Cities: Skylines 2 launched with performance problems, which isn’t entirely unheard of. Now, though, it’s been suggested that the game’s framerate issues may be down, at least in part, to NPCs’ teeth.
Some Reddit-based city builders think they’ve found the root of the cause for the performance issues, suggesting part of it could be down to the way the game renders its citizens’ chompers. Reddit has been wrong before but between the multiple Cities: Skylines 2 threads, there seems to be some degree of tooth, er, truth to the matter. “The game DOES render individual teeth with no LOD as far as I can tell,” explains one Redditor.
Normally, LOD or level-of-detail means that characters are rendered in less detail the further away they are. However, it appears that Cities: Skylines 2 characters are being rendered in perfect detail, right down to their teeth, no matter how far they are away.
Can you see an NPC’s teeth if they’re so far away they’re practically ant-sized? No, but if Reddit is on the money, the game is still rendering their teeth, molar by molar. This, in turn, takes processing power, which could account for some of the slowdown.
Another Reddit thread expands upon this theory, suggesting that the unusually detailed NPCs are down to the game’s use of procedurally generated assets. Reddit user MattyKane12 suggests that “The main issue here is the assets generated with procedural generation tools seemingly were not optimized for the game.”
Colossal Order’s own dev diary confirms they did use a tool known as Popul8 to create their game’s citizens. Their goal was to create a populace that was suitably diverse, so you wouldn’t just have six identical NPCs waiting for a bus.
We don’t know for sure that the level of NPC detail, teeth and all, is responsible for all the game’s performance problems. But some people have reported an increase in frame rate from meddling around with the way the game renders its citizens.
Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order have yet to comment on the matter. If the FPS problems in Cities: Skylines 2 are down to NPCs’ pearly whites, there could be a lot of dental work in their collective futures.
Update: Following the publication of the above article, Paradox and Colossal Order reached out to The Escapist with the following statement, which denies teeth are part of the game’s performance problem. You can read the statement below. The article appears as it was originally published above.
Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters.
We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets. Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project.
For more details on Citizens, Lifepath, and more, our developer diaries are here.
