Cities: Skylines (the Sim City we deserve)

  • Thread starter Akira AC
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“Shopping Malls” includes:
4 unique buildings: Shopping Plaza, Large Grocery Store, Medium Grocery Store, Mall of Marvels
53 growable buildings added to the commercial zone (neighborhood malls, big box stores, modern luxury malls, and outdoor pedestrian malls)
Additional theme-related props

 
Got my free next gen updates for the PS5. Hoping the more relaxed experience on a console will kick-start my PC building enthusiasm.

Still can't stand the forced highway at the start of a map...
 
What functionality do you want beyond what is already available?
Just convincing scale and customizability like we got with the parks, university and airports expansions. Those didn’t bring much in terms of functionality, but it allowed players to get lost building bespoke areas within cities. I’d say seaports are massively overlooked in this regard.

I’m on Playstation, so I cannot rely on mods to achieve something that comes remotely close.
 
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VXR
Got my free next gen updates for the PS5. Hoping the more relaxed experience on a console will kick-start my PC building enthusiasm.

Still can't stand the forced highway at the start of a map...
How would you rate the next gen version compared to the original?

Does anything stand out apart from extra tiles?
 
Just convincing scale and customizability like we got with the parks, university and airports expansions. Those didn’t bring much in terms of functionality, but it allowed players to get lost building bespoke areas within cities. I’d say seaports are massively overlooked in this regard.

I’m on Playstation, so I cannot rely on mods to achieve something that comes remotely close.
Fair enough.
 
I had a big deathwave occuring and decided to build a monumental cemetery in order to fix that. Turned out that the hill on the other side of the train tracks was a good location. I started with the road network, a mix of pedestrian streets from Plazas and promenades and a road version of the parklife paths from the Steam workshop. Then placed some monuments and deathcare facilities. Finally a bunch of trees and some decorative lights. In total this build gave me an additional 38 hearses.

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With the deathwave taken care of, the residential expansion may continue.
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Sweet. Glad I've got all the DLC! :D have to say though, with all the roads being, or that have been, added to the game recently, I'm loosing track of what I've used in maps that's vanilla and what's workshop.
 
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Well, after the update my games borked. Maybe more incompatible mods than normal.

edit, interestingly my game now has no mods listed as installed, despite still being subscribed to them all still. One interesting off shoot of that, is that the FPS counter says a new map runs at 180 FPS :D
 
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Further to the above, I can only access my Mod list by clicking the content manager link on the update pop-up. If I try going into it from the menu it's still blank. I've switched off everything that's not been updated for the latest update and I can at least start a blank map with some mods working, I can't however open any old save games, even one I started on Monday that was basically just on off-ramp.

Hmmm...

Given how much I was just restarting the same cities and never finishing anything, I'm not actually that bothered, though I am considering just shelving it until CS2 comes out.
 
Further to the above, I can only access my Mod list by clicking the content manager link on the update pop-up. If I try going into it from the menu it's still blank. I've switched off everything that's not been updated for the latest update and I can at least start a blank map with some mods working, I can't however open any old save games, even one I started on Monday that was basically just on off-ramp.

Hmmm...

Given how much I was just restarting the same cities and never finishing anything, I'm not actually that bothered, though I am considering just shelving it until CS2 comes out.
That sounds strange, hope you can get it to work again. I just went through all my mods and checked their steam pages to see if some had been reported as broken. Most of the mods were fine, just had to change one or two to a "temporary fix" version and another one back to the original from a temporary fix version which was no longer needed. Fortunately the game loads well for me.

Speaking of mods, here's a CSL Map View map view of my current project.

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That sounds strange, hope you can get it to work again.
I've turned back on a bunch of mods and now it works again, so it was obviously a mod that wasn't compatible but has now been fixed. I didn't do it methodically though, so I'm not sure which one is a potential game breaker.

edit: still not working properly, no buildings appear when I place them! edit2: Plop the growables was still turned off. Works now.
 
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Some more spaghetti. The coastline here is a little steep so i decided to try a stacked highway configuration. This led to an interesting interchange, made more complicated by the fact that it shares the space with a railway junction.

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This screenshot reminds me a lot about some East European cities I've been to. Warsaw, Budapest, Lodz, Batumi, Gdansk. The corner building is a new asset I found recently, by a Brazilian creator (username DBrum on Steam).
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I'd like to think it is just a temporary error, but i have a feeling it was intentional, which is a shame.

