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Cities: Skylines II

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Re: Cities: Skylines II

#251

Post by Renaud »

mlsu wrote: post #112
andrewfong wrote: post #75

I hope they get perf down. The first game runs great on my M1 until we get to around 100K residents or so. That's not a huge number of people for a real world city, but I guess simulating traffic + pathfinding for 100K+ actors is a dicey proposition CPU-wise. IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only simulating a subset of your populat…

Someone came over and asked what I was using the PC in the living room for. I told him -- it's the Cities Skylines Mainframe! If you have a spare desktop lying around, it really helps to do the simulation "in the cloud."

What do you mean exactly?

You run it on the desktop and remote play it using remote desktop or steam’s equivalent on your laptop?

I used to do that with my powerful desktop, leave it in my home office and remote play CS from the living room. Lag was good enough to play.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#252

Post by Renaud »

panick21_ wrote: post #231

I wanted to like Cities but I didn't. The main issue is that the way zoning is done is really damn bad. Like not even American cities are that bad, zoning at its very very worst. There is no reason why it should be possible to have a much more flexible and powerful zoning code. Having mix use zoning, exclusion zones and so on. Why can offices and high density building not be in the same place? I also dislike the road…

I think we get spoiled. CS came out 10 years ago. At the time, it kind of had to be a recognisable competitor to SimCity, which pioneered the zoning system we all somehow hate now.

I wish they will introduce mixed zoning but you have to bear in mind that these games are also meant to work on consoles, with limited UI complexity. So that could be a challenge to implement (or maybe it’s not).

Parking works. I haven’t played in a while, but I think the Traffic Manager mod is the one that allows you to see areas of the city where parking is needed (building appear red in the traffic view).

Bus routes can be complex, but real world ones are also complex. I’m not sure how this could be better handled. There are mods that give you more stats to help you make better decisions, like also show you where people are coming from and where they want to go, but it’s always going be a challenge.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#253

Post by db48x »

satvikpendem wrote: post #84
legitster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I similarly get bored of Skylines as soon as the game starts handing you near-infinite money. Making something aesthetically pleasing is only so interesting to me - I want the challenge of constraints. I actually have a similar problem with the Tropico remakes. Tropico 1 was hard . You could not survive a mission without dipping into the dictator toolsets. So striking a constant balance between economics and human ri…

You could use a game trainer to limit how much money you receive. I usually do the opposite since I hate grinding in a game for virtual money or points, feels like a waste of time for me as compared to working on something cool in the real world.

Cities: Skylines has that built in, actually. The more money you have saved up the lower your revenue from taxes is.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#254

Post by bakuninsbart »

sfcarrot wrote: post #163
satvikpendem wrote: post #83

I find it hilarious that EA had the concept down and just blew their opportunity with Simcity 2013 (always online (which by the way was actually not true, people cracked the online requirement within the first day or so), had to contract with other users for basic services like sewage and electricity), paving the way for competitors like Cities: Skylines to take the lead instead. This reminds me of the same thing tha…

EA is supposed to be pretty happy with its SimCity BuildIt as it is a new way of generating lots of revenue through micro-transactions and makes the balance sheets look better. Meanwhile, players are pretty happy with Paradox's real passion about how to build a better city simulation game. For what it is worth, it is a win-win-win for EA, players, and Paradox Interactive.

Especially recently, Paradox has a streak of publishing overpriced, unfinished, even broken games. I'd wager that the success of Cities Skylines lies more with the developer than the publisher, and hope hope hope that PDX stayed away as much as possible from CS2s development.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#255

Post by panick21_ »

Renaud wrote: post #252
panick21_ wrote: post #231

I wanted to like Cities but I didn't. The main issue is that the way zoning is done is really damn bad. Like not even American cities are that bad, zoning at its very very worst. There is no reason why it should be possible to have a much more flexible and powerful zoning code. Having mix use zoning, exclusion zones and so on. Why can offices and high density building not be in the same place? I also dislike the road…

I think we get spoiled. CS came out 10 years ago. At the time, it kind of had to be a recognisable competitor to SimCity, which pioneered the zoning system we all somehow hate now. I wish they will introduce mixed zoning but you have to bear in mind that these games are also meant to work on consoles, with limited UI complexity. So that could be a challenge to implement (or maybe it’s not). Parking works. I haven’t p…

I really don't think its that hard to make mixed zoning or exclusionary zoning work in terms of UI. A list where you can hit check boxes or not is most of what you need.

> Parking works.

Parking aren't even in the base game, and yeah you can add lots of mods I think overall the dynamics about parking, induced demand and traffic isn't that great.

> Bus routes can be complex, but real world ones are also complex. I’m not sure how this could be better handled.

Yeah I don't want my game to be as hard to manage as the real world.

It could be significantly easier to draw routes, modify them after you created it. The UI around that stuff I found really hard to work with.

It just feels like much more thought was put into car traffic then any of the others. The game could suggest service patterns to make it easier to get started. Give you good visualizations of where the routes are, make it easy to modify them.

I just found the whole experience of trying to make public transit work frustrating and to time consuming.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#257

Post by EricE »

tomalaci wrote: post #115

IMPORTANT: the trailer and the screenshots are not actual gameplay. There is essentially nothing of the gameplay. At best you could say it is concept being shown but... I mean, what more of a concept can you do than just making better iteration of the first game? Some people have also said they switched to Unreal Engine 5 but I have a hard time finding definitive source of that. It would be a major change since the o…

City Planner Plays initially speculated it was Unreal 5 because of the trailer but he has since retracted his video and issued a correction on his Youtube community tab that Paradox reached out and confirmed it's still based on Unity. Drat.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#259

Post by calsy »

pavlov wrote: post #235
calsy wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no proof the brand was destroyed by managerial greed. You also never said managerial greed, you said capitalist greed.. big difference. You mention capitalisms failures and destruction of ideas while public funding saved the day. Pointing out that a single government grant does not make a game industry or save ideas destroyed by capitalism is not projecting ideology.

Did you read the story of SimCity 2013 linked here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202 It seems pretty clear that this game was destroyed by EA management's poor decisions. They forced the game to require an active online connection primarily as an anti-piracy move, but then underfunded the development of the server-side functionality, so the servers were down for most buyers. For strategic reasons, they w…

A company attempting to prevent the theft of their product on a platform rampant with piracy is capitalist greed? Improving their share value by stopping the theft of their product is capitalist greed? How about they incompetently implemented anti-piracy measures and paid for it with consumer backlash?

PC gamers want to run games on a platform open to piracy, and call it greed when companies try to stop the theft of their own work.

...And where is the government in all this by the way? Anti-piracy laws seem to be grossly ineffective as it is so widespread. Companies have to protect their own work as government sits by idle.

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