- 1,309
- The Pool Of Life.
I didn't expect to see actual race cars on the track. 😳😄 Well done. 👏
Cities: Skylines (the Sim City we deserve)
- Thread starter Akira AC
- 1,530 comments
- 129,954 views
I didn't expect to see actual race cars on the track. 😳😄 Well done. 👏
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
@MatskiMonk Good to see the fire department in action! 🚒
I tend to use the roads with grass for my local roads, especially in residential areas. The problem with that is that there’s less parking for the residents.
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
The most common way of doing it is to set up a bus route around the circuit and select an F1 car as the model for the buses. At the moment the 'stop' is at the beginning of the start/finish straight, and you see the cars stop there in the video. It means the circuit also needs to be connected to a bus station, I'm currently using a service cube in the pit lane for this, which you won't see once I've built the pits. I'm not happy with the gravel traps at the moment... Need to find a better way of doing that.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
The ore industry has expanded with a second mine and a couple of processing plants.
In the city, the old high school burned down (well, technically it was slightly too big for the lot, so I made sure it had a little "accident") and was replaced by something a bit more futuristic.
Top grade for that view!
Detailed this intersection with lines and signs. Figured out how to place the shark tooth lines (intersection marking tool) a bit closer to the junction.
I also started working on a new asset
This one is some kind of tourism/entertainment building, I imagine it'll have some restaurants, a rooftop bar, a hotel and on the ground floor a couple of small shops.
In the city, the old high school burned down (well, technically it was slightly too big for the lot, so I made sure it had a little "accident") and was replaced by something a bit more futuristic.
Top grade for that view!
Detailed this intersection with lines and signs. Figured out how to place the shark tooth lines (intersection marking tool) a bit closer to the junction.
I also started working on a new asset
This one is some kind of tourism/entertainment building, I imagine it'll have some restaurants, a rooftop bar, a hotel and on the ground floor a couple of small shops.
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
Forestry Area underway...
.. in the last shot you see a custom Rail Cargo depot from the workshop. This will form part of the internal only cargo network, but for now it's attached to the outside connections. I'd love a bare bones functional rail cargo depot that we could decorate to suit its surroundings a little better but this one wasn't bad... it actually just looks like this...
.. but the trucks coming and going straightline it through the building and across the tracks to the nearest road, despite being attached the road... so I had to build it up to disguise this. The Building Spawn Point editor doesn't seem to work with this asset either... but it's still beats trying to make the vanilla Cargo station fit into a logging yard.
.. in the last shot you see a custom Rail Cargo depot from the workshop. This will form part of the internal only cargo network, but for now it's attached to the outside connections. I'd love a bare bones functional rail cargo depot that we could decorate to suit its surroundings a little better but this one wasn't bad... it actually just looks like this...
.. but the trucks coming and going straightline it through the building and across the tracks to the nearest road, despite being attached the road... so I had to build it up to disguise this. The Building Spawn Point editor doesn't seem to work with this asset either... but it's still beats trying to make the vanilla Cargo station fit into a logging yard.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
The new asset is almost finished! Well the main model anyway. Spent a lot of time creating textures and UV-mapping them. The ground floor was particularly challenging because at the front of the building the floor height is 5 meters while on the back it's 2.9 meters, so I had to create a texture with an adaptable wall height. I'm surprised at how good the railing turned out. I used an alpha texture and a bump map to fake a 3D effect. Of course the game's render engine isn't as sophisticated as Blender's Cycles engine, so it might not look as good in the game.
The triangle structure will light up at night, it should look pretty spectacular
This little fire exit on the back of the building is my favourite detail
Pretty happy with the ground tiles texture as well.
The triangle structure will light up at night, it should look pretty spectacular
This little fire exit on the back of the building is my favourite detail
Pretty happy with the ground tiles texture as well.
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
I usually start by drawing everything from scratch, because I often need very specific dimensions, especially for windows and doors. If the texture needs grains or patches of dirt (usually wood and concrete) then I make a search on the internet for free seamless textures and use that on top of the drawings. For the stone tiles on this model I searched for a seamless tiles texture but it's really hard to find something that is a) perfectly straight, b) seamless, and c) free to use, so I ended up drawing my own tiles and then just pasted a basic concrete texture on top of that.
I don't know if Google has been hardwired to only show commercial sites when you search for textures, because I have a feeling that it was much easier to find free textures in the past.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
The new building is finished*! It fills the lot perfectly
(*I need to fix the pedestrian path over the stairs though, I think I picked the wrong path for it, the pedestrians are now disappearing when they walk on it. When I got that working I'll share it on the workshop.)
