Cities: Skylines (the Sim City we deserve)

[MatskiMonk]

Minor update that's nothing but for my own record, on Project: London.

Having learned what Sketchup and Blender do and don't like when exporting/importing, I can now get from one to the other without masses of things to fix, so this is the largest of the 3 waterside buildings I need to make for Shadwell basin... it's still a work in progress, I'm just really happy I can get it from one application to the other reliably now.

 

[HarVee]

New Troubadour, a city stuck in late '60s. Inspired by Mafia 3's "New Bordeaux".

 

[HarVee]

A new suburb, laying on the outskirts of The Fronts district, which I named after The Who song "Eminence Front". This is an area where the rich Cims live away from all the pollution and noise from the industry by the shores of the river in this district.

 

[HarVee]

Wow no replies? No one plays CS1 anymore? Anyway, this is what I've been working on for New Troubadour. I updated the city in a way where it's more modern and less 1960s. It's still heavily '60s but has does have a couple modern cars here and there. New Suburb, very poor; very scummy.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Wow no replies? No one plays CS1 anymore?

C:S2 mods seem to be coming a long, but until CO finish patching the game, and we start getting official support for mods that are less likely to bork the game, I'll be sticking mostly with C:S1 - I just don't have anything worthwhile to post at the moment.

My London project keeps hitting road blocks. At the moment I've gone back a few steps because I need to tweak the balance between modelling and texturing (specifically, put less detail in the model, but make better Normal maps from scratch). I'm obsessing over workflow, but I need to increase my output like 1000% to have any chance of this project getting anywhere.

Most of the progress that has been made, is in making hi-res image overlays from which to work - the one that's exported by the heightmap website is hopelessly low-res and also not that accurate. I've started laying down all the roads, streets, back alleys, mews etc. etc., at which point it became clear that I needed to rename all my roads to match the real world or else I'd get totally lost, so that's taking longer than expected. (edit The other thing that's taking a lot of time is adjusting the width of roads using the node controller.

I've also been trying to plan out the rail network. Using Metro to mimic the 'London Underground' above and below ground sections is easy, but some of the 'Overground' rail network spends a long time under ground and ideally I could do with below ground 'Overground' stations (!). Google Maps displays most of the London transport network geographically accurately, so that saves a lot of research figuring out where the underground sections actually run.

 

[HarVee]

That's kind of why I never attempted to recreate a real city and instead just wing it with fantasy cities. The road and rail networks of real cities tend to throw me off. Hopefully you'll stick with it though. I would love to see your London recreation. 👍

That building you were making looked very nice, I could see myself using it in my European-inspired cities, that is if you ever finish it and decided to share it.

 

[TheCracker]

That's kind of why I never attempted to recreate a real city and instead just wing it with fantasy cities. The road and rail networks of real cities tend to throw me off. Hopefully you'll stick with it though. I would love to see your London recreation. 👍

I'd be interested to see if the economic element of a recreated real city, ie the proportions of housing - retail - industry, works within the C:S economic model.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I'd be interested to see if the economic element of a recreated real city, ie the proportions of housing - retail - industry, works within the C:S economic model.

The next district to the west of where I started is the 'City of London', this is pretty much a square mile of office, it's one of the lowest residential population districts in the entire country (~8500 people), yet it employs ~650,000 people. In the real world, people flood into this area from the outskirts of London and far beyond, but I'll need to have created a LOT of surplus educated residential in the area to support that well enough. It's far more of a closed system in the game than the real city is.

I'm obviously playing with unlimited money to begin with, the road and rail infrastructure alone will mean it's going to be a long, long time before I'm making any money.

That building you were making looked very nice, I could see myself using it in my European-inspired cities, that is if you ever finish it and decided to share it.

It's classic 'modern' (late 80's) docklands architecture, there's lots of similarish style buildings in re-developed areas along the Thames to the East. I'm hoping they're good enough to be worthy of sharing, but I'm not there yet. I made the mistake of watching Ronyx69's asset creation videos and I think I may be setting the bar way to high for myself!

 

[MatskiMonk]

So further to the above, these are the assets I'm experimenting with technique on...

And this is what I'm doing on the map in the mean time...

I'm concerned about scale...

 

[eran0004]

What scale are you building the map at? 1:1?

 

[MatskiMonk]

What scale are you building the map at? 1:1?

For better or worse, yep. The Map generator default 81 tile export gives 115mi², which I verified on Google Maps.

