CO Word of the Week #2

[∆tlαntic4]

We will only continue with new features and content development after we are satisfied with the results on the performance improvements.

We have some developers, who don't have an active performance related task, working the editor and Paradox Mods integration.

Do we have developers fixing bugs or is everyone focused on performance? I think it's more important to have bugs fixed than good performance now

 

[co_martsu]

Hi Mariina

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Cities Skylines II will be fixed soon. I feel sentimental towards you and even though the game had a lot of technical and optimization failures (including bugs), I am still optimistic. The game will certainly reach a satisfactory direction sooner or later. I have not the slightest doubt here.

When it comes to the Animal Shelter DLC, I'm all for it . Dogs, cats, horses and other amazing animals are an important part of human life. The world would be empty without them. At the moment, they are just visual-aesthetic objects that, apart from being, have nothing more. Animals add variety to the world, but they also bring a lot of happiness and are a cure for all evil. They have therapeutic and other properties. It would be nice if the dogs from the game could not only stand, but could also sit, lie, bark and fawn on. They should have more features and interactions with the environment like Cimy. This is a more natural order of things. In turn, stray animals and animals wandering alone around the city should be caught by dog warden. Veterinary clinics could treat sick or even abandoned creatures. Animal shelters, on the other hand, would be a safe house for them, but residents could also adopt them at any time, or even after the owners' death.

It would be worth including in this DLC care for elderly people and orphans (combining them with the animal shelters DLC) with the possibility of building houses for the elderly, orphanages, houses, houses for single mothers, etc. And one more thing, I miss kindergartens for children; ).;

To liven up the world, I would add a greater variety of birds, but also sea mammals and other animals. Water bodies such as lakes, rivers and seas should be home to marine animals.

Don't worry about criticism. She only strengthens. I'm with you.

Take care Mariina

Thank you for the kind words and for the nice ideas for DLC! Indeed the animals in the game could have more meaning to them

I can't wait to get past the performance improvement phase so we can start really digging into the possibilities of future features and content together with you, the community!

 

[FernandoLins86]

Hi CO Team, hope you are all doing well. I want to say thanks for all the hard work you have been doing to patch the game. The first and second patch have improved things a lot for me already, so I'm looking forward to the next ones.

The game is fun, but I've been having a lot of issues with AI traffic, especially long lines of traffic behind cars, busses or trucks that decided to go into or out of a lane for a turn at the very last second possible, or turning in a direction that is forbidden, completely ignoring the rules set for the road with the road tools. I have also noticed sometimes vehicles will go around the roundabout twice before choosing an exit. I'm hoping the next few patches can address these issues so that I don't need to abandon my 95K population city as it slowly drowns in traffic and CPU hickups.

Keep up the great work!

 

[EinherjarLucian]

This is exactly the plan, and we're working as fast as we can to deliver the fixes.

I'm just relieved it's the dogs and not the children.

Just like Cities: Skylines this game also has fail conditions where the game helps the player so that there is no hard failure ending the progress of a city entirely. Is your feedback that the game should punish the player more for the mistakes? We can most certainly look into the difficulty level in the future and see if there could a hard mode implemented.

Perhaps Hard Mode could go hand-in-hand with authoritarian mode, similar to the Tropico games.

 

[Arctyc]

That is exactly what I meant by choosing not to release simultaniously and treating customers different. If Steam is instant anyway, it is possible to treat everyone the same and you choose actively not too. Other developers don't do this. If paid DLC is not released simultanously I will never purchase any in the future.

That said, I am happy you are looking into it.

So you would rather they make everyone on steam wait because you have to wait? How does that make your experience any better? That is simply spiteful. "If I can't have it, nobody can."

 

[EinherjarLucian]

Thank you for the kind words and for the nice ideas for DLC! Indeed the animals in the game could have more meaning to them

I can't wait to get past the performance improvement phase so we can start really digging into the possibilities of future features and content together with you, the community!