Thankfully C:S is one of those games that regularly gets discounted on the store, so once it comes down in price again... (Its currently £39! £32.99 - for an 8 year old game!)

edit
- There's a website that tracks PSStore game prices over the years and it shows that for the past 3 years or so the main game has dropped, consistantly, to either £7 or £9 every other month for a short period of time. So shouldn't be long before it drops in price again. Thankfully with the PS5 version of the store, you can set alerts to when a game you favourite is offered in a deal.
Looks like my prediction was correct. The Remastered update is now down to £8.24 (75% off retail) on the PS Store.

I've bought and downloaded it but not had chance to try it as yet.
 
The new financial/skyscraper district is growing nicely.
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I built an airport on the other side of the river. It's based on the layout of Oslo's Gardermoen airport, but scaled down a little. I used gravel paths to sketch the layout of the runways, taxiways and concourses.
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The highway splits into three ramps. The left goes directly to the parking garage, the middle goes to arrivals and the right goes to departures.
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The airport design is a mix of the classical style and the ultramodern style. The classical concourses are connected to small gates while the ultramodern concourses are connected to medium and large gates.
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I'm playing with transition curves again, after reading a paper about a Symmetrically Projected Transition Curve (SPTC). It basically takes the old 19th century method of simplifying the clothoid spiral into a third degree polynomial (basically the first term of the Taylor series expansion of the clothoid function), but takes advantage of the fact that we now have computers and can easily and quickly calculate as many terms of the Taylor series as we need.

The benefit of approximating the clothoid with a polynomial is that the polynomial is well behaved and it's relatively easy to construct.

I've put together a quick and dirty test environment in Python and implemented some limitations from Cities Skylines (for example, each road segment can't be longer than 96 meter, and can't be shorter than 32 meters.

So far it looks promising. The result looks more accurate than my previous script and it's a lot easier to understand what's actually going on :D I should have a script ready for the Python Console mod within about a week or so.


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I'm playing with transition curves again, after reading a paper about a Symmetrically Projected Transition Curve (SPTC). It basically takes the old 19th century method of simplifying the clothoid spiral into a third degree polynomial (basically the first term of the Taylor series expansion of the clothoid function), but takes advantage of the fact that we now have computers and can easily and quickly calculate as many terms of the Taylor series as we need.

The benefit of approximating the clothoid with a polynomial is that the polynomial is well behaved and it's relatively easy to construct.

I was just thinking this myself the other day.





... okay, no I wasn't ...
 
I'm playing with transition curves again, after reading a paper about a Symmetrically Projected Transition Curve (SPTC). It basically takes the old 19th century method of simplifying the clothoid spiral into a third degree polynomial (basically the first term of the Taylor series expansion of the clothoid function), but takes advantage of the fact that we now have computers and can easily and quickly calculate as many terms of the Taylor series as we need.

The benefit of approximating the clothoid with a polynomial is that the polynomial is well behaved and it's relatively easy to construct.

I've put together a quick and dirty test environment in Python and implemented some limitations from Cities Skylines (for example, each road segment can't be longer than 96 meter, and can't be shorter than 32 meters.

So far it looks promising. The result looks more accurate than my previous script and it's a lot easier to understand what's actually going on :D I should have a script ready for the Python Console mod within about a week or so.
Good Burger Reading GIF


Meanwhile, me: haha road go turn on self
 
The script is working :) It just took half a day of bug-fixing! For some reason the script produced perfect curves outside of Cities Skylines, but in the game the curves became distorted in weird ways. Eventually I tracked the bug down to a division error, turns out that in the Python version used by the Skylines Python mod, if you try to divide an integer by something, the program will perform a floor division by default (e.g. 7/2 = 3, 11/5 = 2, 20/21 = 0, etc) and order to get proper division you must first declare that the numerator is a floating point number.

Now it's been fixed and the corners look great!

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I have to confess since CS2 was announced, I've lost a lot of motivation for the game.

Part of it is because I'm working towards spending a lot of time on making assets, and though that time won't be lost, I'm hesitant until I know what the situation is with modding.

Secondly, I've not been able to (well, perhaps overly cautious in doing so) reinstate all my mods since the last update, consequently I've not bought the last DLC's either, which normally I'd be all over...




... really want that release date for the new game.
 
I bought the Remastered PS5 versions a few weeks back but other than a very brief play around with it, i don't have the motivation to do much with it at all. I couldn't even tell you the diffrences between this and the PS4 original. There's certainly nothing graphical about it that seems a step up.

Because you can't port existing cities between the two and because none of the new DLC is available for it yet, there's nothing making me want to start another city from scratch when there's nothing fresh to play around with. The more than 9 tiles thing is intriguing on paper, but when you are faced with starting a new city from afresh it's hardly relevent.
 
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