19 ms·
Cities: Skylines II
- TechnicolorByte 4y agoNot much info other than the fact that it’ll release sometime this year on PS5, XSX, and PC. Teaser trailer is just a bunch of cinematics.
- ShakataGaNai 4y agoYea. It's "cool" in concept but there is nothing information-wise about the game. Does it fix the problems of CS1? Does it introduce new features? I want to be excited about it, but there is nothing to be excited about. Getting excited about a single trailer will just lead to disappointment later.
- TechnicolorByte 4y agoIt’s annoying but it seems to be the way things are marketed these days to build up hype so I can’t really fault them for it. Better to release info piecemeal as opposed to one big info dump if you want to build up a following.
- ShakataGaNai 4y agoI'm all for the build up with piecemeal information, but this "release" contains no information. If they so much as said "Seasons matter", I'd be happy.
- geraltofrivia 4y agoIf foreshadowing is one of their intention with the teaser, I'm afraid they'll push raytracing very hard. Their trailer had a lot of 'reflect in water', 'reflect in glass panes' moments.
- sandos 4y agoEugh, graphics is the least interesting things about these kind of games! I would take better simulation and pixel grapics rather than fake simulation and "RTX ON".
- xenon7 4y agoI have a feeling that this isn't going to be available on the Series S (or if it is, it'll be like CP2077 on the original PS4/XB1). Oh well.
- jalino23 4y agoits specifically said series s|x at the end of hte video
- xenon7 4y agoYes, but I said "(or if it is, it'll be like CP2077 on the original PS4/XB1)". I simply can't see the game running very well on 10GB of RAM. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but that's just what I think.
- jeppester 4y agoI don't think there's been any official communication from MS, but it seems well-established at this point that Xbox games are required to release both on Series X and S, and with feature parity - except for graphics modes.
- nixpulvis 4y agoI'll be so excited if this allows multiplayer city building. Imagine the possibilities... First of all, you get to collaborate and build things faster. You could have a voting mechanic where the citizens (AI) resolves conflicts. You could assign roles to subordinate players to manage things like traffic, services, new developments, etc. You could implement trade across city lines, and have acquisitions. It could easily turn into a MMO of epic proportions; with whole worlds built out. So. Many. Things!
- jeffbee 4y agoAnd the other players could show up at city council subcommittee hearings to denounce your mouse clicks as the insidious, carceral hand of Big Developer, sucking the character right out of the neighborhood.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoThere is a mod for that but it doesn't work terribly well.
- telman17 4y agoTruly excited about this one - there are not enough of these games in the genre. I wish they had announced a date but even if they had who knows how accurate it would actually be?
- cwkoss 4y agoAnyone able to read between the lines and see what features will be coming?
- i-am-gizm0 4y agoThe 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
- cwkoss 4y agoWould be super cool if citizens had stories and lives, more like dwarf fortress dwarves.
- FinnKuhn 4y agoThe game will have seasons and probably improved graphics as it is based on the Unreal 5 Engine instead of Unity.
- satvikpendem 4y agoFinally, ray-traced cities! I jest, but the Matrix demo on UE5 looked amazingly realistic.
- haunter 4y agoOne 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/ https://terrain.party/ Hope this will work in the sequel too
- yknx4 4y agoThank you. You've just killed my weekly productivity at work hahaha
- therein 4y agoVery nice, I didn't know this existed. Will give it a try.
- Imnimo 4y agoI 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 in the future.
- dwringer 4y agoYou 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).
- sleepybrett 4y agoIf you could find heightmaps dating back to seattle's founding that would be pretty annoying map, but only if you couldn't just flatten out parts of it at will with no cost. it's still pretty challenging geographically to this day, but it went through many re-grade projects as it grew.
- madduci 4y agoI hope this time the game can really take advantage of multi core computing, the first one was bounded to a single core: a long as a city has more than 5/10k citizens, it starts lagging
- kridsdale1 4y agoThat was my thought as well. Hell, just subdivide my city as my CPU core count goes up. There would be overhead for boundary interactions but it would still be way better. We can buy 32core chips now.
- dcchambers 4y agoI have put many hours into Cities Skylines and I am really looking forward to this. The obvious thing people will want them to fix is traffic and vehicle pathfinding, put personally I hope they let us build more pedestrian-focused streets. I so desperately want to build walk and bike friendly cities with beautiful pedestrian malls and walking-only streets but the game kind of forces you to build out extensive car infrastructure. I also hope they offer a way to do true mixed-use building instead of being forced to choose residential/commercial/industrial/office.