Another possibility for a bugfix-turned-feature DLC could be driving schools.

Seriously, the road behavior of drivers in cars can only be described as "maniacal" and "insane." Every driver I've seen cuts to new lanes with no warning, as close to the intersection as they can get. Normally, a driver will select the lane they need to go to well in advance.

Perhaps this Driving Anarchy could be a metric that combines many factors (age, education, recency of a traffic citation, number of times breaking driving rules without getting caught, recency of driving school, time in the city to get used to the traffic layout) to determine if the driver does something... "inadvisable" or not?

 

[EinherjarLucian]

That is exactly what I meant by choosing not to release simultaniously and treating customers different. If Steam is instant anyway, it is possible to treat everyone the same and you choose actively not too. Other developers don't do this. If paid DLC is not released simultanously I will never purchase any in the future.

That said, I am happy you are looking into it.

Are you seriously suggesting that Steam customers should be penalized because Microsoft takes longer to approve patches?

 

[EinherjarLucian]

Thank you for the message, it's good to be heard and see that you are successfully targeting real issues.

I would like to know when/if it is scheduled to rework the sim speed. I know that sims are generally complex and multivariate, but on my first city I have reached 300k inhabitants and of course, the industries and road systems that go with it. When everything is summed up, the sim is phenomenally slow, which is a shame since I would like to reach 1M inhabitants.

I have no experience in game dev optimisation, however, I would gladly drop visual calculations such as cars, trains, and inhabitants for lower definitions or even none if that could increase the sim speed and help me reach more citizens. By that I mean, focus purely on the calculations, no more entities running and driving everywhere, just the result of their movement in the economy. I feel like, in the actual state, it is numerically impossible to reach the 1M citizens as the inhabitant amount grows exponentially slowly (not due to new citizens/h) but because 1 in-game hour takes exponentially more time to pass. (On a 2080ti, and i7-8700k, 32GB RAM)

If in the parameters you could put a fully sim performance-focused mode so players who want to push the game further can for a while, and get back to normal mode after to see the results, it would simply be amazing. Out of all the issues I have encountered with garbage, deaths, and no more medium-density demand for years, I think the sim speed could fix it as it will show significant variations with small changes (Which is hardly the case for me now).

I know you are all doing your best and I know how hard debugging while live can put you under pressure, I'm looking forward to your new patches and wish you all the best!

Did you already try setting the performance balance setting in the Options panel? There's a setting that lets you choose between simulation performance and display performance.

 

[Prairie_Doggin]

As a small team, we must focus on the task at hand to avoid spreading too thin.

I keep hearing this and I really don't get it.

CS1 was a massive hit. Hire some new people if the workload is too high.

 

[co_martsu]

@co_martsu

After the garbage, what will be the next bug that will take priority to be fixed?

On gameplay side there's an issue with the harbours that will be investigated.

How about the unity crash? You never mentioned it, fixing the garbage issue has a higher priority. I feel like I'm in the group of players that got abandoned.

I tried everything, undervolting the CPU, lowering the GPU power limit, disabling e-cores, disabling XMP, reinstalling the GPU driver with DDU, but my game still crashes with the unity message randomly within 10 minutes.

I have a 13900k and a 4090, but I have to play the game on GFN with only 3080. It's a shame.

We are investigating this. I'm sorry it has not yet been resolved for you.

Hey Martsu,

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions at this stage of the process.
I'm a bit confused by the statement above. This may have happened because you don't know the exact content of the two forum posts that were posted.
It's about the fact that in users' experiments the cities were cut off from the outside world and these cities still function. In another test, a user completely avoided using electricity in the city. The only consequence was that 50% less output was produced in the factory

Don't get me wrong, I like Cities Skylines 2 and I've been looking forward to it for a long time. Your trailers and everything that was released in advance made me really excited. Now the game has been released and there is no deep simulation at all. I'm disappointed by it and apparently other users are too. I'm not a "hard-core player" just because I expect that at least intentionally bad actions lead to consequences.

