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, 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was not familiar with the teeth thing. Link for the lazy:
https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-addresses...
This seems like the logical explanation, it still doesn't run that great even on GeForce Now
> Does this look nice to you?
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.
>naive
Opinions be like
"You disagree with me so I can label you in a negative light"
> You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature
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.
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.
I find it comforting to be reminded that when this little experiment ends, Nature is still vigorous enough to take back over.
If the clean lines we laid down were persistent, I'd worry we'd planted the seed of something poorly thought out yet permanent.
Nah, look at the second set of photos. It’s more lived-in, not all the way apocalyptic. The first photo looks like a render from an architect.
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.
I had the same reaction. Like, add these effects for when your city simulation is simulating what happens when your city is being neglected.
Based citybuilder
> 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
That's exactly what a city is though.
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
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.
Metropolis 1998 seems to understand this. Very excited for it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
Looks like Transport Tycoon
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I had an argument at one point, honest!
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.
I booted Cities: Skylines II and opened HN to scroll while it loaded up, and the first headline I see is this ;-;
If we define soul as the visual artifacts of the history of the people involved then our search for perfection is going to leave us miserable.
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.
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.
In the past “why don’t games look like my mockup??” was annoying, but at least required some effort / talent. We didn’t know how good we had it.
So basically we just need to make it more realistic. I agree.
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.
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.
Decent? I couldn't quit the game and finished my first (and only) run at 5am.
It's truly amazing. It integrated with my ten year old Alienware keyboard and made the lighting ice blue during a snow storm.
Also the paths in the snow that are gradually disappearing when left unused.
Another reason SimCity 4 is still be best one of these to be made.
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.
i think he's saying that you can't add the soul, and that soul can't be boiled down to "the graphics are uninteresting".
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.
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.