Cities: Skylines (the Sim City we deserve)

[eran0004]

@eran0004 Any particular mods, assets or tools you'd recommended for texturing the ground differently in general?

The most important is to find a good map theme. The one I’m using now is Owl’s Los Angeles, it has this kind of arid Californian GTA V vibe.

Surface Painter allows you to paint the ground with some of the basic ground types (pavement, ruined, gravel and field). It’s extremely hard to get nice looking edges though so it works best for areas that are surrounded by roads (such as inside the city center) or where there are trees or props masking the edges.

Finally, Extra Landscaping Tools allow you to paint natural resources (oil, minerals, fertile land). As opposed to surface painter, these areas do have soft edges so they blend nicely. On the minus side, it only works for relatively large areas, so don’t expect to be able to have oil texture in one backyard and mineral texture in next door’s backyard.

 

[redhed17]

A truck heading towards that cargo station in that case would show as "Exporting goods from (other town name)", I guess this would be fairly unusual. You could perhaps build a dedicated area in the far right tile on the middle row, and connect the cargo station to the line that comes down to the passenger station... then join it it to the main highway via it's own junction.... you could also connect the cargo port to the main highway directly too. edit: both these dedicated connections could also have tolls too.

Thanks for giving my situation so much thought MatskiMonk. 👍

The squares on the right, middle and bottom are mostly quite large hills (the yellow area) which I have been thinking of having some windy road district, with maybe the observatory on top. I'll play about and see what direction it takes me in. I just don't understand why both cargo hubs both suddenly got overwhelmed, and then to see most of the traffic seemingly coming from outside the city, to use the inland cargo hub to also apparently leave my city via the rail. Maybe I am reading things wrong though.

I forgot to say about this current map, I did a second university, (the pink areas) and had a lot of trouble reaching levels 4+5, even though it was saying there were more than enough Cims in need of University education. I got around this by setting a number of districts to prefer education, and filled the levels. I think I have 2k+ in each University.

Weird, just writing that about the university's above, and changing the districts to preferring education may have affected imports in a dramatic way to cause this effect. 💡 Now that I have all the buildings for the second university, I will change the districts to not prefer education and see if that affects the cargo hubs when I switch them back on.

 

[MatskiMonk]

@redhed17

No worries, we all seem to get something different from the experience of playing CSL, for me, a big part of it is the infrastructure and logistics of the city, and a big part of that is getting yer head around industry logistics. It's such a shame that the EDS mod got borked by Sunset Harbour, the extra control it gives is really useful.

It would be really weird for the education level or university attendance to affect the import/export calls!

 

[redhed17]

@redhed17

No worries, we all seem to get something different from the experience of playing CSL, for me, a big part of it is the infrastructure and logistics of the city, and a big part of that is getting yer head around industry logistics. It's such a shame that the EDS mod got borked by Sunset Harbour, the extra control it gives is really useful.

It would be really weird for the education level or university attendance to affect the import/export calls!

The idea that came to me when I came to the end of that post, was that if I have a lot of Cims preferring education over jobs, goods produced for Cims in my city would go down, exports would go down, because less may be working, and imports would go up because of that. I haven't tried to see if it will have any effect yet. Watching a live stream revue of Liverpool's season. Priorities.

I like to see the city working in an efficient way. That is why I like starting with Scenario, to fix things (usually traffic) to run smoothly and efficiently. Trying to understand why something that was working well, suddenly goes to **** baffles me sometimes.

 

[eran0004]

I spent some time detailing the airport. Since the airport looks kind of empty with only the terminal building, I took the opportunity to make it a service hub, with fire department (kind of realistic actually), recycling center (not so realistic perhaps) and a new taxi depot.

The entrance to the airport. The sign (workshop asset) makes all the difference!

View from the highway. I was reading about the ILS system on wikipedia and checked some airports on Google Earth to see where it would make sense to place the ILS buildings. You can see them on the left here. They are props, but I'm not sure if I downloaded them from the workshop of if they came with the game.

A birds-eye view. I laid out a service road around the airport, because it's one of those things that airports tend to have
It doesn't really have any purpose in this case. The tarmac/concrete area to the left of the runway is where the fire department are having their fire drills. I should find some nice old plane prop to put there.

I used the helicopter depot to get a control tower for the airport. Turned out nicely!

A nice spot for plane-spotting.

