And we're back from our summer vacation! Only to skip the word next week because I will be in Cologne for Gamescom with Karoliina, our game designer. It's going to be epic and there will be an announcement made on Thursday the 18th. I honestly can't wait! Therefore this week the team and I are working hard to have everything ready for the event, basically continuing from what we left off with before the vacation.

The vacation was great and we actually managed to have nice and warm weather here in Finland for a change. Having four weeks off gave us plenty of time to relax and gather energy for the rest of the year. The best thing with long vacation is that you really start to look forward to getting back to work so it's great for motivation. I do believe there needs to be a balance with work and freetime, you know, to get the best out of your employees. Happy dev is a productive dev!

We ate a cake on Monday, cause that is kind of what we do here

How was your summer vacation? (Given that you live on the Northern Hemisphere and in a country that has annual holidays, like Finland does.) I closed all notifications on my phone, tried not to read any emails and went to a couple of festivals. The highlight of the summer for me was definitely seeing Helloween play at the John Smith Rock Festival in Central Finland. Otherwise I pretty much spent my vacation doing nothing as our horses also enjoyed a couple of weeks off training and competitions.

Tilda and Alpo just horsing around.

All in all the team and I are very excited to be back at the office and continue to work on Cities: Skylines! Stay tuned for more updates this autumn and if any of you are at Gamescom next week, be sure to visit the Paradox booth!

Cheers,
Mariina

 

[Bendlovajager]

I am so sad that I have to wait another year or several months for another expansion. I will probably buy this one too but it's the naval traffic and improved industry I am after. Is your development always focused on one think? Or do you develop more things simultaneously?

 

[japiek]

Oh no.... not this!
What is with optimising the horrible traffic-system, before you come with disasters?

I couldn't agree more. Utter disbelief here this Truth gets way more disagrees than agrees.

The game is ALPHA like this. Bought it, noticed this, tried all mods to change this to no satisfactory avail, then uninstalled. Now monitoring if it will finally be fixed. No merging lanes? And still Absolute Zombie behavior? They often merge right on top of each other, or stop on the highway to change a damn lane, waiting and waiting. It's horrendous. Why no skimming lanes? Why no decent behavior? A proximity check for vehicles nearby (in a certain radius if it really brings down the latest cpus?) Give us something, like Linuxfan relentlessly does! Without his mod, multi lane roads are mere decoration. Without Network Expansions, they don't even provide you with decent infrastructure toolbox. The train line overhead line poles are so messy and clumsy when you don't build them in pieces of 12.000 units (or multiples of course) exactly and always in the same direction. Why no option to redraw the whole track once it's in place to make it look realistic and nice, evenly placed poles toward the horizon? It's so... lacking.

And now we get disasters.... like f---- Sim City 2000. Woo-hee! I would really love to see a tsunami ruin my train station I spent three nights building!

Dude, I really hope one day the devs will hear us. I'll give you an "Agree x16"!

 

[Anttonilla]

I couldn't agree more. Utter disbelief here this Truth gets way more disagrees than agrees.

The game is ALPHA like this. Bought it, noticed this, tried all mods to change this to no satisfactory avail, then uninstalled. Now monitoring if it will finally be fixed.

The traffic is far from perfect, but it's not that bad! Seriously, it's one of the challenges of the game and in the end, it's not that hard to master. I suggest you give this game another try.

 

[japiek]

I know it is extremely difficult to program AI that is realistic and runs on a single CPU thread. I certainly understand that, I can't write programs but I know a lot about computers and computer sciences. But the dev team is not even trying. It's unchanged since version 1.0.7 or something. Although Traffic Manager President does alleviate a lot of my frustrations (and I feel it's quite shameful it's up to a German student instead of the dev team!) and adds A LOT of tools required to manage traffic (speed and vehicle limitations, traffic lights management, priority signs, also NOT in vanilla game to date!), we get quite nice traffic in the city itself. However, on the highway.... they merge on top of each other, they race on in the right lane, and near exits they often suddenly stop on the highway, wanting to go to the lane to the left, with traffic behind it backing up! There is no way to achieve 'taking over on the left only' on highways, cars just take a lane, a random speed and change randomly even if there is a f--- truck right where they need to go. There are TONS of cars taking roads that lead to nowhere (pathfinding anyone?), etc, etc. And why are we still fed up with the stupid crossings at intersections only? Why cant we remove and add crossings where we like to get an optimal traffic flow? Why are the highway textures at on and offramps still such a mess? Just like the intersections in the city, no markings at all?

At one time I needed 70 mods to get this thing going. All obliged. You need local stations only to fix the damn endless arrays of outside trains on tracks meant for local trains only AND to create pass-thru only platforms in modular stations. You need NEXT roads. Fixes for power and water consumption. Fixes that actually fill buildings to near capacity. Airport roads top build realisticly placed runways between mountain ranges. Precision Engineering tools. Road tools to make extremely long <1% grade bridges. You also need mass transit mods to stop a busline from spawing 275 busses. Etc, etc. The community makes the game playable, the devs give us snowflakes and 1998 sport animations in sports buildings.

And now they proudly announce... well another thing we don't need considering the STILL extremely lacking transportation department of this game. That can't even be saved by the mod community, who seem to be much more interested in this project than the dev team themselves.

It's such a shame. I still kinda love this game. When fixed, I will probably consider it the best game EVER. (C64 gamer here, that old).... There are so many cool things in the games as well of course. But to tell you the truth, I think the dev will keep on announcing rubbish, and at one point in the future just abandon this game, leaving the game killing traffic as-is. I feel they're lazy. Linuxfan did a great job improving. I'm sure CO has an algorithm or mathwizard in their team, able to atleast vastly improve? The merge-on-top-of-a-truck should have been fixed in version 1.0.1.

Trying and trying again and again is succeeding. We build planes. Eradicate diseases. Landed on the moon. We will build fusion plants. And now you're telling me a multi-million dollar title developed by hundreds of smart people can't bring us a better traffic simulation? I don't buy that. I hope one day they will hear me. I will take a month off work and play this. Finally creating a 1M city. For now, I will be returning to EU4. Rarely a braindead AI moment in that game.

 

[Artt]

I am afraid the seasons will not happen for Cities: Skylines, because the game was not originally planned to have them and implementing it afterwards is quite tricky business

But there is already Mod on Steam for seasons "Environment Changer", or somth like that. Not very reliable though. But it`s working. And u can change your winter maps to European, and back. If modders could do, devs definitely should be smart enough to make it perfect in base game)
Snowfall isnt full without seasons....(

 

[MotownCountry]

But there is already Mod on Steam for seasons "Environment Changer", or somth like that. Not very reliable though. But it`s working. And u can change your winter maps to European, and back. If modders could do, devs definitely should be smart enough to make it perfect in base game)
Snowfall isnt full without seasons....(

but don't you have to manually change the seasons? i guess that's as good as we'll get, huh?