The steps on the back of the building matches the slope of the road. Here you can also find The Boatman, which is of course the pub from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
The railing turned out beautifully in the game! Alpha map + normal map = great success
I called this building Club Trinity, because of the triangular theme and the because trinity has the right amount of letters so that I could put one letter between each of the pillars at the front of the building.
(*I need to fix the pedestrian path over the stairs though, I think I picked the wrong path for it, the pedestrians are now disappearing when they walk on it. When I got that working I'll share it on the workshop.)
The steps on the back of the building matches the slope of the road. Here you can also find The Boatman, which is of course the pub from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
The railing turned out beautifully in the game! Alpha map + normal map = great success
I called this building Club Trinity, because of the triangular theme and the because trinity has the right amount of letters so that I could put one letter between each of the pillars at the front of the building.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
The pedestrian path has been fixed and here is Club Trinity on the workshop:
steamcommunity.com
And as a reference to future asset creators (including myself, because I'll probably forget this): It seems like the surface path makes the pedestrians follow the geometry of the mesh (they walk over the surface of the mesh basically), but only if the path is above the mesh. If the mesh goes below the ground, the pedestrians will happily follow (this is probably how the vanilla metro stations work by the way, with the cims walking down the stairs). There is a limit to how close you can put the nodes of the pedestrian paths, if they are too close together then you may not be able to place the building in the game. Hard to say how close too close is, but I'd say roughly 1 grid unit (8 meters) or so.
Steam Workshop::Club Trinity
And as a reference to future asset creators (including myself, because I'll probably forget this): It seems like the surface path makes the pedestrians follow the geometry of the mesh (they walk over the surface of the mesh basically), but only if the path is above the mesh. If the mesh goes below the ground, the pedestrians will happily follow (this is probably how the vanilla metro stations work by the way, with the cims walking down the stairs). There is a limit to how close you can put the nodes of the pedestrian paths, if they are too close together then you may not be able to place the building in the game. Hard to say how close too close is, but I'd say roughly 1 grid unit (8 meters) or so.
Last edited:
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
Constructed a double decker bridge from vanilla assets, then remembered that I was going to demolish the spur of railway line, but I quite like it so I think I'll keep it.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
@MatskiMonk Is that power lines you used for cables?
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
I got the Airport Roads mod and extended the runway to 1.2 km. Still a bit short compared to real airports but I think it's good enough. I'll see if I can find some runway number decals on the workshop.
The arterial road between the city and the airport was upgraded to a 2+2 highway with a cable barrier in the middle. Feels a bit safer now, with the barrier, the wider lanes and the shoulder. I might add a bicycle path to the airport as well, just to give people some options.
Here is an overview of the city. The population is 15,300.
The arterial road between the city and the airport was upgraded to a 2+2 highway with a cable barrier in the middle. Feels a bit safer now, with the barrier, the wider lanes and the shoulder. I might add a bicycle path to the airport as well, just to give people some options.
Here is an overview of the city. The population is 15,300.
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
I spent most of the night sorting out trucks not spawning from my new Ore Mining area, and trying to place a bus stop within some pit buildings I cobbled together for Croxstone Circuit to try and stop the racing cars from waiting on the circuit as much... most of which just wasted a lot time with no real achievement...
.. I did build a cargo station for the mining area... which looks alright...
.. the road along the back is up against the edge of the map, I could do with making the junction a bit larger for some more realistic ramp gradients... but it'll be a PITA... so I might just deleted it and put up with a timed traffic light junction.
I also experimented with making 'Close'/'Dead-ends' look a bit better just by using a normal road and the node controller.... a work in progress... kinda works.
.. I did build a cargo station for the mining area... which looks alright...
.. the road along the back is up against the edge of the map, I could do with making the junction a bit larger for some more realistic ramp gradients... but it'll be a PITA... so I might just deleted it and put up with a timed traffic light junction.
I also experimented with making 'Close'/'Dead-ends' look a bit better just by using a normal road and the node controller.... a work in progress... kinda works.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
Did you figure out what's causing this? If not I would suggest testing the roads by dragging a bus path to the area. If the bus path works, then at least we know that the roads are all connected.
I wanted to record the main bus line of my city. Managed to record about 75% of it before my computer ran out of disk space (my mistake, I forgot to delete a ton of old footage before starting the recording). The good part is that traffic safety seems to have improved, the number of people thrown under the bus is relatively small.
In the city center I realised that I had an opportunity to create a nice scenery by knocking down a couple of buildings and replacing them with an open plaza. That would increase the visibility of a couple of landmark buildings and would make for a nice contrast to the skyscrapers on the other side of the main road. I also built a couple of paths across the square so that people would use it. The radio mast on the hill in the background gave me the idea to build a TV-tower there in the future and make it a tourist destination, perhaps with a cable car connection from the city?
