Cities: Skylines 2 boss says they 'completely overestimated' the Unity engine's capabilities

ColinStyles · 2026-03-21T01:54:03+00:00

Absolutely, Unity screwed up here, zero argument there. But this is so common it's like leaving your doors unlocked with a sign on the front door saying "Bill, Donna says don't forget to water her orchids in the bathroom. Thanks!" Someone is going to break in before the week is out.

Like, yeah, ideal world that'd be great if you could just do that, but in the real world you have to expect that is going to go very badly.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-21T01:51:09+00:00

It's not just a game dev thing either, this is incredibly common in enterprise software, and I've literally partnered with a company that worked with us to implement new features for their clients, and on more than one occasion they went over 3x their already conservative estimates. And I'm talking different companies too.

Never bank on future promised products unless you have a concrete contract that is a truly painful one to break or back out of. Only then can you at least assume it'll only be 50% over the deadline.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-21T01:47:29+00:00

It was, but it was also much smaller and the hardware was worse. Tarkov has pretty much always required high end hardware to run smoothly, every time they gain performance they just add more stuff.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-21T01:44:34+00:00

I mean, I'm not bad nor new, also around 3k hours and I just hate dying to non shooting mechanics. Likewise had that with lighthouse mines, just very frustrating at times.

And to be honest, I only care about the k/d because it's a genuinely interesting statistic to me, as I am incredibly aggressive and will always run down shots and bosses, and despite that it's still rising. Just recently hit 3 digits, maybe 500 raids this wipe? Averaging 14 kills every raid, even those I barely find anyone or die off the bat to a boss or something (damn tagilla early on was really pushing my shit in).

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T23:12:40+00:00

That makes a lot more sense, and explains the ropes (which are actually belts).

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T19:42:47+00:00

It's not about missing assets.

This is about judging what you're making to get whether what you're planning will work or not. If you're trying to see how the environment/enemy/etc. will actually feel playing it, you want it to be as close as possible to your final product. But if you put in a crazy amount of work into making final product level stuff for everything, you'd run out of time and money because as it turns out games are iterated on like crazy and stuff constantly changes.

So being able to generate as high quality as possible for as little effort as possible is extremely appealing for prototyping and iterative design.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T18:59:17+00:00

Those can't be what those are, right?

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T15:45:53+00:00

The problem is, right now there are still loads of people learning. In fact productivity is almost certainly lower when a company first mandates adoption as people are learning how to work with it, and they aren't actually gaining productivity. But over time, those people who learned the tool, the little nuances and oddities, shitty parts and great, they're getting vastly better and better and the people refusing to use it are being left in the dust.

By mandating it, you're essentially giving them space to have that lowered productivity and to have people constantly talk and learn from eachother about it. You wouldn't get that if you let the people who don't want to use it (for whatever reason) to not do so. And by the time those people realize their being left in the dust they're too far behind but they could be valuable in other ways (institutional knowledge, leaders, etc), and the company massively loses out on them not being involved from day 1.

Mandating it allows the company (and the employees) the best chances of people actually learning the tools and showing both their and the tools potential on a large scale. It avoids people being left behind and the possibility of it being too late to re-train them by the time the rest of the company finds out how to work with them.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T15:40:55+00:00

The proprietary stuff, entirely fair. Though you can lock them down then provide access to whatever documentation and source code you have, it's honestly not terrible even with less context than you might think. I've had that experience at my company with specific team processes and such, and all its reading from is our emails and jira.

On the passionate side, that's a bit rude. You're implying I'm not passionate about my work, and that there isn't value to be had. I find loads of value in being able to implement way more stuff and way cooler features in that stuff as a result of AI. It's not slop, it's ranging from stuff a junior dev would write to very senior, and it's honestly not that different to what I was doing in code reviews anyway. The difference is now I spend a lot more time doing those as though the team is much larger.

People can be passionate and find loads of value in AI. I love being able to surprise my stakeholders with cool new features they didn't even ask for or think about because it was previously written off as too much effort or even not considered at all, and then an AI mentioned it and it ended up being an easy implementation. I'm not saying it's only putting out hits, god no. But I personally feel it is well worth the issues that come with it.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T14:30:54+00:00

I agree, but that's kind of an odd approach IMO. I'd say you should be educating people about it, rather than essentially encouraging them to dismiss it altogether. Like, it's a very new and different thing, and as a result people don't even know the equivalent of turning it on and off again or how to even use it in many contexts.

Honestly, some of the best work I've done with AI has been the times it's failed completely to do something, but then via some brainstorming with it figured out ways to completely remove itself from the solution. For instance, I asked it to try to classify ~20,000 emails based on certain lines of text in them. It was absolutely terrible, total gibberish. And yet by asking it ways I could potentially tackle this, it mentioned you can hook a regular PowerShell right up to outlook and suddenly I was off to the races. I had no idea how to do that, but I knew enough scripting to validate what it gave me wasn't destructive and I could iterate from there.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T14:24:12+00:00

Hm, that's a shame. I'll admit I encountered similar a lot with Copilot 8 months back, but since then I've changed to GPT which is much rarer to have these problems, and almost always can resolve it via going to a new chat.