Again. Maybe your statement above was created because you didn't know the content of the forum posts. Therefore, could you take the time to reconfirm that the game works as expected and is balanced in the point I mentioned?

I haven't had the time to go through those threads so I'll answer on a general level. It seems some players dislike the so called failsafes that prevent a full corruption of the city and would like to see the difficulty increased to the point of "game over". This is something we're open to think about. I respectfully disagree on the deepness of the simulation, especially when comparing to Cities: Skylines. If the game is not functioning as it is intended we will look into it and fix bugs/balance issues, so I will have someone go through those threads to collect feedback. I'm sorry that you feel let down by the simulation.

Do we have developers fixing bugs or is everyone focused on performance? I think it's more important to have bugs fixed than good performance now

We have a group of developers working on performance and at the same time gameplay programmers and designers are looking into to the reported gameplay bugs. We also have a couple of developers making sure the Editor and modding tools are moving forward, but more on that next week!

 

[Surge72]

Just like Cities: Skylines this game also has fail conditions where the game helps the player so that there is no hard failure ending the progress of a city entirely. Is your feedback that the game should punish the player more for the mistakes? We can most certainly look into the difficulty level in the future and see if there could a hard mode implemented.

Fundamentally yes. However, there shouldn't be a label of "hard mode" when you have so strongly sold the concept of a detailed simulation. If anything, the current implementation should be labelled Casual, and the removal of failsafes as Regular or Normal.

Simulations require consistency and expected believable behaviour. If companies can't get any resources to sell, the simulation should not just magically create some just for the sake of keeping said companies active.

Don't you think that removes a large point in this game of yours? Removes the point in all of the effort you have gone through to simulate production chains, supply & demand, and the movement of goods?

Why have you bothered when the game will just do some magic, invisible to the player, so they are under the impression they are creating a well functioning city?

I feel like you have missold this game through all of your Feature Highlight videos that demonstrated a detailed simulation, because none of that matters with these fail-safes, which are so nebulous and opaque to the player, and give us the wrong impression of how our cities are really performing.

 

[Marov84]

Thank you for the kind words and for the nice ideas for DLC! Indeed the animals in the game could have more meaning to them

I can't wait to get past the performance improvement phase so we can start really digging into the possibilities of future features and content together with you, the community!

I am very pleased with this game. I've been eagerly waiting for it for years. I must admit that I bought it quite early. Since I was a child, I dreamed of a real city builder in which I would build a real world, beautiful cities (I loved drawing city plans). Cities Skylines II has just that something, this huge potential, but it needs some refinement . It will definitely work, because it is your child ...

I have been with you since Cities in Motion was created. When Cities Skylines came out, I was simply speechless, I actually fell in love with this game. I followed all the information about her with bated breath. This was also the case with Cities Skylines II. I have several favorite games, but city builders have always been my passion. I share it as much as you, Mariina and your team.

Best regards, Mariusz

P.S. Thank you for your answer Mariina . And for being here

 

[thefluorescentplatypus]

A hard mode would be nice, removing some if not most of the fail saves (Those that reward playing the game wrong).

However, imo the biggest issue are not the fail saves. They save the situation when you are doing stuff completely wrong. But we really need in any mode (easy or hard) way more feedback on what we are doing and way more impact. Even easy mode I should see low happiness when companies permanently go bankrupt. However, what ever you do, you will never have a bad happiness. It should more vary between 0 and 100%, not between 60% and 80% (This is not due to fail saves, a total fail is at 0% happiness, but it is not where most games will end, but there should be better cities at 80% and worse cities at 40% etc)
I think there is a lot of tweaking required. Also I wonder why we only have one type of industry zoning. It would be good to distinguish between storage and manufacturing with both having their specific demand.

I think you hit on the real thing that would benefit from change. I doubt many people would actually use hard mode, so what we really need is a way to tell that a fail safe has been triggered and we need to change something to get the city functioning properly again. We can't solve a problem if we don't know it exists and what it is.

