Cities Skylines is out and Urban Games should take notice

[FX2K]

My biggest gripe about this game (TF) is the poor performance and UI which makes it perform even worse.
Cities Skylines performs amazingly well, as did CIM2. I get 60+ FPS no matter what I do, fast fluid and very playable even with large populations and lots of moving parts.

In Train Fever, I get 15~25 fps mostly, with the occasional jump up to the mid 30’s so long as I dont do anything such as follow a train or open a PIP window, and have the zoom / angle just right.

The worst thing about the low fps for me is how it also lags the cursor, enough to make it feel unplayable.

I keep checking back but have not played properly since Jan, there has been very little improvement in these aspects of performance, even after the performance patches.

Gameplay wise, they are of course completely different, but until a version of train fever is released which actually performs ok (considering my PC spec’s are very high) then I doubt I will return to play it.
Oh and just for info, Paradox is a publisher, Cities skylines was made by a small studio Colossal Order with about 13 ppl iirc

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by FX2K.

[douglas]

For me the only problem of Train Fever is performance.

Colossal Order also had the same problem with CiM 1. They developed their own engine, great graphics, good modding support etc, but horrible performance.
I wish Urban Games would have learned with their mistake.

Please don’t try to re-invent the wheel, use Unity or something. If TF 2 could do the same with better performance would be amazing.

[DocSavageNDMF]

Is it safe to say that this developer doesn’t want 500K sales in the first week after release..?

C:S is a nice playing game, but not a particularly interesting game.

Even with limited industries I find the game play of TF much more compelling. I enjoy the actual game more for sure.

However, three things will prevent me from actually playing or supporting TF in future:

1. Performance issues
2. GUI issues.
3. Lack of DEV interest.

One of those things will also stop me from ever buying a game or DLC from this company, and it isn’t the performance or the GUI issues.

I guess we’ll all see which way Urban actually wants to go soon enough…

I hope they choose the way in which I can continue to give them my money.

Cheers..!

 

 

[douglas]

I’m talking about Cities in Motion. It didn’t sell 500K. Was a modest game, just like TF.

I bet you will keep buying anything they do, as long as its good. Same goes for numerous players of CiM 1 and 2, treating to not buy a game from CO ever ever, and just jumped in pre-order of CSL.
Its hard for small developers.

[grimdanfango]

Before being too critical of Train Fever in comparison with Cities Skylines consider this:

Skylines has an 18x18km map size (10×10 playable, with unlock mod), which has an overall base grid resolution of 1080×1080.  Divided down, that means each cell of the map is 16.666m.  (When playing, it appears to selectively refine where you build to create minor embankments and such, but the base terrain is still limited to that)

Train Fever by comparison, has a 16x16km map size (fully playable), which has an overall base grid resolution of (I believe) 16000×16000.  Divided down, that’s a cell size of 1m.  This means that for every single grid cell in Skylines, Train Fever fits in roughly 278x as much terrain detail!

Considering that, I’m still staggered that Train Fever runs as well as it does!  A 256-million-square piece of geometry is a hell of thing to get to display in realtime, and that’s not considering all the houses, roads, vehicles, people, etc.  I know they use some very clever streaming LOD tech to not literally display that many polys, but all the detail is there to be looked at when you want to, and I very rarely spot any hint of LOD pop-in while it does it.

I still think Train Fever is an incredible achievement, and I suspect I’ll still be coming back to it long after I’ve had my fill of Cities Skylines 🙂

[douglas]

Again, not talking about Cities Skylines, but CITIES IN MOTION.

Also, a game where you have to build one city (CSL) or a game where you build a urban mass transit system (CiM) definitely needs a much lower scale than a game where you have to build inter-city transport (TF).
Anyway, I never complained about the map size of TF.

If the detail is what brings TF such poor performance, then pls, remove details. Gameplay is far more important than details.

[isidoro]

And that resolution difference is very noticeable.  In Skylines, the scene is somewhat “cartoonish” and lacks the details of Train Fever.

[simonmd]

LMAO, I see the art of not being able to read and jumping to conclusions hasn’t faded in the past week.

Let me be clear, I NEVER compared the two games, I’m comparing the way they were developed and launched. They are NOT in direct competition with each other, one is a city builder, the other a transport system/model trainset sim. However, they are similar enough to be of interest to the average Train Fever player, hence my original post.

