I stumbled upon an interesting example for why #CitiesSkylines2 has performance problems. This one in particular is hopeful because it's the kind of thing that can be fixed with a patch but also a bit worrying that it wasn't noticed and addressed before launch.
In order to create a more diverse roster of NPCs, they worked with a tool called Popul8 by a company named Didimo. It uses AI (somehow) to dynamically generate individual human characters based on a bunch of parameters and you can apply changes to those models in a simple programmatic fashion.
That's really cool. It enables amazing things like "in the 4 months after a park is built in a neighborhood, reduce weight of sims within a given radius if they have at least 5 hours of recreational time per week". You can watch individual people changing as a result of your policy decisions. That's incredible.
However, it looks like there was a miscommunication between teams working on it so LOD isn't accounted for. LOD means level of detail. The basic idea is that when you are on a huge city wide view, it's okay to use a simplified model with a lower polygon count since the player doesn't really care about individual characters' teeth or eye color at that distance. You want those details if you click their profile or are street level walking around but you kinda don't need it from an airplane.
That's the kind of thing that will melt graphics cards. Somebody just dropped the ball where both sides of the team assumed the other side would handle that. When development is rushed, it can be easy for a project manager to miss that kind of detail.
Let's just hope there's lots of other low hanging fruit like that.
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