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
After the bus route trick, the broken node mod, and demolishing road links at at each junction sequentially (and bypassing it with a direct link) I think I can put it down to two things;
1) I used a rail network that offered a better tunnel entrance than the vanilla one for one section of the connection to the rail cargo depot. My best guess is that although it appeared functional, it broke the pathfinding algorithm for a shipment to/from an outside connection that was already underway. Changing the rail network cleared it temporarily, a few trucks spawned, but next time I looked it was doing the same thing
and
2) the Extractor building was hooked onto the road network at a node, I think this has the same effect as the short segment, or node angles problem, after the above fix solved this temporarily, moving the node seemed to fix it permanently.
I also had to demolish the mine and rebuild it before it would clear whatever 'jam' or 'break' there was. As you can imagine, isolating specific things when there was possibly more than one thing at play was frustrating, and I think once it gets an entry that's stuck, it relates to the extractor type, and not the vehicles/shipments itself - several total traffic despawns didn't fix anything either.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
I started designing a TV tower / observation deck for that hilltop overlooking the city. It's 170 meters tall and fits on a 2x2 lot. Took some inspiration for the design from a water tower in Dublin.
I spent waaaaaaaay too many hours last night trying to make a nicer European style motorway exit. As anyone who has played vanilla/console knows, the game doesn't let you curve roads in their natural, realistic direction off existing curved roads and it also snaps to nearby nodes even with all snapping off, so you can't get too close to an existing node.
Which in short means if you build a roundabout style exit your junctions are always going to look something like this, it doesn't look nice with the kinks and it does also slow cars down. The roundabout itself also ends up bigger than it should be.
I therefore decided to do some experimenting and found firstly a fully round circle isn't good. I also wanted the roundabout to be on ground level, not raised. After much trial and error I ended up with a base like this. The little roads in the middle of the curve are just guides for the centre.
Even to get to that stage takes a bit of manipulation of roads and land. The key generally is to build with dirt or smallest tarmac road and upgrade. You can do things that it won't allow you if you start with highways/wider roads.
So as I said at this stage if you try and curve off some natural off ramps the game won't let you. I figured since I already have the start of the curve there what If I delete the original bend, build natural curves and then try to join them somehow.
Again using dirt roads, and other dirt roads for grid guides. Not perfect, but not bad. At this stage though I wasn't sure if the game would allow me to make the curves I wanted to join them, it usually doesn't. It did though, thanks to using dirt roads. Then I had to just join up to the exit roads which again isn't easy, the game always wants to curve roads the opposite to the way you want. So the exits are still longer and jankier than I'd hoped.
This is what happens whatever you do trying to curve them naturally. First one fine, second one always curves the wrong way, so no good.
Final thing was to curve the bridges over the motorway, uprade everything and this is the nearly final result
It's still a bit rough and not totally symmetrical despite my best efforts being precise with the freeform roads but I think it's about as good as you'll get on console/vanilla. You may also note that only the two bridges are actually bridge roads, despite the entire thing being bridges to start with including the ramps. Another trick, if you build bridges but then lift the land back up to the exact height, when you upgrade the road it'll switch to a normal road.
I think with a bit of decoration, trees and bushes to hide the janky bits, it'll look pretty nice. I just hope the traffic works on it, otherwise it's hours wasted!
Which in short means if you build a roundabout style exit your junctions are always going to look something like this, it doesn't look nice with the kinks and it does also slow cars down. The roundabout itself also ends up bigger than it should be.
I therefore decided to do some experimenting and found firstly a fully round circle isn't good. I also wanted the roundabout to be on ground level, not raised. After much trial and error I ended up with a base like this. The little roads in the middle of the curve are just guides for the centre.
Even to get to that stage takes a bit of manipulation of roads and land. The key generally is to build with dirt or smallest tarmac road and upgrade. You can do things that it won't allow you if you start with highways/wider roads.
So as I said at this stage if you try and curve off some natural off ramps the game won't let you. I figured since I already have the start of the curve there what If I delete the original bend, build natural curves and then try to join them somehow.
Again using dirt roads, and other dirt roads for grid guides. Not perfect, but not bad. At this stage though I wasn't sure if the game would allow me to make the curves I wanted to join them, it usually doesn't. It did though, thanks to using dirt roads. Then I had to just join up to the exit roads which again isn't easy, the game always wants to curve roads the opposite to the way you want. So the exits are still longer and jankier than I'd hoped.