Road widths in game aren't far off double what they should be for a British city in most cases, so the more densely packed the roads the harder it will be to squeeze everything in, hence using Node controllers to reduce the width of some roads by 60-80%, amongst other things.

I could have scaled the map to about 120% on export to give myself more space, but then any asset that's made 1:1 will be too small, and I'll have to scale every measurement I take from Google Maps or Street View.

Neither scenario is ideal, but I'm erring on the side that will make it more dense, which feels more realistic for London.

 

[TheCracker]

For better or worse, yep. The Map generator default 81 tile export gives 115mi², which I verified on Google Maps.

Road widths in game aren't far off double what they should be for a British city in most cases, so the more densely packed the roads the harder it will be to squeeze everything in, hence using Node controllers to reduce the width of some roads by 60-80%, amongst other things.

I could have scaled the map to about 120% on export to give myself more space, but then any asset that's made 1:1 will be too small, and I'll have to scale every measurement I take from Google Maps or Street View.

Neither scenario is ideal, but I'm erring on the side that will make it more dense, which feels more realistic for London.

Doing London seems like a massive undertaking. Couldn't you have started with Rochester or Southend-on-Sea first

What happens when you come to placing some of the central London landmarks that are unmodelled. Substitute for similar or create your own asset?

 

[MatskiMonk]

Doing London seems like a massive undertaking. Couldn't you have started with Rochester or Southend-on-Sea first

I did start making my own town, and it rapidly became obvious that whatever the location, to really look the part it has to have lots of custom assets. London is then, a massive undertaking, and I'd imagine impossible in terms of game limits if no other reason - but we'll see how far I get - I am somewhat fascinated by London though so it's an interesting research project at the very least. I always take the time to just wonder around the place when I'm there, to the point I'm planning both a straight line mission through Greater London, and also to walk the Thames path from source to sea (subject to my Knee returning to normal operation). I'm also watching lots of Tom the Taxi Driver on YouTube, the idea of doing 'the knowledge' and literally learning 25,000 roads is incredible to me, but it really does help get a feel for the geography of the place.

I'm spending so much time messing around with the same models at the moment because I want to make sure I can bang smaller assets out really quickly with them being total crap.

What happens when you come to placing some of the central London landmarks that are unmodelled. Substitute for similar or create your own asset?

Hopefully by then I'll be more adept at making the assets and will be able to tackle making them. I'm much faster using SketchUp than blender for stuff with simple geometry, but tackling some of the more Gothic-revival-esque buildings will mean putting my big boy pants on and persevering with Blender a lot more since it's head and shoulders above Blender for capability.

 

[TheCracker]

Hopefully by then I'll be more adept at making the assets and will be able to tackle making them. I'm much faster using SketchUp than blender for stuff with simple geometry, but tackling some of the more Gothic-revival-esque buildings will mean putting my big boy pants on and persevering with Blender a lot more since it's head and shoulders above Blender for capability.

I suppose in turn you can offer those assets for others to use via Steam?

 

[MatskiMonk]

I suppose in turn you can offer those assets for others to use via Steam?

If I think they're good enough, probably.

 

[MatskiMonk]

So, Christmas holiday was when I was going to get sooooo much done... instead, I spent it staring into an existential abyss, or drunk, as such I've only made small progress with asset creation.

As previously mentioned I had to go back to the drawing board a bit with regards to how I was modelling some stuff. It's apparently better to put small details (things like window frames) into the normal map, than model them in the mesh. I'd originally not thought too much of it, because I was planning on using an online tool to pretty much one click generate the normals. Having watched Ronyx69 talking about it though, it very much seems that if you're actually relying on the normal for any kind of actual detail, it HAS to be accurate, and that means creating them manually.

This didn't seem that bad, until he explained that you also had to worry about the way CS compresses the various texture files. This compression works on a 4 pixel grid, and basically you want hard edges to follow this grid on the normal map, and ALSO on the Specular map, but ideally not have them over lapping. It's taken me a while to get my head around it.

In the video below, look out for the following things.

A) These lighter faces (the inside edge of the window aperture) are in the mesh, and are catching the light because of it, they behave as you'd expect.
B) These highlighted edges representing the beading around the window glass are just on the normal map, they are actually flat, but also highlight and shadow as the sun moves.

