Cities: Skylines II

[eran0004]

The French pack is pretty neat. I've been using it in the historic city centre to create a more cozy and touristic atmosphere. I like that the buildings have a small footprint as it makes them useful for building on hilly terrain. With inspiration from Paris I've also added a bunch some trees along the streets, it makes quite a big difference.

Now I'm excited to see the rest of the regional packs!

 

[MatskiMonk]

German region pack now on Paradox Mods...

 

[eran0004]

German region pack now on Paradox Mods...

Another beautiful pack!

One critique I have is that all the zoneable buildings so far have been wall-to-wall. It would be nice to have some free standing buildings as well.

Although I understand that it wouldn’t work so well with the zoning mechanics to mix wall-to-wall and free standing assets within the same zoning type. So perhaps the problem is that there’s no dedicated wall-to-wall zoning type.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Just thinking out load.

Been quietly trying to get my head around asset creation in CS2, pretty sure I'll be able to do it so I want to continue my London project, starting largely from scratch again.

With the 529 tiles mod, this gives a maximum map area of 13.8km×13.8km. Comparing this to the 17.2km×17.2km available with the 81 tiles mod in CS1 dramatically cuts down the area I aim to produce. On the one hand, this is a good thing, it makes it marginally more possible (though this is still pretty much 0.000001% chance of satisfactory completion) - on the other, it really messes up my plan. Getting some of London's iconic West End in, was just about possible given I'd set the furthest East point as London City Airport and the North Circular road next to (both heavily preferred for outside connections)... with the new, smaller, size of CS2, I'm now well short of that required width.

One option would be to rotate the map by 45°, giving me a max distance of 19.5km from the most easterly point to the most westerly, which might actually work, it just means I've got to re-do the Hi-res overlays I made from Google Maps from scratch, which took me weeks before, and I'll have to do a much bigger one this time (as I can't lock Google maps to a 45° rotation), to then cut the required diamond shape from it. I've also got to find a way of working with the height map since none of the tools I've used will rotate it in the required fashion, or, freehand it.

The other option is to bin off the London City Airport, the North Circular, and the Woolwich Ferry, all of which were plausible outside connections, that's going to put a lot of traffic on Road and Rail.

Even then, I'm pushing it on scale - I'd say it's definitely more consistent with real life in CS2 than CS1, but heavy use of Road Builder and it's janky junctions will be required to keep the roads/sidewalk to realistic sizes.

 

[eran0004]

Just thinking out load.

Been quietly trying to get my head around asset creation in CS2, pretty sure I'll be able to do it so I want to continue my London project, starting largely from scratch again.

With the 529 tiles mod, this gives a maximum map area of 13.8km×13.8km. Comparing this to the 17.2km×17.2km available with the 81 tiles mod in CS1 dramatically cuts down the area I aim to produce. On the one hand, this is a good thing, it makes it marginally more possible (though this is still pretty much 0.000001% chance of satisfactory completion) - on the other, it really messes up my plan. Getting some of London's iconic West End in, was just about possible given I'd set the furthest East point as London City Airport and the North Circular road next to (both heavily preferred for outside connections)... with the new, smaller, size of CS2, I'm now well short of that required width.

One option would be to rotate the map by 45°, giving me a max distance of 19.5km from the most easterly point to the most westerly, which might actually work, it just means I've got to re-do the Hi-res overlays I made from Google Maps from scratch, which took me weeks before, and I'll have to do a much bigger one this time (as I can't lock Google maps to a 45° rotation), to then cut the required diamond shape from it. I've also got to find a way of working with the height map since none of the tools I've used will rotate it in the required fashion, or, freehand it.

The other option is to bin off the London City Airport, the North Circular, and the Woolwich Ferry, all of which were plausible outside connections, that's going to put a lot of traffic on Road and Rail.

Even then, I'm pushing it on scale - I'd say it's definitely more consistent with real life in CS2 than CS1, but heavy use of Road Builder and it's janky junctions will be required to keep the roads/sidewalk to realistic sizes.

In CS1 I made a loose replica of a city in scale of 1:2 (if I remember correctly) and I found that it worked pretty well. You don’t have space for everything, but it was enough to build all the important parts and it “felt” correct. From first person camera view it will be more obvious that the scale is off, but from a birds-eye perspective it was good.

 

[MatskiMonk]

In CS1 I made a loose replica of a city in scale of 1:2 (if I remember correctly) and I found that it worked pretty well. You don’t have space for everything, but it was enough to build all the important parts and it “felt” correct. From first person camera view it will be more obvious that the scale is off, but from a birds-eye perspective it was good.

I'd anticipated having to miss out the odd street in denser areas especially when it's just rows of terraced houses that'll be the bulk of the outer sections of the map, but I wanted to keep the relative distances between everywhere that's recognisable pretty accurate. As laborious as making the required overlays is, it takes away any need to think about stuff too much.

I'll be curious to see if the UK region pack will bring anything of use.