It’s a simple fact that Cities Skylines has had a HUGELY successful launch with extremely high reviews from professional sources and customers alike.  I have been playing this like a *******er over the past 7 days and can tell you from first hand experience, (NOT SOME TF FANBOY like some of the comments here who are downright stupid enough to think it’s CIM with citybuilding), that is is a superb game, feeling polished and well thought out. Is it perfect? No, there are a few bugs but even if it was never patched, it would still be playable and enjoyable.

So, to clear this up, NO it isn’t CIM3, its a totally diffent and brand new game engine for one so anyone who says its a ‘warmed up CIM2’ is an idiot. It’s basically what SimCity 2013 should have been and quite simply, the best citysim since Simcity4 back in the early 2000s.

Anyway, my original post was aimed squarely at Urban Games, to tell them that they could learn a lot about customer relations, game development and launch. Colossal Order and Parradox have handled it superbly, other developers / publishers who don’t take notice, do so at their peril.

I would never compare these two games directly, to do so would insult Cities Skylines. Nuff Said.

[Azrael]

Omg,

Colossal Order has made some games before C:S, it’s not their first title, TF is the First title of Urban Games and Urban Games doesn’t have such a powerful Publisher on their side like Colossal with Paradox.
Remember Paradox? They’re those guys who make f**kin millions of money with titles like EU IV, CK II, HoI 3, Victoria II etc etc.

So they alrdy have knowhow and more importantly much more cash at their hand to develop games and take your time, Urban Games hadn’t that much cash on their hands, otherwise they wouldn’t have started with a dev team of somewhat 5 guys.

So you can’t compare the two, the only more bizarre comparisons you could make are Urban Games vs. EA and Urban Games vs. Ubisoft or in RL Terms the State of San Marino vs the United States!

So the only comparable things are the games itself.
What could Urban Games learn from C:S? The Simulation code, the game runs smoothly on 70k Citizens, thats impressive and TF could flourish from this, if they could manage to bring this code into TF or a possible TF 2, more immersion because the Cities have real numbers, not a number divided down by 100.

And what could Colossal learn from TF?
1) The Traffic AI is ridicoulously bad in C:S. We’ve got highways with 3 free lanes and the AI-cars are waiting in a line with 2 free lanes to chose but no they wait patiently.
And then you build a subway and bus lanes to get the traffic away from the streets and from the 33.000 people in your city only  1200 consider taking them and the rest still wants to wait in the traffic jam.
Are you fucking serious?
2) Mass Transit Management, TF has the clear advantage here.
3) Game Difficulty. You know why C:S is so popular? Being better than Sim City 4 or anything else in that Genre isn’t the only factor here, it is incredibly easy.
You build a few streets, electricity and water and you’re good to go, as soon as you hit a certain threshold of citizens, and the threshold is incredibly low, around 500 or something, you gain money, no matter what you do and expanding the city is as easy as stealing candy from babies.
And thats the problem of the game, although, the hyped masses don’t recognize it yet.
The game is a fucking no brainer and no one wants a no brainer.
The gamers want at least a little challenge and C:S poses no challenge where as Train Fever poses this challenge.
In Medium Difficulty it proves to be a reasonable challenge, on hard it is really hard.

So, if a game has a mixed review on steam like TF has, this is not a bad sign. More in the contrary, this is a quality mark, because Todays gamer is a f*cking lazy id*ot, who want’s no challenge and runs around with cheats in FPS games.

So to finish this.
If you don’t like this game or the devs for reasonable points, it’s your right to express those points on the forums.
But don’t express unreasonable points and silly comparisons on the forums, that helps no one.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by Azrael.

[Pasi]

LOL to what he ^^ said.

Traffic AI might be poor in CS but at least the cars use all lanes and overtake the slower ones unlike in TF. So nothing to learn from UG there.

Easiness… Well, both game are incredibly easy on easy difficulty which is good. Not everyone wants all the time big challenge. But try hard mode on CS, not as easy as TF on hard… So they both offer variety of challenge for people who want that.

 

Mass transit management… Well, CS is not about traffic management. CIM and CIM2 are, and they do it better than TF.

