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.