I fixed the traffic congestion at the port by building a back road for internal traffic. I can probably downgrade the four-lane road now and get some space for other stuff. In the future I would like to have the shipyard in this area, hopefully I can make it fit.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Looking great @eran0004

I've used this before as a control tower...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=412919278

edit:

Hmmm, started getting some problems now... perhaps this is as big as a I can go. Also getting some index array errors on start-up, and the load time has jumped right up... in fact the loading screen mod now hangs at 3:11 and I just have to wait. Once the game has loaded I have to wait a couple of minutes before I can interact with anything on the map... so it could also be a mod problem, though I've tried switching off everything I've added recently and it hasn't helped. Also at almost minimum graphics settings now too.

 

[eran0004]

Looking great @eran0004

I've used this before as a control tower...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=412919278

edit:

Hmmm, started getting some problems now... perhaps this is as big as a I can go. Also getting some index array errors on start-up, and the load time has jumped right up... in fact the loading screen mod now hangs at 3:11 and I just have to wait. Once the game has loaded I have to wait a couple of minutes before I can interact with anything on the map... so it could also be a mod problem, though I've tried switching off everything I've added recently and it hasn't helped. Also at almost minimum graphics settings now too.

View attachment 944461 View attachment 944462

Looks pretty much like the glitch I had in my previous city. So seems like it’s something that can get triggered by building too big.

Annoyingly, my pedestrians have stopped obeying the Traffic Manager mod. I tell them to don’t cross the highway, but they just won’t listen.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Looks pretty much like the glitch I had in my previous city. So seems like it’s something that can get triggered by building too big.

I'll probably investigate further. The map glitch isn't fatal, if you pick-up a tree with the MoveIt mod, and just move it over the terrain, it goes back to normal. Seems to happen in a different spot each time I reload.

I'll be disappointed if this is as big as I can go... I'm also curious as to whether it's hardware related since I'm still flip-flopping on getting a new PC.

Between what you're doing, and what I'm seeing on YouTube, I'm feeling I need to spend more time detailing the next city. Asset creation ground to a halt once I remembered how hard it was to get to grips with Blender last time, so I'm still looking for ideas.

 

[MatskiMonk]

@eran0004

By chance, do you use Adaptive prop visibility distance by bloody penguin, or Building Anarchy by TBP mods, and if so do you use them together? With both off I don't get the map glitching. Trying to figure out if it's the Adaptive prop LOD slowing things down so much it glitches, or if there's a conflict between the two mods, or if it's just the anarchy mod on its own.

 

[eran0004]

@eran0004

By chance, do you use Adaptive prop visibility distance by bloody penguin, or Building Anarchy by TBP mods, and if so do you use them together? With both off I don't get the map glitching. Trying to figure out if it's the Adaptive prop LOD slowing things down so much it glitches, or if there's a conflict between the two mods, or if it's just the anarchy mod on its own.

I use neither of them. But the glitch is likely linked to some kind of “graphics overload”, so it makes sense that the problem disappears with those mods turned off. Not sure what building anarchy does, but if it keeps props rendered at long distance, or maintain a detailed LOD of the buildings even at long distances, then it should be pretty taxing on the graphics.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Prop visibility distance mod is a LOD mod, it definitely impacts system performance, but running in isolation I did not seen the glitch, likewise with Building Anarchy, that's why I was wondering if it's the combination of both that was causing the problem. If the mods aren't a common factor then it does point to something being at it's limits. My next question is it a game engine limit, or simply a system limit... since people on YT seem to be doing much bigger or more complicated stuff than me, it does point to a system issue...

... damn... still haven't worked up the courage to order the new PC yet.

 

[eran0004]

Prop visibility distance mod is a LOD mod, it definitely impacts system performance, but running in isolation I did not seen the glitch, likewise with Building Anarchy, that's why I was wondering if it's the combination of both that was causing the problem. If the mods aren't a common factor then it does point to something being at it's limits. My next question is it a game engine limit, or simply a system limit... since people on YT seem to be doing much bigger or more complicated stuff than me, it does point to a system issue...

... damn... still haven't worked up the courage to order the new PC yet.

Yeah, I think it’s a hardware limitation. The terrain shader runs out of memory or something.

Actually I can recommend playing on a smaller scale. You can focus more on the landscape and build interesting environments

 

[redhed17]

... damn... still haven't worked up the courage to order the new PC yet.