You can see in the corners of the Red window, the corners are clean, the specular map (which generates reflections) is properly aligned with the normal map, to the pixel...
... on the blue windows, I've accidentally let them overlap, and basically the entire 4 pixel grid square mushes them into one, and it shows up as a square inset into the corner of the window.

Ignore everything else, it's a **** model I've just knocked up for testing, and I've a bunch of mod clashes so setting the LUT, time of day and camera position is a PITA for some reason.



I do hope to be cracking on properly soon. I've paid £280 just to be able to use SketchUp for this project.

 

[TheCracker]

Okay. Seemed to have hit a brick wall on my latest C:S Remastered city with an issue that i've not come across before. Or at least not to this extent.

Its a fairly compact 12-tile city with a population of 80,000 or thereabouts.

I'd pretty much 'finished' it really. Had placed everything on it i wanted to aside from maybe a small suburb or two and a small area of industry on an Ore 'vein' i hadn't yet exploited. I was getting towards end game stage with it - I'd ironed out any road congestion, traffic was all flowing smoothly. All my parks were turning a profit and my industry areas were very profitable. I'd even managed to slide the university into a small profit. The 'need' bars were all low with the commercial one being the one most in need, but still pretty low (perhaps at 20% of max). The only issue i was having was the usual 'not enough buyers' and 'not enough resourses'(?) within some of the industry areas.

I then started to notice some of the commercial properties started to flash the 'not enough products to sell' icon. I had this early on in a high density commercial area on my 'old town' area which is situated on a peninsular of land formed where theres a confluence of two rivers, which means it was difficult to get delivery trucks onto it and traffic was bottlenecking. But i sorted that and the issue went away. But this time the issue/warning spread, eventually covering nearly all my commercial properties. Need for commercial zoning plummeted and need for industry sky rocketed. This all happened very quickly.

I've had to create a large amount of new industry areas, probably increasing the existing by a third, and this has slowly brought down the 'need' bar for industry (but increased the previously static need for housing, which is expected) but the remaining commercial zones are still crying out for products, even though 3/5ths of the commercial zoned areas now lay empty/undeveloped.

A 3x4 tile area isn't massive and even though most of the industry is situated away from the main city, transport links are extensive and although busy they still flow at the default uncongested speed. I just don't know what can be done to solve it.

 

[MatskiMonk]

A 3x4 tile area isn't massive and even though most of the industry is situated away from the main city, transport links are extensive and although busy they still flow at the default uncongested speed. I just don't know what can be done to solve it.

Import/Export links are my go to solution for most things, Air freight and Sea freight ideally, and lots of warehouses.

Generic commercial get their product from generic industry so if you're fulfilling industry demand with specialised industry, generic commercial will be relying on imports while those industries may be relying on export for custom - rather than your industry serving your commercial. Making sure you have abundant opportunities for both Import/Export could be a simple fix, as well as trying to make sure you have adequate generic industry to match specialised industry (non-DLC).

Just my two cents.

 

[TheCracker]

Import/Export links are my go to solution for most things, Air freight and Sea freight ideally, and lots of warehouses.

Generic commercial get their product from generic industry so if you're fulfilling industry demand with specialised industry, generic commercial will be relying on imports while those industries may be relying on export for custom - rather than your industry serving your commercial. Making sure you have abundant opportunities for both Import/Export could be a simple fix, as well as trying to make sure you have adequate generic industry to match specialised industry (non-DLC).

Just my two cents.

Interesting what you say about 'generic' industry, as i've only been using the Industries DLC to serve that aspect - and it seemed to work fine up until the 80k population point where commercial needs suddenly collapsed. There are no sea connections available on this particular map, so a cargo port isn't viable - but i do have a cargo airport and six cargo train stations plus motoway connections to other cities north, south, east and west, so i should be pretty well covered for import/export. I'm not wanting for warehouse space either. I've even boosted unique factories output to the 150% max, but it still doesn't seem to dent that commercial appetite for goods.

I've avoided using the base game/generic industry as pre-Industries DLC i always found the generic industry created massive amounts of traffic for the footprint of the area zoned for it. Industries allowes you to manage that traffic much better. I'm already at the cusp of traffic-flow, i really don't want to be pushing it any further as congestion is not going to help with any supply chain issues. It's also ugly and repetitive in style so i've avoided it for asthetic reasons as much as anything else.

But if that's what's needed for the city to 'work' then at least i won't have to abandon the city, which is the event horizon i was heading towards.