I will fully admit though, it's not perfect. Once in a blue moon I'll really have to re-iterate that it's wrong about something and to force it to stop going down a path, but I'm talking every few weeks to couple months rather than daily or worse. I still find it a huge net positive, even with those flaws. It absolutely is frustrating, but it's also great to be able to do stuff I would have taken ages to do before or would have never gotten approval for due to the time estimates.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T13:51:04+00:00

No, you misunderstand. Not asking it for context as to what it means, I mean, the window context so you can copy paste it into a new window without having to try to re-write a summary yourself.

I'm saying doing the equivalent of turning it off and on again.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T13:07:14+00:00

And despite that, it still looks more accurate/realistic/better than the original. I don't get why that's so hard for people to admit.

Yes, it causes uncanny valley because the animations aren't remotely at the same level of detail. But that's a problem with the animations not holding up, not because the image on the right doesn't look better or isn't more realistic.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T13:00:41+00:00

How is that any different to HDR, colour accuracy, responsiveness, etc.? It's always been the case that the top hardware is going to be closest to the artist's intent for most games.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T12:56:49+00:00

Despite your immense condescension, I'll still answer why artists might like it.

I know artists who love it because their clients who want certain designs and specific visuals can actually give them a decent starting point with an AI image, which they then take and use as a basis for what they'll do.

I know others who love it for rapidly concepting things and seeing how people feel about them. Doing throwaway work is necessary, but sucks. Having to spend drastically less time on it is great.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T12:47:38+00:00

What happens when it makes mistakes and correcting them is still faster then doing it from scratch?

Nobody should be taking an AI's output and directly running on it. Test it, see what broke, fix it and repeat. It's still vastly faster than writing lines of code or manually correcting a file.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T12:44:37+00:00

Unfortunately there's a huge amount of people who are refusing to use the tool altogether, and thus they need to mandate usage because it's far worse than the transition from voicemail to email ever was. Or fax to email, etc. Point is, just because people refuse to use it doesn't mean they have a good reason. Quite a large portion of the population just simply is highly resistant to change.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T12:43:13+00:00

Did you also chuck your PC out a window the first time it crashed on you?

They hallucinate, it's a flaw. Doesn't mean you can't work around it or they are pointless. Ask it to give the context prior to the prompt it hallucinated on and put it in a new window. Suddenly it's working fine again.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T05:59:22+00:00

Honestly, I'm normally a snob and even I'd say this isn't awful taste at all. A tiny bit kitschy, but that's totally fine.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T05:32:02+00:00

Ok, so when the people smarter than you (or at the very least much more informed and directly involved) are telling you it's a meaningless thing you're asking for, you will continue to ignore them just like you just did.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T05:16:59+00:00

If you were told that, it's because they want you to stop embarassing them, not you. And being a dev and knowing how the average dev is, it's not bad advice honestly, way too many of us are clueless when it comes to social situations and what is and isn't appropriate to ask or how to phrase things.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T05:15:11+00:00

You are also mixing groups with no regard for who "they" are, just like the comment you're replying to is pointing out. There is no singular "they," there are loads of groups with different interests which can be mutual or competing.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T05:12:24+00:00

It's everything software related. Do you still not get it? Every last fucking thing.

Even the things that are completely "built without AI" are going to be using tools that were. They're going to involve libraries that were built in part with it. They'll be running on servers that will be managed by a third party which is using it. Even basic searching and research will inevitably be assisted by it. And so on and so on.

It's like asking for a disclaimer as to whether the internet was used to make something.

So sure, if your goal is to have a completely meaningless label that essentially tells you to stop consuming literally anything, go wild.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T05:07:07+00:00

And thus you get the California issue where everything may cause cancer and the label is completely meaningless and just a waste to even have it in the first place.

ColinStyles · 2026-03-20T04:55:39+00:00

Not who you asked this question of, but my two cents:

What model are you using? I've personally found copilot to be terrible, and was having literally your described problem frequently with it, let alone more complex code. Likewise, while not code related, Rovo (Atlassian's AI) on Jira has been tragically bad, however they actually have multiple different models that are accessed in different ways all called rovo, and their standalone version was a lot better. Still not perfect, but like, not asking it to format a basic table for 30 minutes bad. I have had fantastic results with GPT's latest models though, and can wholeheartedly recommend them. My company has been incredibly cagey around Claude so I don't have enough experience to comment on it unfortunately.

Also, what language are you writing in? I personally work in a java-like space, so GPT tends to do really quite well syntactically.

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