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Cities: Skylines II [video]

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Re: Cities: Skylines II [video]

#41

My main gripe with the original game was that it wasn't possible to create walkable or cyclable cities. The only way to build anything is to have a road (as in, a road with lots of cars). So mechanically your cities are car centric, which isn't qui the cities I'd like to build. As far as I can tell, there are no bicycles in that trailer which leaves me little hope. I'm sure someone will reply about whatever mod that…

A related gap that I felt when playing the base game a few years ago was around ability to reclaim land and evolve a city over time [1]. CS (like SimCity) gave great tools for greenfield development, but I never felt like I could do things like what happens in a real city, where:

- A street is widened to accommodate new transit or bike lanes, but by buying back people's yards rather than by demolishing and rebuilding a whole neighbourhood.

- Zoning changes permit former-bungalows to have second stories built on them, or similar small-scale densifications like encouraging duplexing of existing structures.

- Old factory buildings are converted into trendy lofts.

- A house that burns down is converted into a pocket park.

And I guess worst of all, I never felt rewarded for planning this kind of thing ahead, though maybe I just wasn't doing it right.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_House

Re: Cities: Skylines II [video]

#45

I'm a bit underwhelmed. There are tons of QoL changes, but afaict there is little innovation. I would've expected at least a not grid-based zoning so that buildings on curves look more natural. All these empty pieces of land in between buildings look really bad and kind of force us to make grid cities. And that is not even an innovation, it was already present in the SimCity series. But some procedurally generated bu…

Its hard to make assets that would work with every curve. When you see screenshots of nice cities like this, people are using mods to hand place assets with them clipping into each other to make a unified wall of buildings along the curve or corner.

Re: Cities: Skylines II [video]

#46

I just hope they intergrate QOL features so you aren't forced to use a ton of mods to be able to build out cities efficiently.

It's a paradox game, expect it to be missing a ton of content only available post-launch in 20+ expensive DLCs. Get a better business model Paradox, please consider condensing your DLCs into the base game eventually.

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Re: Cities: Skylines II [video]

#49

There's so much to learn from how CS1 was built and supported mods. But it's hard to tell from the trailer what kind of technical changes have been made. The rendering looks really nice. Is it URP, HDRP, their own pipeline? Unity has had an ECS framework under development for almost 5 years now, which could be a great fit for what this game is. Or maybe Colossal Order has engineered something similar, like Photon did…

"Under development" is the operating word here, DOTS is very much still strongly experimental. The development workflow is chaotic and best practices unclear, somehow even more so than the regular workflow. And even more errors now crash the editor.

Re: Cities: Skylines II [video]

#50

I'm a bit underwhelmed. There are tons of QoL changes, but afaict there is little innovation. I would've expected at least a not grid-based zoning so that buildings on curves look more natural. All these empty pieces of land in between buildings look really bad and kind of force us to make grid cities. And that is not even an innovation, it was already present in the SimCity series. But some procedurally generated bu…

Its hard to make assets that would work with every curve. When you see screenshots of nice cities like this, people are using mods to hand place assets with them clipping into each other to make a unified wall of buildings along the curve or corner.

The houses themselves don't have to be curved - but if the zoning around a curve (or non 90 degree angle) could be filled in completely, that'd be nice. Triangular buildings or similar shapes could help. For detached housing, it still might look OK (although a bit weird), but for buildings that are supposed to connect with each other (which is something you see a lot at least in European cities), placing these on a curve and having empty spaces between them just looks bad. The building itself could still have straight walls - with angles other than 90 degrees and then a little bit of auto-filling plaza this could work.

I know it's a hard problem to solve. Personally, this is what makes C:S 1 unable to create natural looking cities. Cities aren't all grids or detached housing.

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