If I were able to get a new system I would, as it is I am only able to get a memory upgrade in the hope that it will improve the game. For everything else I use the computer for, it is powerful enough. The main taxing things are watching 4k vids connected to the TV and editing and process images, and what I have can handle that no problem. If I had the cash to get a system like Biffa has, or close to what you specced I would because I know that would last me for many years. As it is for me, work has taken a dramatic downturn, and I won't have cash for anything of not for the foreseeable future, so thankful I have everything I need atm.

Talking of memory, I am into my 4th week of trying to get that sorted. Ordered the memory, two sticks of 8GB, got it next day. One stick didn't work so had to send them back. I took a few days to find somewhere to print the return label (I would normally do that in work, but not atm). They took time to check that it was broken, and then they sent it back. They seem to come back slower when it's a return. Originally I got the RAM delivered to a collection point which is virtually across the road, as I live above a shop, where all my mail goes to, and the shop was shut at the time because of the virus.

The return was not sent to the same collection point though, which they8 didn't tell me, but apparently was in the 'Terms and Conditions' and was coming to my address, but my address is inaccessible, so the delivery driver couldn't find it surprisingly enough. So the store said they had told the delivery company to deliver to the shop, they didn't for the next few days. So I went onto the delivery company to tell them to deliver to the address of the shop, they didn't. So had to go back to the online store I got the RAM off to explain all this and they said they will tell me when it is sent out again, either today or tomorrow. 1st of July this all started with the initial order, and it isn't over yet.

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

Hopefully it actually makes a difference for Cities Skylines when I finally get it, because my 16GB of RAM is getting maxed out when the game loads, and it works of course.

 

[MatskiMonk]

If I were able to get a new system I would, as it is I am only able to get a memory upgrade in the hope that it will improve the game. For everything else I use the computer for, it is powerful enough. The main taxing things are watching 4k vids connected to the TV and editing and process images, and what I have can handle that no problem. If I had the cash to get a system like Biffa has, or close to what you specced I would because I know that would last me for many years. As it is for me, work has taken a dramatic downturn, and I won't have cash for anything of not for the foreseeable future, so thankful I have everything I need atm.

Trust me, I'm itching to do it, but it's not a small investment for me either!

Sorry, had to get that off my chest

D'ya ever miss just being able to pop to your local computer shop

 

[eran0004]

Thinking about adding a small island with just a ferry access, but I would probably need the service helicopters from Natural Disasters, and I'm kind of afraid of buying that DLC since I don't want my city ruined by a glitchy "disable disasters" switch. @MatskiMonk, you have that DLC right? Is the disable switch reliable?

 

[MatskiMonk]

Thinking about adding a small island with just a ferry access, but I would probably need the service helicopters from Natural Disasters, and I'm kind of afraid of buying that DLC since I don't want my city ruined by a glitchy "disable disasters" switch. @MatskiMonk, you have that DLC right? Is the disable switch reliable?

The obvious option to turn it off is not reliable, I got hit by a 'quake even after disabling it. There is a second option, which IIRC is something to do with probability or frequency, once this is also set to zero, it's been totally reliable for me. I can check in a few hours when I get home what the specific options are.

Natural disasters also brings some other assets you might find useful. Simple things like building radio masts can increase happiness for very little effort, and things like the emergency water storage tanks can be good 'silo/tanker' buildings without adding any traffic. Accidental floodings are also dealt with by water pumping trucks which I've found pretty useful when I **** up building a dam!

 

[MatskiMonk]

@eran0004

Provided you go for these settings prior to loading your save file.. I'd say you're golden.

The frequency slider is the risk, it's got to be on zero, because just deselecting random disasters isn't enough.

 

[eran0004]

I got the Natural Disasters expansion and started working on the new island.

The first attempt was kind of a failure, I made the island a bit too big and caused a massive tsunami that swallowed most of St Priaulx Port. The waves were about 30 meters tall.

Reloaded the old save and tried again. This time I made the island much smaller, and I also built a deflector shield to direct the waves away from the city. I used roads as a framework for building the shape of the island, then used the smooth terrain and level terrain brushes on top of that.

The completed shape of the island, with the framework removed:

Removing the deflector shield upset the ocean enough to send a tsunami anyways, although on a much smaller scale. It didn't actually destroy anything this time.