I do wish the available stats (for everything, but especially for import/export) were better at explaining to where and of what percentage your industry output was going to. It's all a bit non-specific and therefore stab-in-the-dark when you're faced with an issue.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Interesting what you say about 'generic' industry, as i've only been using the Industries DLC to serve that aspect - and it seemed to work fine up until the 80k population point where commercial needs suddenly collapsed. There are no sea connections available on this particular map, so a cargo port isn't viable - but i do have a cargo airport and six cargo train stations plus motoway connections to other cities north, south, east and west, so i should be pretty well covered for import/export. I'm not wanting for warehouse space either. I've even boosted unique factories output to the 150% max, but it still doesn't seem to dent that commercial appetite for goods.

I've avoided using the base game/generic industry as pre-Industries DLC i always found the generic industry created massive amounts of traffic for the footprint of the area zoned for it. Industries allowes you to manage that traffic much better. I'm already at the cusp of traffic-flow, i really don't want to be pushing it any further as congestion is not going to help with any supply chain issues. It's also ugly and repetitive in style so i've avoided it for asthetic reasons as much as anything else.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Vanilla generic industry just because I hate the assets. Obviously unique factories only create specific items, this will satiate some of the demand for goods, but I think they still put out requests for generic goods - if you're importing those you'll probably see that's a big wedge of the pie on the import chart, and a small one on the export tab. Making them locally might cut down on the import traffic at your freight hubs.

Managing industrial traffic can be a pain, ultimately the best idea is to not cluster it too tightly and make sure you have really well thought out road hierarchy and lane maths!

edit:

You can see from this diagram what the effect of missing Generic Industry can be.

 

[TheCracker]

Managing industrial traffic can be a pain, ultimately the best idea is to not cluster it too tightly and make sure you have really well thought out road hierarchy and lane maths!

The one large spot of empty land i still had available to build more industry on was fertile farm land. (i know you can 'make' forestable land by just planting trees too) I tried to streamline it by building a raised 4-lane one way 'ring road' around it with slip lanes running down to separate farms which also use just one way roads. I've used that method before and it can work pretty well. This time? All the traffic wants to fight over one of the middle lanes, leaving three mostly empty lanes and a load of tailbacks back onto the main motorway :/

I'm sure there must be a PC mod to sort that sort of issue out.

 

[TheCracker]

So i eventually 'fixed' my issue of the decimated commercial sector. Turns out i was exporting too much product. Nothing seemed to be working. I had increased all the unique factories output to 150%. Introduced much more 'Industries' industry plus, as suggested, zoned some vanilla industry. No difference to the lack of products was made.

I did however have 6 cargo rail stations a cargo airport and a cargo airport hub. I switched off 5 of the 6 cargo rail stations and the cargo airport hub. Slowly the need for product subsided. I've now switched back on all but one of the cargo stations and removed the cargo airport hub. Looks to have done the trick 👍

Unfortunately whilst i was waiting for those changes to make a difference i 'tidied up' some of the coastline where i had some quay walls with still a touch of land on the water side of the quay. I reduced the land height so the water now met the actual wall, but now i have much reduced river height which now means my pumping stations are inland, a beached fishing fleet and neighbourhoods complaining on mass about reduced land values.

 

[MatskiMonk]

So i eventually 'fixed' my issue of the decimated commercial sector. Turns out i was exporting too much product. Nothing seemed to be working. I had increased all the unique factories output to 150%. Introduced much more 'Industries' industry plus, as suggested, zoned some vanilla industry. No difference to the lack of products was made.

I did however have 6 cargo rail stations a cargo airport and a cargo airport hub. I switched off 5 of the 6 cargo rail stations and the cargo airport hub. Slowly the need for product subsided. I've now switched back on all but one of the cargo stations and removed the cargo airport hub. Looks to have done the trick 👍

Hmmm, I suppose it makes sense that there's a ratio of cargo facilities to production resource that means a fixed level of demand (from outside connections that's not linked to your population), those cargo facilities might absorb too much relative to your output, but it's odd it doesn't afford the same opportunities to import goods as well.

I just tried to load up my old big map, to check a couple of things about how the demand requests for resources and goods are handled for rail cargo... forgetting that every save file I've got before my current project is totally borked.

 

[TheCracker]

Hmmm, I suppose it makes sense that there's a ratio of cargo facilities to production resource that means a fixed level of demand (from outside connections that's not linked to your population), those cargo facilities might absorb too much relative to your output, but it's odd it doesn't afford the same opportunities to import goods as well.