This is what happens whatever you do trying to curve them naturally. First one fine, second one always curves the wrong way, so no good.
Final thing was to curve the bridges over the motorway, uprade everything and this is the nearly final result
It's still a bit rough and not totally symmetrical despite my best efforts being precise with the freeform roads but I think it's about as good as you'll get on console/vanilla. You may also note that only the two bridges are actually bridge roads, despite the entire thing being bridges to start with including the ramps. Another trick, if you build bridges but then lift the land back up to the exact height, when you upgrade the road it'll switch to a normal road.
I think with a bit of decoration, trees and bushes to hide the janky bits, it'll look pretty nice. I just hope the traffic works on it, otherwise it's hours wasted!
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
I finished the TV tower, only to find that it didn't really suit the location 😅. It was dominating the skyline too much, so I ended up using the radio mast from the Natural disasters DLC instead. I think it would have fitted better in a more urban setting.
You can find the TV tower here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2536710508
This is how the hill turned out without the tower: I put a small amusement park at the top in order to attract visitors, placed a couple of viewing platforms and finally did the cable car line. It goes straight from the hilltop down to the city centre, I had to demolish a school in the process but the end result is pretty nice.
You can find the TV tower here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2536710508
This is how the hill turned out without the tower: I put a small amusement park at the top in order to attract visitors, placed a couple of viewing platforms and finally did the cable car line. It goes straight from the hilltop down to the city centre, I had to demolish a school in the process but the end result is pretty nice.
- 16,432
- United Kingdom
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
In response to the teachers' outrage over a recent incident involving a school and a bulldozer, the city council decided to invest heavily in the education sector.
First, a new high capacity elementary school.
Another elementary school, in an older style.
A state of the art high school.
And last, but certainly not least, the university was expanded with a school of environmental studies.
Of course, to make room for all these new schools, quite a few homes had to be demolished. To compensate, a brand new waterfront neighbourhood was constructed. Hopefully the stunning view will keep them relatively happy.
Also, I just learned that the unemployment level in my city is 20%. Oops. Hopefully the economy will improve now that the people have a chance to get an education.
First, a new high capacity elementary school.
Another elementary school, in an older style.
A state of the art high school.
And last, but certainly not least, the university was expanded with a school of environmental studies.
Of course, to make room for all these new schools, quite a few homes had to be demolished. To compensate, a brand new waterfront neighbourhood was constructed. Hopefully the stunning view will keep them relatively happy.
Also, I just learned that the unemployment level in my city is 20%. Oops. Hopefully the economy will improve now that the people have a chance to get an education.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
Unemployment dropped to 14% thanks to a new forest industry starting up business in a remote part of the island. Some worker homes are available in the small town the company built, but a lot of workers are commuting by train from Saint Martin.
I thought it would be hard to find space for a train line through the city, but because the harbour is separated from the rest of city there was a nice corridor between the two that was just big enough. This train station is not actually a train station, but a unique building placed in front of a basic train station track. Turns out you don't actually need a train station to create stops for a train line, it's enough with just a train station track connected to a pedestrian path.
I thought it would be hard to find space for a train line through the city, but because the harbour is separated from the rest of city there was a nice corridor between the two that was just big enough. This train station is not actually a train station, but a unique building placed in front of a basic train station track. Turns out you don't actually need a train station to create stops for a train line, it's enough with just a train station track connected to a pedestrian path.
- 10,917
- Sweden
- eran0004
Here's a train ride from What's-soon-going-to-be-a-farm-area, through the city of Saint Martin and then to the end station at Woodhurst (the new forestry town). I'm using an old Hungarian train [Steam workshop link] with three cars and a top speed of 75 km/h, it's cute and I don't really need anything faster for a train that's just going around the island.
This is Woodhurst Manor, the luxurious residence of the founders of the forestry company. Strategically placed between the town and the train station, the owners decided to open up their garden for tourists, for a small fee of course. For a slightly larger fee you can also get a guided tour of the manor house.
I have a love-hate relationship with building stuff on hills in this game. On one hand it's annoying that the buildings and roads distort the terrain so much, but on the other hand it often looks really nice from a distance.
The farmhouse next to the manor got some detailing too, this avenue turned out nicely
This is Woodhurst Manor, the luxurious residence of the founders of the forestry company. Strategically placed between the town and the train station, the owners decided to open up their garden for tourists, for a small fee of course. For a slightly larger fee you can also get a guided tour of the manor house.
I have a love-hate relationship with building stuff on hills in this game. On one hand it's annoying that the buildings and roads distort the terrain so much, but on the other hand it often looks really nice from a distance.
The farmhouse next to the manor got some detailing too, this avenue turned out nicely
