My point wasn’t that anyone is comparing the games like-for-like. It’s blindingly obvious that Train Fever is an entirely different game compared to Skylines or even Cities In Motion.
My point was that making comparisons about how well Skylines runs, and how bad Train Fever may perform on your system (which you most definitely did), is a somewhat unfair comparison seeing as Train Fever attempts to push the limits of terrain detail, while Skylines specifically opts to take a conservative approach, and only allow a very low-res, blobby base terrain.
I absolutely think it was the right way for the Skylines devs to go… it allowed them to concentrate on pushing the city scale/population a lot more than if they’d been sharing massive resources with the terrain engine.
But Train Fever has a different focus – at its core, its a game about “you-versus-the-terrain”… especially when it comes to trains, they needed an incredibly detailed terrain engine otherwise building train lines would have felt farcical and simplistic.
Urban Games simply took on a much heavier technical challenge when it comes to performance. It does still need work, sure, but there’s also no point in making an example of another game that took a far more safe and simplistic approach and holding it up as a beacon of how game development *should* be done. I’m very glad Urban took on the extreme challenge they did, given that I have a system powerful enough to handle it without too many hitches.
