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paavohtl's blog
Personal blog · blog.paavo.meprogramminggames
paavohtl's blog is a personal blog at blog.paavo.me about programming and games. Since 2021, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Paavo's posts on Cities: Skylines 2 performance, covering problems like NPC models with teeth, missing LODs and weak culling. HN threads on the game's launch and rendering costs cite them as the technical explanation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-11-05
- Trying and failing to optimize frustum culling in a WebGL and TS and Rust engine2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-02
- What was Radiant AI, anyway?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-07
What Hacker News says?
> without having the 'every NPC has 10k-poly teeth in their mouth' problem that's currently sabotaging Cities Skylines 2's performance Sad to see an otherwise good comment end with a misconception. The problems with the performance is much grander than just "teeth rendered but not visible" ( https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/ ), although I guess it's a illustrative point. Missing LODs and lack of c…
Comment linking /cities-skylines-2-performance/
on “Northlight makes Alan Wake 2 shine”Submitted What was Radiant AI, anyway? as a story · 234 points
HN discussionI'm the author of said technical analysis! ( https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/ ) But yes, at launch Cities Skylines 2 was very heavily GPU bound, due to very unoptimized meshes and a poor culling implementation. I haven't profiled it afterwards, but from what I've read they've optimized it enough that on most systems the limiting factor is now the CPU.
Comment linking /cities-skylines-2-performance/
on “SimCity 3k in 4k”Submitted Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly as a story · 52 points
HN discussionFor anybody else reading this and thinking (like I did) that these comments about teeth are a deliberately silly example invented for the purpose of this discussion - it turns out that Cities Skylines 2 really did have NPCs with teeth in their models, per this[1] story from up the thread. 1: https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/
Comment linking /cities-skylines-2-performance/
on “Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'”Submitted Bypassing early 2000s copy protection for software preservation as a story · 7 points
HN discussion"Unfortunately a lot of the graphics-related issues are indirectly caused by the game’s use of DOTS" "The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in the…
Comment linking /cities-skylines-2-performance
on “Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'”Submitted Rendering large 3D tilemaps with a single draw call at 3000 FPS as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons. The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants…
Comment linking /radiant-ai/
on “Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)”Submitted Trying and mostly failing to optimize frustum culling as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/
Comment linking /cities-skylines-2-performance/
on “Cities: Skylines 2's troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard”Submitted Trying and failing to optimize frustum culling in a WebGL and TS and Rust engine as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted 1000 Days in 32:9 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rendering large 3D tilemaps with a single draw call at 3000 FPS as a story · 1 points
HN discussion