 

[TheCracker]

Just thinking out load.

Been quietly trying to get my head around asset creation in CS2, pretty sure I'll be able to do it so I want to continue my London project, starting largely from scratch again.

With the 529 tiles mod, this gives a maximum map area of 13.8km×13.8km. Comparing this to the 17.2km×17.2km available with the 81 tiles mod in CS1 dramatically cuts down the area I aim to produce. On the one hand, this is a good thing, it makes it marginally more possible (though this is still pretty much 0.000001% chance of satisfactory completion) - on the other, it really messes up my plan. Getting some of London's iconic West End in, was just about possible given I'd set the furthest East point as London City Airport and the North Circular road next to (both heavily preferred for outside connections)... with the new, smaller, size of CS2, I'm now well short of that required width.

One option would be to rotate the map by 45°, giving me a max distance of 19.5km from the most easterly point to the most westerly, which might actually work, it just means I've got to re-do the Hi-res overlays I made from Google Maps from scratch, which took me weeks before, and I'll have to do a much bigger one this time (as I can't lock Google maps to a 45° rotation), to then cut the required diamond shape from it. I've also got to find a way of working with the height map since none of the tools I've used will rotate it in the required fashion, or, freehand it.

The other option is to bin off the London City Airport, the North Circular, and the Woolwich Ferry, all of which were plausible outside connections, that's going to put a lot of traffic on Road and Rail.

Even then, I'm pushing it on scale - I'd say it's definitely more consistent with real life in CS2 than CS1, but heavy use of Road Builder and it's janky junctions will be required to keep the roads/sidewalk to realistic sizes.

Have you created a map any way near to these proportions before? - Do you expect any performance issues?

As a non-PC user, i don't really know what the limiting factor would be. RAM? graphics card? processor?

 

[MatskiMonk]

Do you expect any performance issues?

Yep, I've not built anything like this size yet in CS2, but I'm not really having any problems running max settings at the moment, so I've got quite a bit of capacity to turn stuff down. In CS1 I 'managed' with down to 10 fps, so I'm prepared to be pretty lenient.

I've got 64gb RAM and I think I can go to 128gb if necessary.

I probably could just slap down a 529 tile grid, zone it and see. Might be worth doing for a laugh, or cry!

 

[eran0004]

Created some clusters of low-rent apartments (from the French regional pack) near the industrial district.
The population is now 20,000.

 

[eran0004]

The UK pack has been revealed and released. I have only seen it in a YouTube video so far, but it looks like a good one. It’s bigger than the two previous packs (perhaps even bigger than the two of them combined?) and has a lot of residential assets. The detached, semi-detached and medium density housing will see a lot of use in my current project.

 

[MatskiMonk]

UK pack is pretty good, next week we get modern architecture and urban promenades pack. The CCPs really are demonstrating the potential the game has, even if they're still ironing out the bugs.

 

[eran0004]

I spent some time working on the countryside. I started by building the road network based on what made sense with respect to the terrain and where the roads crossed I created a village. There was a castle ruin on top of a hill, I detailed that area a bit (trees, paths and parking) and on the slopes below I placed a little vineyard.

It made a big difference to the city, previously there was just an empty landscape around it, which made it hard to decide where to stop its expansion. Now that there's a bit of farmland it will be easier to make the transition from city to suburbs to countryside.

 

[eran0004]

Some more rural detailing, this time in spring.

 

[redhed17]

I must say I have been very happy with the recent region packs. Lots of quality assets, and nice variety and all free.

I have been very happy though with the latest patch after the Japanese region pack, which really optimised the game for me. Previously I would get to about 270k cims, and the game would slow down. Nothing would happen when I increased the game speed.

I opened a save I was just about to give up on, to see how the new Japanese assets fit into a city. The next day I went to open the save again, but had to do an update. I was very surprised that the game was back to normal speeds. I've since added 50-60k cims, and the game is still playing quite well. It will be interesting to see at what number the slow down happens again.

Love the new animations on the service building too.

 

[eran0004]

On my end I noticed that the adaptive tessellation of the terrain is quite taxing on my laptop, especially when the camera is close to the ground. To the point where the performance actually gets better when I enter the more dense parts of the city, because more of the terrain is obscured by buildings 😅

Fortunately it’s possible to set the terrain resolution in the advanced graphics settings, it helps a lot to reduce it.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Restarted Transitopia since it got really messy integrating the region packs. All this updates and content are very welcome, though I have to say since since details patch #2 (v.1.2) I'm getting a lot of both in game crashes and crash to desktops, which is quite annoying.

 

[eran0004]

Restarted Transitopia since it got really messy integrating the region packs. All this updates and content are very welcome, though I have to say since since details patch #2 (v.1.2) I'm getting a lot of both in game crashes and crash to desktops, which is quite annoying.

Yeah I had a couple of game crashes as well. Not a lot of them, but the game seems less stable than before the update.