- izacus 4y agoI also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse. Hopefully we also get a bit more diversity of gameplay - Skylines got pretty repetitive quickly with only challenge being traffic optimization. The new DLCs didn't really add that much to gameplay except different things to paint between roads. I hope things like universities, industry, agriculture, airports, etc. become a an actual challenge to build, fund and retain - maybe pull in some things from the Anno series to make it happen.
- leeter 4y agoI'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.
- izacus 4y agoWe 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).
- em-bee 4y agobut that's the issue. most sims are designed after american cities
- nzgrover 4y agoTraffic. Traffic, Traffic, Traffic. Please.
- s-xyz 4y agoI love the Traffic challenge. Often I build a super condense city with horrible traffic, and then work towards optimizing it while keeping as much as possible intact. I hope that traffic will as well be realistic and that it can be used by city planners. It should not get easier, but more realistic.
- YesBox 4y agoWell 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
- zamadatix 4y agoAs 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 launched the dollars per hour was still significantly lower than traditional games. Looking at Metropolis 1998 my feedback would be I'm excited for the concept of a modern take on retro builders but I'm worried the gameplay will end up more "2D grid traffic simulator" than city builder. "Traffic simulator" can be a key layer for city builder die-hards but I'm hesitant that a 2D grid approach would be more interesting than base CS1, particularly with a free mod that simulates traffic more realistically (albeit not as performant what you can do with the traffic and road designs in 3D freeform is also much more interesting). I'll keep an eye on it though, it may be something I pick up in the future as it materializes :).
- YesBox 4y agoThanks! I agree with your feedback. I intend to have different options to mitigate the traffic if people don't want to manage it. My biggest inspiration for the game is actually roller coaster tycoon. I want to offer to the player the option to sit back and enjoy what they built (from scratch if they want!), and then switch back to managing and building their city, much like a theme park.
- em-bee 4y agoi 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?
- pclark 4y agoHopefully the AI is a _trillion_ times better.
- malcsm 4y agoSadly, sequels never have better AI. All the money gets spent on shiny graphics.
- richwater 4y agoThey never fixed the terrible traffic AI in the first game. I have no confidence in the sequel.
- toasteros 4y agoI have a hard time with freeform city builders like Skylines or SimCity. The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing. I have the same issue with The Sims or something like Planet Zoo. That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go? It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and I'm not sure what to do. On the other hand, games like Tropico (at least the later titles - 3, 4, 5, 6) having a "story" to play through help a bit because there is direction in what to build and where. Conversely, though, cities I build in Tropico end up being haphazard patch jobs where I find an empty space and put a dozen wind turbines in it because that's what the mission calls for, and so I miss out on some of the potential satisfaction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dragontamer 4y agoThere's two separate subgenres, and that's fine. Because its just a different game in general despite both being simulators. If you like Tropico, then you probably should give TwoPoint Hospital a try, as well as Ceasar 3, Cleopatra, and a few other games of the more "agent simulation" nature... with actual goals and challenges to defeat and win. Sim City / Cities Skylines is less about gaming and more about play. There is no winning or losing in these games... I mean nominally, if you run out of money I guess you lose. But the games are setup so that you don't really run out of money under typical circumstances.
- EMM_386 4y agoTwo Point Hospital is really a fantastic game. I'm curious how Two Point Campus is, I am not sure if I'm as interested in that one.
- somethoughts 4y agoI think it correlates to how much uninterrupted blocks of free time you have. My almost middle school son loves it, but he has much more free time than I do (maybe because he hasn't discovered HN yet!). In my free time, I want to have a specific end goal or victory condition.
- daveyjonezz 4y agoI'm glad to see colossal order and paradox are behind the sequel.
- wnevets 4y agoI'm really hoping they don't botch this release like some of their DLC. Most of the DLC released have pretty bad ratings on Steam.
- Macha 4y agoSome of the later DLC have been pretty half hearted yet at the same time they've hired modders for some of the more popular mods (like traffic manager) who've said they weren't working on DLC, so this has been in the works for a while
- nrdgrrrl 4y ago[dead]
- brianbreslin 4y agoWould love to play this on my m2 mac, but i'm assuming its windows or console only? Or do we think this would be available on Apple devices?
- trefoiled 4y agoMost Paradox game are available on Mac, strong possibility CS2 will be too
- kickout 4y agoSame, don't know though
- altairprime 4y agoOne random post on the Internet suggests that C:S1 was doing 45fps @ 4K on an M1 two years ago, so presumably the C:S2 sequel will do fine on M2. https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jw3e1c/game_benchmarks_for_m1_mac_mini_with_8gb_ram/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jw3e1c/game_benc...