I just tried to load up my old big map, to check a couple of things about how the demand requests for resources and goods are handled for rail cargo... forgetting that every save file I've got before my current project is totally borked.

I wondered if it was just easier for businesses to export than to transport into the city and back?

I’d originally zoned my first industry on a relatively flat area close to existing intercity rail lines and motorways where there were ample resources to exploit and room to expand. Naturally my cargo terminals got sited along these city to city transport routes. It was maybe far simpler for industry close by to take them to these terminals to export than to serve local commerce?

Without a more in-depth break down to how supply/demand, export/import is controlled in game it’s difficult to know for sure.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I wondered if it was just easier for businesses to export than to transport into the city and back?

I’d originally zoned my first industry on a relatively flat area close to existing intercity rail lines and motorways where there were ample resources to exploit and room to expand. Naturally my cargo terminals got sited along these city to city transport routes. It was maybe far simpler for industry close by to take them to these terminals to export than to serve local commerce?

Without a more in-depth break down to how supply/demand, export/import is controlled in game it’s difficult to know for sure.

I have it in mind the Vanilla system doesn't take distance into account, or at least it's not a deciding factor. I believe it's basically a first come, first served system. Even with industry in 4 corners of a 25 tile map each with their own cargo station, you'd still see vehicles turning up owned by industry on the opposite side of the map.

This is a screen shot from one of the Mods...

The d column in the matches section is the distance, and allows the mod to select which matches it wants based on distance... but that's functionality the mod brings in, I don't think Vanilla does that.

Even in the case it does, it also means that it's easier for your commercial to get goods via import than from your own industry - so there shouldn't really have been a shortfall.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Not really achieved much in Project: London recently.

Having started subscribing to CorelDraw, I was keen to move my texture workflow away from Photoshop CS4 to that instead. Primarily, some elements are much easier to work with - managing the diffuse, normal, alpha, colour, specular and illumination textures in one file for instance, however some parts were a lot harder to figure out. Working with vectors is just better, and it means I can use methods for automatically generating elements of them (via SVG), as well as alter and re-use elements down the line.

Although the Bascule bridge isn't modelled, or textured very well, this is pretty much the first time I've really known what I was doing at every step.

Also, despite building out loads of roads, and renaming them. I've started the base map again. I needed more height for the underground, I was struggling to build some metro under the River Thames, the base of which was 0 height, so I'm assuming that was causing some glitches. I also took the opportunity of starting again, to slim down the map size as much as I could. I wanted to keep London Zoo to the East, and London City Airport to the west on the map (North/South doesn't really matter), and by taking the edges right up to those places I've 'scaled' the map by 7%, this should help with the mismatch on C:S road scales... also also... I'm scaling the contours down to flatten the terrain a bit - a lot of the bumpiness of the height map obviously comes from 'noise' created by taller buildings.

 

[PJTierney]

It is done.

 

[Jtheripper]

Wow no replies? No one plays CS1 anymore? Anyway, this is what I've been working on for New Troubadour. I updated the city in a way where it's more modern and less 1960s. It's still heavily '60s but has does have a couple modern cars here and there. New Suburb, very poor; very scummy.

View attachment 1310718View attachment 1310719View attachment 1310717

Looks a lot nicer it seems than the ps4 version.
I just tried the ps5 remaster as well, and it looks abysmal honestly, almost worse.
Very low detail, aka ps3/x360 level, with bad lod even near, pop-ups, shimmering in trees a little farther etc.
Went back to the ps4 version, even the added tiles advertised are an option in the remaster that if you set it on, warns you of instability etc.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Project: London tiny update.

Nothing particularly interesting, but I finally finished the overlay I'm tracing from. It uses ~340 screen caps stitched together from google maps, to produce a 176mb PNG image of building level googlemaps image. I've also traced the Transport for London, Underground and Overground onto a separate overlay...

The TfL map.. Obviously it runs of the map on most routes, so some are terminated by loops, some will just link to the National Rail network, which I've yet to map out.

the 176mb overlay... it shows pretty much every building, path, road, station, many, many bus stops, the parks and other green spaces... and all the road names.

It's all progressing slowly, I'm flip-flopping between projects, and this overlay has taken a long time.

 

[HarVee]

Been experimenting with render it! to achieve the look of Mafia games, Mafia 2 (top) and Mafia 3 (bottom). Which do you guys prefer?