• Cethin
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    17 months ago

    Am engine is just a set of tools stuck together. If they have to write their own rendered, editor, interpreter/compiler, and everything else, that’s a ton of investment that you then can’t spend on game features. You don’t do that unless you have very good reason. You are also required to maintain them yourself. You don’t just get upgrades essentially for free as the engine updates.

    Unity actually does have a lot of features that are useful for a city builder, like ECS. I don’t know if you’re trying to be sarcastic.

    The performance probably didn’t “sneak up on them” but they almost certainly didn’t know how it’d end up. There’s likely still a lot of optimization left in there and a lot of optional things that can be enabled/disabled. There’s no way to know how the end product is going to look until you’re nearing the end and all the pieces come together and time starts running out.

    • @mindbleach
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      17 months ago

      “This commercial engine cannot handle our game” is a pretty good reason.

      However well ECS does its thing - it’s obviously not doing enough, for this game. Even if this somehow came on by degrees, and performance got just the tiniest bit worse day after day, the time to stop tolerating that and pursue performance was a year ago. That doesn’t rule out bugfixes. That doesn’t rule out new systems. That doesn’t rule out major changes.

      But they’ve surely been fighting Unity for a long damn while and this is the best they could do.

      • Cethin
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        17 months ago

        “This commercial engine cannot handle our game” is a pretty good reason.

        The “engine” isn’t at fault. You can continue to add things that consume resources and you eventually use up too many resources. That’ll happen on any engine.

        However well ECS does its thing - it’s obviously not doing enough, for this game.

        I believe you’re wrong here actually. By all accounts I’ve heard, it’s GPU bottlenecked even with increased entity counts over C:S1. It’s likely just too many shaders doing too much work too frequently. Weather and temperature are both apparently big hogs, which to me looks like the perfect opportunity for shaders to handle a lot of the work and I’m sure that’s what’s happening.