- tarentel 4y agoThe first game you could play on mac. That doesn't mean this one will be but who knows.
- rsynnott 4y agoThe original's available on Mac (and Linux, I think).
- geraltofrivia 4y agoWas available on Linux, yes. Performed much worse though, AFAIK.
- jonas-w 4y agohttps://www.protondb.com/app/255710 https://www.protondb.com/app/255710
- pastacacioepepe 4y agoI hope they don't go again with a car-centric idea of city building, but seeing the steam page screenshots I'm preparing for disappointment.
- andbberger 4y agothere are no trains or buses in the trailer
- FinnKuhn 4y agoYou can see a bus at 1:27 and 1:52, but I really hope that the public transport system is better than what they showed in this first trailer, especially trains.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agoI wonder if this will still use Unity
- toshredsyousay 4y agoOne thing that annoys me about the first game is the way the commute times are not factored in at all to happiness or whatever. People literally go from one side of the map to the other for work and you aren't punished for terrible transit design (and cars magically disappear). I think the AI is too crappy for commute times to be a feature, but I hope they improve AI and add it for the sequel because it is just one of the most important aspects of city design.
- linkdd 4y ago> and cars magically disappear Not with the Traffic President mod which allows you to disable cars despawning and adds to the challenge of building a good transit system.
- db48x 4y agoThat would be a nice improvement to the simulation. Currently traffic really only affects city services; more buildings will burn down if the firetrucks take longer to arrive, more sick people die if the ambulance can't pick them up in time, etc, etc.
- zamadatix 4y agoHugely excited to see what the game really looks like. If they could fix performance and add some new gameplay dynamics it'd be great but if they are going to make it something completely different I'd be excited to see it as well.
- chimeracoder 4y agoI loved the SimCity series, so you'd think that Cities: Skylines would have appealed to me, but it's always felt frustrating, which I attribute to a few core issues: - Agent-based simulation instead of model-based (the latter is what the Maxis games used). Agent-based simulation is performance-intensive, and in practice it led to all sorts of gamebreaking bugs. Last I checked, the game still caused traffic jams because every car would enter the turning lane immediately. It also causes the infamous death waves. Some of these are hard to fix without changing the core simulation model. Some of these would be trivial to patch, and it's kind of embarrassing that they haven't. - The DLC is essentially mandatory, in that they release updates to the free game alongside every DLC, and the free updates introduce some of the features but not all, and they end up breaking the balance of the game unless you purchase the full DLC. - The game is far too easy, unrealistically so. Even on the harder difficulty setting, it's just way too easy to create a cash cow and create the optimal city without any real challenge. Cities:Skylines is good in sandbox mode, if you want to create beautiful-looking models of cities. Which is a valid use case and there's definitely a market for that. But for people who like the original SimCity games and enjoy simulations, it's... just not that. There's a reason that professional city planners used the original SimCity games as tools for study and development, and that's what made (for example) SimCity 4 Rush Hour so much fun to play. Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that Cities:Skylines lacks.
- jcranmer 4y ago> Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that Cities:Skylines lacks. You know, I never thought about the factory automation/colony simulator genres as being similar to the city builder genre, but... now that you brought it up, I think I see how said genres would appeal.
- stephenboyd 4y agoI wonder if the sequel will also have a mortuary-based economic system.
- knorker 4y agoWhat has made me give up on Cities Skylines is that you can't build a liveable city. It forces you to build US-style car-centric dystopias. I found that once you reach a certain city size this game is just car traffic management.
- brink 4y agoThere's a pedestrian focused expansion pack.
- syntheweave 4y agoYou can definitely make the city less traffic-heavy, especially after the DLC. But even in vanilla, for the commute traffic it's mostly a matter of having enough pedestrian bridges and tunnels so that they have uninterrupted journeys, and for the trucks the trick is to place rail depots near industrial and commercial districts so that they never need to get to the highway. Do those two things and you've cleared out most of the problem. Everything else is taken care of by designating a faster arterial road at certain intervals(so that the driving AI's preferences are more predictable) and then designing a one-way flow in and out of areas with a lot of conflict points. It is not exactly how I want to envision my city, but it's also not extremely complicated to work out. The game really limits traffic reduction mostly through the city services, which all have to drive down the roads to provide services.