 

[:SomNyx]

Any word on why cims are not using any of the recreational lots? Stadiums, soccer fields, parks are always empty.

 

[co_martsu]

Fundamentally yes. However, there shouldn't be a label of "hard mode" when you have so strongly sold the concept of a detailed simulation. If anything, they currently implementation should be labelled Casual, and the removal of failsafes ask Regular or Normal.

Simulations require consistency and expected believable behaviour. If companies can't get any resources to sell, the simulation should not just magically create some just for the sake of keeping said companies active.

Don't you think that removes a large point in this game of yours? Removes the point in all of the effort you have gone through to simulate production chains, supply & demand, and the movement of goods?

Why have you bothered when the game will just do some magic, invisible to the player, so they are under the impression they are creating a well functioning city?

I feel like you have missold this game through all of your Feature Highlight videos that demonstrated a detailed simulation, because none of that matters with these fail-safes, which are so nebulous and opaque to the player, and give us there wrong impression of how our cities are really performing.

The dev diaries have been written by us, the devs, and we approve the messaging there even with the marketing department wanting to make everything sounds like it's the best thing ever. And I get it, it's their job to sell the features and the game even with the risk that expectations will run high. With that said we do think Cities: Skylines II is a better game than its predecessor. It has issues, but we are working on them.
It's unfortunate that the simulation didn't answer to your expectations and I fully respect and appreciate your feedback. It also sounds like there is room for improvement on the player feedback in the game, since some things might be left unexplained. I can only hope that with the upcoming bugfixes the game is something you can enjoy despite this initial disappointment.

 

[tycoonmike8784]

I'm grateful to see these messages and I hope that you stick to your guns when it comes to making the changes and fixes necessary. I do think that better telegraphing of data in the city would help alleviate a lot of these bugs-that-aren't-really-bugs as will some badly needed tuning of the simulation. But I've been having fun with the game as it stands and can't wait to see more!

 

[Burzghash42]

At this point I'm not really interested in hearing any news unless it's about optimization .

 

[millwalker]

Thank you for the feedback! I'll see if we could get a designer to explain the thoughts behind these in a post of some sort, maybe even in a stream!

I agree, the only info panels I can reliably use to understand how to develop my city are the company profitability - aiming to keep everything in 85%+ so as not to cause too much competition and the population panel to keep an eye on unemployment and grow residential when its below 10%. Everything else seems like unnecessary fluff right now. My other annoyance is that despite having a city attractiveness which is off the scale, only one hotel has spawned in my city.

EDIT: I should also add that I'm really enjoying the game despite some of the bugs (unreliable post service is hurting my CIMs happiness big time), I know how much you guys care about your games so I'm looking forward to the fixes and other developments you have for us in the future..

 

[Marov84]

The dev diaries have been written by us, the devs, and we approve the messaging there even with the marketing department wanting to make everything sounds like it's the best thing ever. And I get it, it's their job to sell the features and the game even with the risk that expectations will run high. With that said we do think Cities: Skylines II is a better game than its predecessor. It has issues, but we are working on them.
It's unfortunate that the simulation didn't answer to your expectations and I fully respect and appreciate your feedback. It also sounds like there is room for improvement on the player feedback in the game, since some things might be left unexplained. I can only hope that with the upcoming bugfixes the game is something you can enjoy despite this initial disappointment.

I must admit that I miss the information panel in the game, from which I could see what their goal was and where the Cims, cars, etc. were going. Cities Skylines had such a function. This was very helpful in the game.

 

[Lordinouille]

Did you already try setting the performance balance setting in the Options panel? There's a setting that lets you choose between simulation performance and display performance.

Hey!

Yes I have tested all possible settings in all different conditions from multiple sources online. It is still varies a lot from slow to extremely slow. I've discussed about these issues to other people on Discord and 200-300K seems to be a hard limit for a lot of us.