Cities : Skylines

[Alienman]

One thing worries me though, he says that they had to make compromises now that the simulation is 100% real, and the compromise is that big buildings will not have that many inhabitants. So now I wonder, will it still be in the hundreds or will it be something weird like ten?

Ten sounds about right. In CiM2, smaller buildings had something like 6 to 8 inhabitants, skyscrapers in the range of 18. They were all tracked though and went to work and home again.

Oh well, looks good. Now please Paradox, don't sell sixty million dlcs for this.

Haha, that's a good one. Of course they will.

Urgh.. CiM2. Same dev-team? Same engine? I'm not invested into these games.

 

[Turjan]

Same dev team, yes. Same engine? Well, it's Unity. Although they claim the engine is completely different from CiM2.

 

[Angthoron]

Same dev team, yes. Same engine? Well, it's Unity. Although they claim the engine is completely different from CiM2.

No way this is Unity, I can't see Unity running a city sim with any kind of decent graphics, sim speed and FPS stability. Ever.

DO NOT USE UNITY! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!!!

 

[Turjan]

Same dev team, yes. Same engine? Well, it's Unity. Although they claim the engine is completely different from CiM2.

No way this is Unity, I can't see Unity running a city sim with any kind of decent graphics, sim speed and FPS stability. Ever.

"Skylines uses an adapted Unity engine with official support for modification."

Also, from the horse's mouth:
"First of all we will have a lot of built in tools: Map editor, 3d-importer with building editor, beautification tool. Besides that we also try to make the actual code, or at least bits of it, available. Unity is not the most open engine, so it required a bit of work, but we are trying as good as we can."

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2e3uku/we_are_colossal_order_paradox_interactive_the/cjvv4hx

 

[Angthoron]

Well, fuck.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Gigantic office buildings only employing 23 people is going to bother me. I'm not a big fan of agent based city sims in the first place.

 

[Turjan]

Gigantic office buildings only employing 23 people is going to bother me. I'm not a big fan of agent based city sims in the first place.

Meh. SimCity (including the older ones) has the opposite problem. People seem to like big numbers, even if they are fake. Also, I don't know yet how many people will be living or working in skyscrapers. The numbers I mentioned were from CiM2.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Gigantic office buildings only employing 23 people is going to bother me. I'm not a big fan of agent based city sims in the first place.

Meh. SimCity (including the older ones) has the opposite problem. People seem to like big numbers, even if they are fake. Also, I don't know yet how many people will be living or working in skyscrapers. The numbers I mentioned were from CiM2.

Oh, I see. That makes me feel better. Hopefully we can get more realistic numbers. I know the person in the video claimed that one million residents was possible.

 

[cw8]

Modding vid:


I wanna see the 3D importer in action.

 

[Mr. Pink]

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2x4mf9/we_are_colossal_order_the_team_behind_cities/

devs answering questions on leddit now.

 

[Turjan]

So, of the 25 plots on a map you can maximally use 9 (your choice which of these). Seems the engine gives up if you are allowed to use more.

1 million residents is a hard limit, also because the engine bogs down after this point.

CK2-style DLC's confirmed. Well, this doesn't come completely unexpected.


Regarding the engine limitations, I can see their point. To be fair, even Simcity 4 bogs down at that point, and large SC4 tiles show all sorts of lags and inefficiencies (they are also prone to savegame corruption). I hope the 9 plot limit is enough to build something nice. It seems to look okay in the vids, but I'll wait till I can play the game myself for a final judgment.

Hmm. I wonder what kind of buildings from other games you may be able to import.

 

[Mr. Pink]

simcity4 bogs down on modern computers because it can only use one core, not because its partucularily complicated...

 

[Stokowski]

1 million residents is a hard limit, also because the engine bogs down after this point.

Evidence of Unity? Shouldn't matter too much anyway (one hopes).

simcity4 bogs down on modern computers because it can only use one core, not because its partucularily complicated...

Yeah, but doing monstrously stupid things like generating morning and evening commuter routes for every agent using a shitty algorithm, when only the morning commute has any gameplay effect, sure doesn't help.

 

[Turjan]

simcity4 bogs down on modern computers because it can only use one core, not because its partucularily complicated...