- aflag 4y agoI feel like most of these city building games is that they feel like a doll house. You can create all the nice things you want and have a pretty city that you'd like to live in. However, the cities themselves don't have much of a personality. It's barely a simulation. I'd like to see certain areas becoming rough sort of ghettos. People in the city having different backgrounds. Just creating a school in those places would not necessarily improve things. I'd like to see economic effects happening and causing disruption in the city. Big companies coming and going and affecting daily life. I'd also like to see rich regions forming. Cool places that everyone wants to go. Essentially, I'd like to have less control and see things not working out exactly like I planned. Everything always goes exactly to plan.
- standardUser 4y agoI completely agree, and it's true more for Skylines than the old SimCity games. The "simulation" aspect is lacking in respect to developing different kinds of neighborhoods. I spent a lot of time in Skylines modding and creating custom neighborhood sets that could emulate various levels of density or socio-economic status. But that's the doll house approach, it doesn't emerge from the simulation. At least in SimCity 4k you could create distinctly rich and poor neighborhoods and the factors that led to those neighborhood types were reasonably well-simulated.
- zokier 4y agoI think one problem with many city builders is how they don't really have proper sense of time. Houses you plop down now are exactly the same as you did 50 in-game years ago, and even megaprojects usually complete in trivial amounts of in-game time. Combine this with the player having near god-like powers to build whatever and eventually raze down and reshape any parts, and it leaves cities very hollow
- foobarian 4y agoImagine the individual people in the simulated cities were run on a ChatGPT-like backend, and remembered everything. Held grudges for destroying their neighborhood. And therefore self-organized into gangs, etc.
- andrewfong 4y agoI 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.
- brnt 4y agoSC4 doesn't simulate residents at all, merely statistics. Even a single SC4 map is as large as one in CS, regions can be much, much bigger.
- mlsu 4y agoSomeone 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."
- Renaud 4y agoWhat 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.
- mlsu 4y agoPrecisely. Latency on LAN is very good, especially for a non realtime game like Cities.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoI'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
- pavlov 4y agoEarlier 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 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) 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.
- satvikpendem 4y agoI 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 that happened with Stardew Valley, the creator missed the old Harvest Moon games, didn't find a suitable substitute, and just build the entirety of the game from scratch, teaching himself art and music composition too. He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence. It just goes to show that the dominant players are not always dominant forever, and that common YC startup advice of understanding what exactly users want (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers)) and serving them well is still correct.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Laaas 4y agoTurns out, building good _anything_ is profitable.
- nikanj 4y agoBut building user-hostile crap _anything_ is way more profitable
- PeterisP 4y agoWell, no, not really - the example of Simcity 2013 vs Cities: Skylines given above is a great example where the user-hostile crap was much less profitable than what EA could have gotten based on their brand if they would have just made a straightforward remake similar to Cities: Skylines.
- kiba 4y ago
- branko_d 4y agoDunno… After spending many hours in Cities in Motion, and even more in Cities in Motion 2, Cities: Skylines just didn’t click for me somehow. It was kind of barren, with awkward road building (compared to CIM2), and just kind of restricting in a hard-to-define way. Perhaps the DLCs have improved the situation, but I lost interest by then. Hope CS2 will be better!
- charlieyu1 4y agoIs the original good? Growing up playing SimCity 2000
- voidfunc 4y agoAs someone who absolutely adored SC2K, SC3K and SC4... I'd pass on Cities Skylines at this point. The similarities between the two basically stop beyond they both have zones, roads, and utilities. CS is basically a mediocre traffic manager and production chain management game with a city builder attached.
- tomalaci 4y agoIMPORTANT: 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 original was made in Unity.
- EricE 4y agoCity 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.
- diebeforei485 4y agoI hope we can have more European style zoning.
- braingenious 4y agoCool! I hope somebody makes a Streets of SimCity-style exploration/battle game from this. That game was so much fun!
- squarefoot 4y agoSort of: enjoy developing a city, then some other country declares war and the same city becomes a Call of Duty scenario. It's probably too soon to have interchangeable world data between games, but one day, who knows...
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoWhat a missed opportunity. Nothing futuristic, nothing good. Same old, same old. Car-centric cities. I'm sure the game will be great. But I would have loved something more revolutionary.
- geraltofrivia 4y agoRight? Like mixed-use housing Or even pedestrian only streets ! Who can imagine! For a Finnish studio, I would have hoped Colossal Order focused a bit less on American cities, American urbanism.
- quic5 4y agoHaving spent countless hours in Cities: Skylines I’m a bit worried that I haven’t spotted a single form of public transport nor more bike infrastructure than a painted bike lane. I hope we won’t have to wait for countless DLCs to add more interesting modes of transport that just cars
- fidgewidge 4y agoYou get bus routes pretty early and can also build metro lines. You don't need DLC for that. So it's in there?