Again what UG could learn from Colossal Order is the constant communication with the customers. At the moment Mikael takes some effort to help on support area but they don’t give a flying f… about other stuff, like wishlists, updates on patch progress etc.

You Azreal need to also check how Publisher / developer relationship works…

Agreed, UG is a small team, which is exactly why they should be more on the ball. Difficult, yes with limited time, but mandatory to make the impression and to establish good brand and business. That’s what Colossal order knew from day one when they were known only for CIM.

 

[grimdanfango]

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.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by grimdanfango.

[Azrael]

So if you think, TF is bad, why you bother then and still post here?

I play TF and C:S and it is the other way round, the Traffic in C:S is horribly bad, in TF it runs smoothly so obviously we don’t play the same game or you’re telling us bs.
They don’t use all lanes, I’ve built a city highway in my city in C:S from one end of the city to the other and there are several wide alternative routes.
But they all wait patiently on one lane in an artificial traffic jam on the highway.

I don’t know about CiM 1 and 2, but I can’t imagine, how you could do it worse than in TF which doesn’t mean, that the Public Transport in TF is bad.

You complain about a lack of communication? Are you on drugs or what?
They communicate in a reasonable matter of time, One of the devs himself personally communicates in the forums on a regular basis.
And that “they don’t give a fuck about our wishes” is so horribly wrong, obviously you’re not a buyer of the first hour.
Many wishes of the community got fulfilled, for example smaller savefiles, waypoints, upgradeable tracks, the whole Upgrademechanic for trains and vehicles, the USA DLC and it is for free!!!

So, Pasi, stop writing Colossal Order Fanboy shit and telling crap about UG, they’re on the ball and they do it good, compare Train Fever from Release date to Train Fever what it is now, it has improved hugely in cooperation with the community and it will do so in the future.

[Pasi]

I think everyone who reads these forums can see what the level of communcation is and who is the fanboy and who is not.

But for your information, i got 360 hours in TF from the day 1. How about you?

Edit> Yeah, compare TF from day one and what it is now and list exactly how many things from community has been added. Like automatic replace. And what else?

TF on the day one was something what should not have been released, it’s even now a working alpha, ready to go to beta stage in real terms. Nothing can change that fact when you consider it as a product without any emotions attached to it. That’s why it is much nicer to be a non fan to any product, it gives you more perspective to things.

And the traffic in CS seems to use all lanes in my cities so don’t know what you are on about. In some specifc slip roads it queues up to one lane only but soon after that splits to all available lanes. But that’s hardly an issue compared to preset routes on 4 lane road where bus can’t over take slower lorry in TF because it follows the set line. And if you remember, traffic was horribly bad on TF too when it launched and has beeen improved on patches.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by Pasi.

[Pasi]

But the point isn’t comparing 2 different products. It is about how publicity is done and that is something where UG seriously need to pick up.

[simonmd]

It does NOT take money and a large publisher to have good public relations and customer support. If you don’t believe me, take a look at EA!

WHEN was the last time you saw a member of UG help anyone on here? Colossal order is a team of NINE people, don’t believe all the hype, just because youre small, doesn’t give you an excuse to STEAL MONEY by selling a game as a finished product when you KNOW its still basically early access. I could forgive UG that if they at least TRIED to appear as if they gave a shit, but they don’t. All we get is half assed attempts at patches and a DLC that was mostly made by outside people to keep the sheep happy.

Six months + since launch and this game STILL runs like shit, is full of bugs and has no support. Colossal order managed to release a game that is silky smooth and only has a few minor bugs from day 1. I have a city of over 130,000 people running on my PC without a SINGLE stutter, EVER (and I mean, EVER) with at least 30fps all the time. TF barely runs now with 10,000 people and stops every month to update as well as a full 10sec pause every year to save. In 2015 this is shockingly bad. I paid my money, a similar amount to what Skylines cost, so I expect either the game ot work AS ADVERTISED or at the very least, some support from the devs. I get neither. All it takes is ONE person to sit down once a week, and help a few people on the forum, but what do we get? SILENCE. That has nothing to with being a small developer, that is because they couldn’t give a shit because they have our money. Those that don’t agree, please pay me money for doing fuck all as well please, oh and don’t whine when I retire on the proceeds.

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