City-building simulation Cities: Skylines 2 has recently faced much criticism for its less-than-ideal performance. Many users have suggested that rendering the minutely detailed teeth of the game’s citizenry might be the root of the problem. This speculation, however, has been strongly contested by the developers of the game, Colossal Order.
An intriguing assumption was shared on Reddit, suggesting that the detailed digital dentition in Skylines 2 was taxing the game, causing it to stutter and lag. The theory was that the absence of LOD (Level of Detail) implementation for the teeth details was resulting in sluggish frame rates. The fuzziness that usually happens with far-off objects in games is the work of LOD, which reduces model quality at a distance to save resources. The lack of this feature for the in-game characters' teeth seemed plausible enough to be blamed.
However, Colossal Order chose to dismiss this particular critique as a "bizarre story." According to them, the citizen lifepath feature, which tracks the lives of the in-game characters through key events, is completely independent of the citizen's geometry. This means the appearance and physical attributes of a citizen do not impact performance measures. The developers are aware that the characters need refinement, and admit that models do lack their respective LODs, causing some performance issues. This issue is on their to-do list, promising improvements across all game assets.
The characters in Cities: Skylines 2 are detailed, even in aspects that might seem unnecessary now. Colossal Order assures that these details will have relevance in future developmental stages of the project. While the absence of LODs isn't beneficial for performance, the case of high-resolution teeth doesn't exactly mean an oversight. They're part of a better, more polished future plan for the game.
The digital dentistry theory may have been spurred on by the belief that the citizen lifepath feature was overwhelming the processing units by managing excessive physical attributes of the characters. This constant updating of tiny teeth growing into larger ones was supposedly resulting in lower performance. Despite admitting that the missing LODs for the characters' in-game models weren't doing any favors for the performance, the developers assure that these details are there for a concrete, future purpose.
Even if these detailed tiny teeth were causing a dent in the game’s performance, the issues with Cities: Skylines 2 don’t start or end there. Performance lags are evident even in the initial stages of the game, even before any cities are constructed.
Colossal Order has begun addressing these issues, with performance patches already being distributed. However, it will take a considerable amount of work and several more updates before the game can reach a level where it can be comfortably played as intended. As for now, the developers have assured players that detailed dental work is off their checklist for now. It seems that the teeth theory is something the developers can firmly put a bite on.
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