Sure, the limitation to one core is a big obstacle, and an engine that makes use of multiple processor cores would help. Also, today's computers can run a more adequate traffic model than the original game had. You can also assign more memory to the game, which helps with crashes.

However, every growth simulation will bog down a computer, no matter how capable. It's only a matter of time, and more memory and a processor capacity only push that point a little further. This is an intrinsical problem of simulations.

 

[Varax]

So...a city building game that might actually be good? As in:

- No forced always online/mandatory multiplayer/social gaming bs.
- Can build decent sized cities (i.e. more than 2 sq km) with large populations (more than 100k).
- Modding support.
- Terraforming (with map editor).
- Public transportation/ multiple road options/ curved roads.
- Zoning (no plop only tedium or mandatory "command economy").
- Decent looking building models.

Now I still have my reservations here so I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. As much as I like city builders I had basically lost confidence in the genre entirely after a decade of mediocre-at-best (i.e. Cities XL) and shit cash ins from EA (new SimCity, complete shit SimCity Societies). It's absurd how many of the basic aspects I took for granted in the likes of SimCity 1-4 where stripped out to focus on other crap that no-one asked for in the genre instead. It's kind of sad that it takes a game like this to actually go and add back in those features or seemingly just take them serious again to get me interested in a new game here but I've been burned before on fake promises and attempted "outreach" to core fans of city builders only to have them fail to equal the older games in terms of actually building a city.

It would also be nice if they could optimize it well, another aspect recent games in the genre seemed to struggle with (I'm looking at you again SimCity Societies - you broken piece of shit). It's all well and good to promise large cities but if your engine can't actually handle it and only people with top end systems can play those that doesn't help much. Some of what I'm reading on that front is not terribly encouraging and a hard pop cap of 1 million is somewhat lame considering in the old SimCity games you could easily get much higher than that. Also considering that real world large cities have much bigger populations than that.

 

[Muty]

Modding vid:


I wanna see the 3D importer in action.

Yes I want to see giant multiheaded dong buildings modded in the game too.

 

[cw8]

Modding vid:
I wanna see the 3D importer in action.

Yes I want to see giant multiheaded dong buildings modded in the game too.

We'll see how the modding tools are for the game, it'll be great if it's anything like BAT for Simcity 4.
http://community.simtropolis.com/fi...dosort=1&sort_key=file_rating&sort_order=desc

 

[Mr. Pink]

It's not healthy to be this hype over a video game yet here I am. It's been 12 years since the last great city builder, Please don't suck...

 

[Turjan]

I'm not really hyped yet. Honestly, I expect this to be pretty barebones on release. However, if this is really moddable, I have hope for its future. Simcity 4 was pretty bad on release. Rush Hour saved it, and only the mods made the game great.

 

[cw8]

Pre-release gameplay:


Asset Editor (My guess it's the equivalent of a LOT editor in SC4):

9:50 of the video, game imports .FBX files, yes!

 

[Turjan]

This transport video is pleasing my inner model railroader:



The stations are a bit big, but I guess that will be addressed at some point. Just think of the possibilities.

Also, 25 tiles have been already unlocked by a modder before release. You can watch a stream of this here.

This game seems to shape up nicely. I'm so looking forward to what modders may be coming up with.

Edit: The same guy posted an even better video now. Follow one train for 19 minutes:

 

[Perkel]

ok there is already mod to unlock all 25 tiles and game is not even out yet.
I bet 1 000 000 is also soft cap that modders will be able to move shorty after premiere.

Though 1 000 000 here looks like a lot harder to reach than in SC4 since there is actual gameplay here after 1st hour.

video of that mod:
http://www.twitch.tv/ingamechat/b/633743304

 

[Hoaxmetal]

I just hope it will run on my laptop. Probably will pirate to check but otherwise it still looks like a D1P to me :>

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i'm struggling to not buy it right away, it looks too good to be true.
what helps me is that last times i bought without *cough*ing first it's been with oblivion and something else so crap i can't even remember what it was.

 

[Stokowski]

All those low-detail (practically nil-detail) textures suggest it is designed with moderately specced machines … and/or massively overbuilt sprawling metropolises, in mind.