Meanwhile, in a less damp part of the city: I expanded the central roundabout and gave it timed traffic lights to better regulate the flow. The Intersection Marking Tool came in handy

 

[redhed17]

It is a pita the way the water reacts to even the slightest change to terrain. I adjusted a river earlier and had flooding, and there seemed no way get rid of it other than to let it evaporate over time. Thankfully it was a small area, with little traffic, and what was there continued to drive through the water. I struggle quite a bit with the terrain tools.

I had a river change from an Anchovy river to an Salmon river, so needed to change the harbour type. And now starting to change back to Anchovy. The river seems to be changing direction too, I think due to the water sewerage and water intake at opposite ends of the river, and the amounts being taken out and put in. The Eco water sewerage outlets also seem to be polluting when they are not supposed to.

The current city is running fine atm though. I built into the hills, and that has turned out quite nice. The roads are sometimes a bit steep, but messing about too much with the terrain tools can mess the very nice original hills up too much. The Cims seem to like it though because even though it is low density housing, the land value is very high. One of the things that really surprised me was putting a pedestrian bridge across a motorway, and expected few Cims to use it, but loads are using it continuously.

I think I may try to do another industrial area with a cargo rail connection close to the edge of the city, with little in the way to the motorway so as to hopefully minimise congestion this time.

 

[eran0004]

It is a pita the way the water reacts to even the slightest change to terrain. I adjusted a river earlier and had flooding, and there seemed no way get rid of it other than to let it evaporate over time. Thankfully it was a small area, with little traffic, and what was there continued to drive through the water. I struggle quite a bit with the terrain tools.

I had a river change from an Anchovy river to an Salmon river, so needed to change the harbour type. And now starting to change back to Anchovy. The river seems to be changing direction too, I think due to the water sewerage and water intake at opposite ends of the river, and the amounts being taken out and put in. The Eco water sewerage outlets also seem to be polluting when they are not supposed to.

The current city is running fine atm though. I built into the hills, and that has turned out quite nice. The roads are sometimes a bit steep, but messing about too much with the terrain tools can mess the very nice original hills up too much. The Cims seem to like it though because even though it is low density housing, the land value is very high. One of the things that really surprised me was putting a pedestrian bridge across a motorway, and expected few Cims to use it, but loads are using it continuously.

I think I may try to do another industrial area with a cargo rail connection close to the edge of the city, with little in the way to the motorway so as to hopefully minimise congestion this time.

Yeah, the water simulation has its pros and cons. I wish there was an option to let terrain changes erase water instead of displacing it, it would make island creation a lot easier

The eco sewage outlet is supposed to pollute, it just pollutes less than the non-eco option. I prefer to use the water tower instead of the water pump, because it’s often easier to find clean land than clean water. Water pumps are nice for dealing with flooding though, they can quickly remove the excess water.

Cims will happily walk long distances I think they are all playing Pokemon Go.

 

[eran0004]

The final piece of the roundabout puzzle was to figure out a solution for pedestrians, so they wouldn't use the crosswalks as much (I've told them it's forbidden to cross the road at the roundabout, but they won't listen). What I ended up with was this pedestrian bridge. The cims love it and it seems to have solved the problem.

I could finally afford the shipyard, and in the process of adding that building I took the opportunity to redesign the port slightly. It's mainly the oil industry area at the top right of the screenshot that has changed.

The full layout of the port:

This little forest industry has been renamed to "Barney's Dysfunctional Logging Co.". The reason for the name is that the sawmill is often lacking resources, although it's literally right next to the full log yard. I guess I need to increase the school budget or something.

As for the little island with ferry connection, I've put that idea on hold, because I realised that the service helicopters won't be enough. I'd also need to collect the trash and deal with dead bodies, and I doubt I can place those buildings on the island without messing up the entire infrastructure (city serivces tend to crash if they can't access the entire city). Instead I started building a new town on the main island. The plan is that this new town is going to be the second biggest, after the capital.

 

[redhed17]

The harbour looks very nice eran. 👍

Those Cranes reminded me of the five Cranes in the Liverpool Docks.

The pictures of them getting delivered on one ship are mental. How they got to Liverpool without capsizing that ship boggles the mind.

 

[redhed17]

I set up an industrial area, and the put in a Cargo rail station on the edge, and next to the motorway. The aim was to try and minimise the effects of traffic. I also put in an express cargo station in to try and speed things up. As before the cargo hubs, be that rail or sea, they seem to attract loads of traffic.