- pieresqi 4y agoLet's hope it won't be another car simulator. Trailer disappointed me. Pass from me.
- munk-a 4y agoMy only regret with Cities Skylines is that it's taken Colossal Order off of working on Cities in Motion - CiM 1&2 were very niche transit simulators but they were extremely well executed.
- dagorenouf 4y agoThe part of the trailer where we zoom-in to pedestrian level gave me an idea. For all the higher-level systems thinking happening in city builders, we never go into the more subtle signals that can make a city feel great or terrible to its people. Would be cool if we could zoom-in to a specific person in the game, and ask them how they actually feel living here, what they like or dislike about it. Including useless things that we can't possibly fix as a mayor. But that would give us cues to let us figure out what we could improve. Then once we interview a few of them in a neighborhood, we'd get a picture of what to change to make them happy. We could also have different types of populations and neighborhood for different types of people. Something more complex and organic than "people in this neighborhood don't feel safe, so you need to add a police station". This would add a layer of discovery and aliveness to the game.
- paco3346 4y agoI have always wanted something like this but on an even more in-depth scale. Let people playing game dev tycoon represent how successful a local business is. Let someone playing a GTA-like game be part of a police chase. Allow truck simulator players to be part of freeway traffic. Obviously this would be extraordinarily difficult to pull off well, but I can dream.
- dagorenouf 4y agoThat would be brilliant but indeed sounds almost impossible to pull off.
- jader201 4y agoWhat you’re describing is — almost exactly — like how the Rollercoaster Tycoon series works. You can click any visitor, and see all the stats for that individual visitor, including how happy, sick, bored, etc. they are. You can even see them saying things like “I reall like Rocket Coaster!” or “The line for Very Merry-Go-Round is too long.” Then you can aggregate how many visitors are saying each thing about the various attractions or the park in general. And then it allows exactly what you said: make tweaks based on the aggregate feedback and see the positive (or negative) effect your tweaks have.
- bmitc 4y agoHaving read the other article about EA's botched SimCity release, I had come across this trailer earlier today. Does anyone have any interesting links, papers, references, etc. for implementing a city simulation? I really like the idea of agent-based models and actor systems, and I think it would be a lot of fun of learning about the science and engineering of the models behind these types of games.
- TheDesolate0 4y ago[dead]
- brailsafe 4y agoOh shit, it's real this time
- brailsafe 4y agoOh shit, it's real this time. If they expect me to get a 4090 for those reflections though, pass. All joking a salad, probably all the very common constraints should be addressed, but I'd be stoked on an online component like SimCity 2000 Network edition. I'm not so into the idea of a pure sandbox anymore. They've had one of the longest beta testing cycles ever with that first version though, I'm hopeful. One thing I was never fully able to explore, was the idea of taking a kind of broken city, and exploring ways to improve it given real constraints. I think a lot of people hate their hometowns, and would love to just start with that somehow. Fwiw I do know about importing terrain maps and so on, which is cool, but it's still a sandbox. I like the idea of starting like 100 years into a city that's just been broke and struggling, with terrible infrastructure and lott of complaints.
- jokoon 4y agoI don't really this game because there is no real granularity: the amount of citizens is simulated up to a certain amount, and above that amount, the game just increment numbers that don't mean anything. I prefer games like factorio or microtown for example, where every object exist in the game, and is not just a statistic.
- panick21_ 4y agoI 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 roads, the basic building block is the road, but it should be the lane. You should be able to easily put together a few lanes, into a new road and then be able to use that. Currently you have to basically load 500 DLC road types just to cover all the basic things and even then it isn't great. Parking, parking is the biggest problem with car based cities. And the game just ignores that issue, and that results in the problem with cars just being about optimization of intersections. I also found the creation bus routes and other public traffic routes to difficult. It gets complex pretty quickly and once you have lots of them it just becomes almost unmanageable.
- Renaud 4y agoI 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.
- panick21_ 4y agoI 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.
- Havoc 4y agoThis will come down to pricing. I don't see the core gameplay dynamic being substantially different so pricing will need to be reasonable for me to buy it if it's functionally a graphics upgrade
- maxsupport 4y ago[dead]
- zimmund 4y agoThe game looks fantastic, I just hope it doesn't become a DLC hell like other games (and the previous version of this game).
- s-xyz 4y agoThis is just amazing. I still enjoy Cities Skylines I, have spent so many hours on it. A 2nd version can only be even more amazing. Understood that it will use Unreal engine 5.