[bob1029]

> The engine lacked occlusion culling and relied on high-resolution shadow maps, causing “an innumerable number of draw calls”.

The engine does not lack or cause these things. The fact that the developers chose the HDRP pipeline for this game should be the most obvious dead bird in the entire coal mine. These games should be running on URP without question. We don't need advanced lighting systems in a top down city builder.

If we want an art workflow that allows artists to shit arbitrary content into the editor without thinking, we should probably reach for Unreal and flip on TAA like everyone else is doing.

[Tadpole9181]

> We don't need advanced lighting systems in a top down city builder.

You don't need a lot of things. The developers wanted the game to look better than the first, so went with HDRP because it claims to be a production ready pipeline that helps them achieve that.

But it was not and the developers did not have the time, or perhaps skill, to work around it's issues.

> we should probably reach for Unreal and flip on TAA like everyone else is doing.

First of all: "Just ask the entire studio to throw out all existing work and retrain staff to change their engine."

Second of all: Do you mean DLSS? TAA is an AA technique, it does not improve performance.

Third of all: Unreal? The engine notoriously ragged on as dragging down the performance of countless games in the last 2 years because it too has features that are easy to turn on and look good, but require skill and knowledge to fine-tune to be reasonably performant? That Unreal?

[TylerE]

Cities skyline is not top down. It’s a fully three d environment

[wongarsu]

But you are rarely looking at it from street level, you spend most of your time in a birds-eye view

I guess you could argue that top down should be defined narrower than that, but the steam tag Top Down is full of games like this [1]

1: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Top-Down/

[bcye]

Detailers spend a lot of time in 3D perspectives and zoomed in close so I don't think that this is generally true.

[TylerE]

Honestly the gameplay is so shallow I'd spend my time zoomed in too. Talk about a series where every release went down hill. The original Cities in Motion was the best of the 4.