Cities Skylines 2 Dev Addresses Character Teeth Controversy

ign.com:

The developer of Cities Skylines 2 has addressed a rumour that in-game teeth are causing performance issues with the game.

A reddit post that went viral this week suggested the city builder renders individual teeth for each of the thousands of people who walk around your city — despite the fact the player cannot see them.

Redditor Hexcoder0 found roughly 1,000 characters, including these “invisible teeth”, were drawn multiple times for the camera, and another time for the shadows, but without any LODs (level of detail), a technique that reduces the number of GPU operations required to render distant meshes.

apparently one of cities skylines 2's many performance issues is that it uses high poly models for each of the thousands of people walking around your city. including their individual teeth pic.twitter.com/r23mTY6kV2

“I just wanted to post about the teeth because it's kinda funny and represents at least some missed performance,” Hexcoder0 said.

While Cities Skylines 2 does suffer significant performance issues — indeed it was something developer Colossal Order felt compelled to warn players about ahead of launch — Colossal Order denied biting off more than it could chew when it came to the little people’s teeth.

In a statement issued to IGN, Colossal Order said Cities Skylines 2’s “lifepath” feature, which describes the major events in citizens’ lives, is not tied to the geometry of the characters and thus does not affect the performance of the characters. However, Colossal Order admitted Cities Skylines 2’s characters “require further work”, and confirmed they are currently missing their LODs, “which affect some parts of performance.”

Here’s the statement in full:

Based on this statement, it seems that the lack of LODs on