You can see in the image, the traffic backing up. The whole city was hovering around 80%+, and is now on the way down. I think I will stick with the industrial area, and fill that in, and get rid of the cargo station. More trouble than it is worth. Having all that traffic appear slowed down the game a lot too.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I'd also need to collect the trash and deal with dead bodies

I'm not sure if the helicopters from the Disaster Response Building deal with bodies or not, I thought they did but I might be wrong... but as for trash, I use this asset a lot...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=565334243

Sends out 3 garbage trucks, brings back the waste, generates power, no ground pollution. Doesn't look like a garbage dump either.

 

[eran0004]

I have been experimenting with inverted roads - roads where the direction of traffic is inverted. In real life, these are used for having bus stops on the median of the road, or for making diverging diamond interchanges. I'm using the basic four lane road, because it has a big median that would be well suited for a bus stop.

At first I thought it would be a really painful job to do, because the asset editor in Cities Skylines is far from user friendly. However, after some trial and error I found an easy way to do it. Reversing the lanes was just to change the lane direction from forward to backward or vice versa. The props (traffic lights, road signs etc) were shifted by simply flipping the "inverted" option in the required/forbidden flags option. "Inverted" is what the game uses to be able to do right-hand traffic and left-hand traffic versions of the same assets, so by inverting the "inverted" flags, I essentially got the left-hand traffic version of the road.

So the road is actually functional now, the props show up on the correct side and everything. The only problem is that for some reason the textures have glitched out, so I'm getting a low resolution version of them. This effect is the worst in the nodes. As you can see in the picture below, the crosswalks is just a blurry mess. I will take another look at it tomorrow and see if I can fix it.

Another thing I started with is modelling some fields. The plan is to cover a sizeable chunk of the island with these.

They look pretty good from the ground.

With most of the highway complete, I recorded a little roadtrip across the island. Even though it fits within 5x5 tiles it seems pretty big.

 

[eran0004]

I reloaded the mesh in the road editor, and it improved the node textures, so they are at least of the same quality as the segment textures. It's still lower resolution than the vanilla road, but it's good enough for now.

I also found a nice roof network on the workshop, I think it's originally meant for train stations but it works great for this bus stop as well.

A short video of the bus stop in action.

 

[eran0004]

I took the "inverted bus street" idea back to the city center of St. Priaulx Port and applied it on the main avenue. It looks pretty cool with so many people using it. A nice side effect is that I no longer need the bus station, so I demolished it and replaced it with an apartment block.

With the new bus street in place I focused on the nearby blocks to increase the density and make it a bit more urban. I also moved the metro station closer to the bus street to really make it a public transport hub. On one side of the bus street there are shops and offices while the other side is residential.

The Russian shopping mall (I believe it's from St Petersburg) below is one of my favourite workshop assets. It's a RICO building, so it functions as high density commercial. A nice thing about it is that it's kind of open underneath on one side, so if you want to you could fit a metro stop there, which looks nice, seems quite realistic and saves valuable city center space for other buildings.

This density increase meant that I had to move quite a lot of nice old buildings away. Most of the homes where shipped all the way over to the new town I started on the other end of the island, but one of the bigger villas were moved to a spot next to the city hall park and now acts as the Embassy of France.

 

[eran0004]

I replaced some old basic highway intersections by the farming area with more advanced designs, to increase the capacity.

I also figured out how to make forests look more dense by plopping patches of vegetation (from the landscaping menu) in between the trees:

It looks especially good from ground level.

The hills are alive with the sound of moose-ic!

The new town is starting to take shape. It's situated on a hillside, so it's a pretty tricky spot to build in. As a result, it gets this rather narrow shape. The town center is pretty much done in terms of the area it occupies, I'll just add some light residential neighbourhoods around the edges and then come back for detailing.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I'm happy I can get big numbers for a city, and that I can get it running smoothly. I'd like the next one to start looking a little less vanilla so I've been fiddling around with some mods and assets to see how I might get on doing close in detail.

It's not going well, in fact, it's bloomin' frustrating. Second attempt at building a functional but more realistic lumber yard...

Better than the first, at least.

 

[eran0004]

I'm happy I can get big numbers for a city, and that I can get it running smoothly. I'd like the next one to start looking a little less vanilla so I've been fiddling around with some mods and assets to see how I might get on doing close in detail.

It's not going well, in fact, it's bloomin' frustrating. Second attempt at building a functional but more realistic lumber yard...

View attachment 949105

Better than the first, at least.

It looks really good!