Cities: Skylines II • Hacker News Board

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#71

Post by em-bee » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

YesBox wrote: post #67

em-bee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i like that idea. i would enjoy watching what i built. taking this as a springboard for a feature discussion: many sim games suffer from needing to build american style car centric cities. how is your approach here? could we build historical european cities? futuristic car-free ones? public transport like trams? separate bike paths?

I'd love to fulfill all of those options, and I plan to, but I dont think I will have them all available in the first release build. I'm the only developer working on the game, and the only other person I work with is the pixel artist. So expect cars and sidewalks. Pedestrian-only walk ways should be possible in the first release.

i am obviously not expecting miracles here, more wondering in which direction you want to go, and if those ideas fit your goals.

found it on Steam. added to my wishlist. will also check out early access...

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#72

Post by em-bee » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:03 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #61

leeter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how much they'll pull over from the existing DLCs, the Plazas and Promenades pack does allow for pedestrian cities. But not in a European sense despite the dev being in Europe.

We could even begin with a concept of mixed zoning that's so standard in many world cities. The usual "stores on the street, apartments above" design. (I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation between commercial and residental areas).

but that's the issue. most sims are designed after american cities

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#73

Post by cwkoss » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:06 PM UTC

i-am-gizm0 wrote: post #28

cwkoss wrote: post #10

Anyone able to read between the lines and see what features will be coming?

The only thing I got from the trailer would be ray-traced graphics and the description suggests that actions have more consequences which I read as bulldozing peoples houses makes people really mad at you and things like that

Would be super cool if citizens had stories and lives, more like dwarf fortress dwarves.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#74

Post by dwringer » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:15 PM UTC

Imnimo wrote: post #59

haunter wrote: post #12

One of my favorite mod in Skylines that you can import _real world_ terrain maps into the game. Building your own city but better is a good fun (and challenge!) https://terrain.party/ Hope this will work in the sequel too

I spent so many hours hunting for cool bits of real world terrain and then massaging them into playable scenarios for myself (it's a lot of work to smooth out artifacts in the data and then add functioning water, vegetation, initial road connections, etc.). I don't know what the licensing concerns for the elevation data and maps would be, but I hope they consider integrating this functionality directly into the game…

You can get heightmaps from NASA's SRTM data without any licensing concerns at all, and they can be used in Cities Skylines (without mods) without any problem (provided you put the heightmap into the right file format). This was pretty much always possible, it's just been a lot of steps and sort of a hassle without projects like that facilitating the process for people.

It would be incredible to have a globe viewer/DEM download tool built in to the game, but the bandwith required for hosting the project might turn into an issue (I'm reminded of the situation with high res imagery for Command: Modern Operations/TacView, where users are strongly encouraged to download only what they need due to server constraints).

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#75

Post by andrewfong » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:23 PM UTC

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 population. Which honestly seems acceptable to me.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#76

Post by MagicMoonlight » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

I'm looking forward to another soulless paradox game where the core mechanics are really stupid e.g all people who move in are born at the same time and will die at the same time so 90% of your city will instantly die in a year

And then they'll want £400 from you for DLCs while still not adding to any of the core mechanics

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#77

Post by dzogchen » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:35 PM UTC

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #76

I'm looking forward to another soulless paradox game where the core mechanics are really stupid e.g all people who move in are born at the same time and will die at the same time so 90% of your city will instantly die in a year And then they'll want £400 from you for DLCs while still not adding to any of the core mechanics

And don't forget you can only build car-dependent cities, not the kind of cities you will find in Europe or Japan.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#78

Post by graypegg » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:36 PM UTC

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #76

I'm looking forward to another soulless paradox game where the core mechanics are really stupid e.g all people who move in are born at the same time and will die at the same time so 90% of your city will instantly die in a year And then they'll want £400 from you for DLCs while still not adding to any of the core mechanics

You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#79

Post by squeaky-clean » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:39 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #33

YesBox wrote: post #17

Well crap, I'm going to have some serious competition :D I've been developing a city builder myself over the last year (Metropolis 1998). I wanted to do a 3D version sometime in the future, but alas. Maybe people will be tired of purchasing $15 DLCs on top of a shallow base game (probably not). Time to get to work

As long as the shallow base game still has more gameplay hours than most games I don't think people mind additional (also needing to be worthwhile) content costing money. That's Paradox's general business model and I think it works great for the types of games. I think I have nearly all of the optional content for Cities Skylines now but dollars per hour I'm still doing better than when it launched and when it launch…

Also if you're willing to wait about 6 months for any DLC, you can pick it up for a couple dollars. I don't think I've paid more than $5 for any of Cities Skyline's major DLC.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#80

Post by pavlov » Mon, Mar 06, 2023, 8:39 PM UTC

Earlier today we had this HN story about how EA’s greed essentially killed the SimCity franchise for good:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202

In that context it’s notable that the company behind Cities: Skylines, the most prominent SimCity replacement, was originally funded by the Finnish government as explained on their Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Order_(company)

VCs wouldn’t invest any money to build such a niche game, but Finnish national funding instruments for startups and arts were more willing to take risks.

A small story to keep in mind next time someone claims everything successful can be created through capitalism alone. It also happens that successful things are destroyed by capitalism and salvaged by public means.