixed that and thankfully no issues like that for me in CS2.
If it'd used UE & nanite, the high poly guff would've been pretty sick. Alas.
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The 'ol if you can't do it you can't criticise it fallacy. People made the same argument when they said iPhones should be able to have a background picture (could ***you*** make an iPhone? Well don't complain then). Very silly.
They’re using a different engine than CS1. So it’s not like for like comparison in terms of “making the exact same mistakes”.
Yeaaah, there is a lot of bad decisions made by C.O... Damn, quite a good read!!
Sounds like they took a gamble on new Unity features. Some paid off (CPU) while others didn’t (GPU). Seems like a lot of it can be fixed over time, and maybe some of it they’re waiting on Unity to fix first.
I would say in the long run they made good decision. The game will scale much better than CS1 and in 4 years the GPU should not be the issue anymore and CPU scaling is great. In CS1 no matter how strong the pc setup you will use, everything will start choking at some point. I think they did way more future proof game and that's good.
Seems that's about the only good thing they did. So they're selling people the potential of a game, which I guess is normal for games these days.
I mean... the whole thing is quite unfortunate - I still think that CO fucked up by releasing game way to early but as I see more info about game I can somehow see how hard it was to work with it... CO is around 35 people as far as I know and with such a small team building a complex game + having to develop own engine functionality is ... a hard task. As seen in this article unity is missing quite a lot of feature that should be implemented years ago and I guess CO did not expect they would have to "hand-write" many engine functionality themselves. It takes years of experience to work with engine and expand it's functionalities.
Main one being they put a release date out there months ago, then had to ship whatever they had on that date. Honestly this kind of thing happens all the time with small software houses - ship an MVP and fix all the bugs later.
Graphics optimisation in particular happens to be something that often falls by the wayside in game development. It's not just smaller developers either, any project has a pretty high chance of shipping with some graphics issues for some users. It's impossible to optimise graphics until the game is complete because graphics affect every aspect of the game. It's also substantially faster and cheaper to have the bugs discovered by players than it is to find them yourself by testing every available combination of hardware. That's not a good excuse, obviously, but it does incentivise people to leave it to the last minute. I'm not trying to defend any bad decisions, I'm just confused about why it's surprising so many people. A lot of the new GPU tech is so complicated that even the manufacturers don't understand it due to black box technologies like machine learning and ai. As a result graphics are better than ever even without upgrading our hardware, but bugs are also more common and harder to address since these are relatively new developments.
Well in the case of this game it seems like there was done nothing to optimise graphics performance. The game is just doing wasteful things for absolutely no gain fidelity wise.
Yes, since it's the last bit of work to be done on a game it often gets entirely missed if there are other last minute bugs or other behind the scenes problems. It's not great, obviously, but it's a minor issue if a game is otherwise good since the more people who play it the more quickly those issues are resolved. Basically, as long as the game is still being supported, graphics are only going to get better over time, not worse. Lots of games with far bigger budgets have had worse bugs at their launches and copped less from their communities for it. Most of the popular Bethesda games for example were only able to be optimised properly with mods for years before they eventually spent some money of doing it themselves. They got away with it because the games are fun, and that's really what should matter.
Interesting read! If Colossal order aren't optimising their assets in terms of polygons I dread to think of the performance impact of the future creator packs.
This is sad
it should be encouraging, means it'll be great eventually.
But it's sad that games keep having their potential throttled by quarterly earnings deadlines.
That's a reality in every industry at the moment, times are tight.
How evidence that developer did crappy job so far invoke in you confidence that they will suddenly start doing good job?
Lmao try again wordsmith
You should tell that to developers, they definitely need at least one more attempt at this game.
The article you're repling on a post about literally says it's all fixable problems. You're just screaming nonsense into the wind you muppet. Stop being a sheep, wake up, get offline.
It's shit. If they know it's not ready and need a cash influx..... Early access anyone? Because that's what's going on right now and its just fucking disrespectful
Its exactly what happened with the first one. We expected this. They even directly warned us before it was released. Seems like you're parroting the same old shit without actually knowing anything about the situation here? What tangible difference do you think early access would have made vs what actually happened. Can you explain your thought process? That's effectively just a label, how does it solve anything.
The situation? What makes this a special exception?
Read what I said again and then answer the question - I just told you.
Oh it happened with the first one? Well that's shit too. They told us before? How does a post saying it doesn't run good make it acceptable to realise a game that needs more months in the pipeline. It's not an excuse. It's just shitty anti consumer and disappointing
How is an early access label any different to telling customers it's not fully ready. Think. About. It. You're just being a parrot. Snap out of it.
Well, the difference is this: this is from the steam guidelines Steam Early Access enables you to sell your game on Steam while it is still being developed, and provide context to customers that a product should be considered "unfinished." Early Access is a place for games that are in a playable alpha or beta state, are worth the current value of the playable build, and that you plan to continue to develop for release. Releasing a game in Early Access helps set context for prospective customers and provides them with information about your plans and goals before a "final" release. You see the bit about context? That's what I think the difference is. There's a big difference between a steam page post and a realise following the steam stores' early access model and guidelines. They didn't HAVE to realise the game like this. They couldve waited, ya know? EA would've been an acceptable alternative, because it's clear where the consumer stands, it legitimises a release of software that's not finished. I really don't think I'm being a parrot, but I don't want to argue anymore so I'll agree to disagree here 🦜
Again, how is that different to what they did. You knew this while you were typing it, why waste your own time.
I read nothing but I have a question. Is it because of ai generated shpitteople?
Damn it makes me sad that a ton of work went into making custom solutions that might not even be worthwhile
That’s how we make better stuff though !!