He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.
Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.
Yes, except the DF doesn’t compute shadows for all the teeth. Or texture map them, or use a shader to make them look wet and shiny.
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.
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.
You are correct but what the article is asking for is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact mods already do what the author is asking for, just not in an automatic way
And how are those mods on baseline performance? Are the mods appropriate for general audience mid range rigs? The tech industry has the capability of pure ray tracing. Game engines don't use it because the audience willing to shell 10k for PC to run it is exceedingly small. They have to target mid range specs to have an audience big enough to make money.
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.
I recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the player's uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Who would choose to live in a decaying city? Broken down buildings, screwed up roads?
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.
Speaking of naivete, you can actually live in a city where the sidewalks are maintained, not sinking into the ground, and where the buildings are washed/painted, where cables are buried, where there is no trash on the street, no graffiti, and where there aren't derelict boarded up buildings with overgrown weeds. Nice areas do exist.
It's unpleasant to accuse someone of being naive in a paternalistic fashion that implies "you're wrong, because you don't know any better, but if you knew better you'd agree with me".
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.
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.
Absolutely the second version. The first version looks unrealistic and gets boring fast. Assuming the amount of degradation can be adjusted it's a no brainer to make use of it. In the real world the elements will degrade everything over time..
The second set of photos just have more detail. For example, the sidewalks are more detailed instead of just being flat rectangles.
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.
+1. Some of the added detail (e.g. more realistic-looking brick) looked great. Some of it was the kind of thing that better depicts "areas you've failed to maintain", iff you want your simulator to have those bits of verisimilitude.
I'd be all for separating "better, more lifelike, more realistic rendering, with interesting variation" from "decay".
"Soul" means something has a story to tell. It was created for a purpose, it was useful, it may be near its end. There are very clear and obvious dimensions to it that help to immerse you into the game. Details to pick up on, some obvious and some not so obvious.
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.
However you want to label it: you don't get a sense that anything living ever touched the little pixels you're moving around on the screen. There is no 'emotional tug' to help immerse you into the game.
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.
big flat rectangles isnt less detail. ive seen plenty of lots that look exactly like that with the surface being sort of a grippy stucko. adding detail would be texturing it to show the grit better
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.
I think it could be tastefully done. Even well–maintained objects age in real life, and that is often part of the charm.
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.
> 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.
Cities: Skylines 2 is a particularly rough pick for this concept, since it's one of very few games I need frame generation to run even passably. LLMs seem plenty capable of tweaking existing assets to make a ton of variants, but actually displaying all of those performantly is then an engineering problem.
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.
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
Literally missing the forest for the trees. You're building a city, not a yard. I don't think making the city look procedurally worn or whatever they mean is trivial either. Feels like complaining about the graphics in Minecraft... That's not the point of the game.
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
If you’re playing a city builder to min/max but want it somewhat grounded in reality then you have to accept it isn’t an Apple Store on every block IMO. If you want perfect symmetry and cleanliness that’s valid too but it’s the default for most games, so I think they make some good points.
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.
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.
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.
AI is going to be big here. You previously had to create a few art assets and reuse them. Cities has to be grids of blocks of buildings. You couldn't have an agent go and design a building that curved to the block perfectly. The slope couldn't have some stairs easily.
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.
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.
I think that’s Townscaper. A very relaxing “cozy” city builder with no real goals or challenges. It’s just a fun sandbox that algorithmically generates the city based on your clicks on a voronoi grid.
Man Forza Motorsports and Cities Skylines 2 came out within two weeks of each other, and I was so pumped for both. Thinking I'd have two genre-defining games to enjoy for years, it was definitely the most disappointing month of gaming for me.
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.
Is “how hard would it be…” followed by an AI image going to be the new way to complain about games? Realistic textures, dynamic boundary rendering, etc would significantly increase the art cost and take a large bite out of the game performance budget for realistic aesthetics when the main audience draw is pushing the scale of the simulation.
The author seemed to be a little dismissive of mods in a game that fully expects most players to be playing with mods. Cities skylines 2 not only has a ton of detailing options but it has built-in modding which is what brings out this type of detail work.
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.
The Division (both first and sequel) did such a good job having a worn/lived in feel to the city terrain. Wandering around the streets at night was such a fun experience. I need to go back and replay. The designers did such a good job.
The problem with stairs might be getting people to negotiate them smoothly. The Sims (up to version 3, anyway) didn't want to deal with collisions on stairs, there's no animation for squeezing past or turning around, so Sims approaching stairs spend a lot of time slowly getting out of one another's way to decide who's going to use the stairs first, and waiting for other Sims to finish so that the next Sim can embark. If you throw a party in a house with stairs, some guests can spend the entire time stuck in the stair queue, and then they go home and complain that the party was no fun.
Frostpunk (only played first) did a decent job with this. It’s all coal fire power and heavy industrial buildings, very grounded and pragmatic, so it’s all dirty and loud and belching flames/smoke. It was somewhat obvious given the setting but regardless it works so well. The city feels very alive.
Personally (apparently like you) I didn’t have any desire to re-play the game, but boy was that first play-through enjoyable! They really did well in making you feel the intended vibe with the visuals, sound effects, bits of dialogue etc
Sim City on SNES felt like it had a soul. The music was fantastic. I was never great at it but the slow pace was super cozy to let play in the background.
I am fine with games showing an abstraction of the real world instead of simulating every detail. I am also fine with other games simulating every detail.
I don’t really think aesthetic details can create soul where there is no soul. Somehow I can’t imagine a world where games cost millions of dollars to produce yet also have soul mechanically injected by following some art director’s design-language protocol.
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.
There was a big heyday a decade ago with town builders, like Banished, Farthest Frontier, Manor lords and a bunch of ancient history ones. It seems to have died out again the last few years. And I don't know any that replace simcity or cities skyline 1. The only city sim I play nowadays is Soviet Workers Republic, some combination of those words.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Agreed. Or xeriscaping, or something better than grass (which is a really low bar to be better than).
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.
I didn’t realize cities were made with a point to reject entropy and weren’t mostly organic congregations of people for economic reasons
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.
If the clean lines we laid down were persistent, I'd worry we'd planted the seed of something poorly thought out yet permanent.
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.
I'd be all for separating "better, more lifelike, more realistic rendering, with interesting variation" from "decay".
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly what a city is though.
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!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
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.
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.
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.
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.