CO Word of the Week #7

[co_martsu]

It’s time for the last CO Word of the Week this year. Next week we’ll start our holidays and will be away for a few weeks. But before the holidays there’s still time for the last patch, which is planned to go out this week. We will of course have full patch notes for you when it releases, but in the meantime, I can give you a sneak peek at what’s included. On the performance side of things, the patch adds the level of detail models for characters and improves the geometry layout for all assets. This won’t be the last update to performance, it takes us one more step towards our goals.

As promised, we’ve also managed to include a bunch of gameplay fixes and improvements. The patch changes how money is calculated and shown in your city. We hear your feedback and hope these improvements make the budget more transparent and easier to determine what new services your city can afford. We’re grateful for all the feedback you have shared, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on things to understand how things feel after the patch. We’ve also improved how vehicles change lanes, fixed situations where the resource amount stored would end up as a negative value, and added the line color to ships and cargo trains so you can easily see which lines they belong to.

The patch also includes a little holiday gift in the form of two new maps that were the result of internal testing of the Map Editor. There are still a few things missing from the Map Editor for it to be fully functional, like proper preview images showing off your amazing new maps, but we’re making good progress. I can’t wait to see what kind of maps you create! In the meantime, here’s the brief I gave the designers for the new maps based on some feedback we’ve gotten:

Land of the Eternal Sun
As the name suggests this area basks in the glory of the eternal sun. With literally no rain and steady warm temperatures this is an ideal choice for those looking to build with minimal input from the seasons.

Flatland
Hills, slopes, mountains? No thanks, I'd rather stay leveled. No need for contour lines on this land!

To my great disappointment, the designers changed both the names and the descriptions of the maps to “better fit the existing style” of the game. So Sunshine Peninsula and Corral Riches are the names of the new maps when you start a new game. Let us know what you think about them!

And then, as promised, let’s go over what our plans for Cities: Skylines II in 2024 are:

Modding
Bringing the mod support to the game is a high priority. This includes the map editor, code modding support, and the asset editor. The asset editor is the part that is most behind the schedule, but we will continue to work on it in January. We’ll be releasing Development Diaries related to the modding, and run an early access program for modders to try the tools before their release. Check out the previous WoW to sign up if you haven’t already!

Consoles
The console versions of the game were delayed and we’re working hard to get the performance and the stability up to par so we can bring the game on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The console versions will also have the modding tools (minus code modding) present on release so the players on console will also be able to create maps and add custom assets.

Expansion Pass
The DLC production is currently on hold and waiting for the higher priority work to be completed, but progress has already been made on the first Asset Pack, Content Creator Packs, and Radio Stations. CCPs are of course created by some of our favorite content creators in the community and the content for the radio is produced by Paradox.

Performance and bug fixing
While we’ve progressed quite a bit on the performance and bug fixing we’re still not satisfied and will continue to improve the quality of the game based on our internal findings and your bug reports and crash logs. To be honest, this is work that we’ll continue throughout the lifetime of the game, as I believe there’s always something we can improve upon, but the biggest remaining offenders should be sorted out during the spring.

Your suggestions/feedback
We'll be taking your suggestions and feedback on board regarding new content, features, and quality-of-life improvements that are not classified as bugs. Your feedback matters and we’ll be drawing inspiration from it for the lifetime of the project, just like we did for Cities: Skylines, so let’s keep the discussions going!

That is the current list of priorities we’ll have in 2024, though we will of course continue to keep an eye on your feedback and adjust our priorities as needed, especially when it comes to performance. We hope to bring you the features and missing platforms as soon as possible, and we’ll announce timelines as we get closer to each release so keep an eye on the CO Word of the Week in the new year for the latest news.

Next week there will be something to round up the year, but this little blog is taking a break until January 15th. I wish everyone lovely holidays and I look very much forward to getting back to work in the New Year!

Sincerely,
Mariina

 

[co_avanya]

May I ask what is your focus when talking about "performance"?
Shortly after the release the GPU was the bottleneck. Now it appears to be the CPU that is going to bottleneck. After a certain amount of people in your city the simulation is getting so slow that it kills all the fun. It's great that my GPU now is running at 60 rather than 100%, but now my CPU is slowly dying.
You advertised that the game is so complex, but I fear that it might be too complex. What are your plans in that regards?

I can answer this one. Our focus has been on GPU-related improvements as that's been what was needed the most, but as we're working our way through those improvements, we'll start to focus on the CPU side of things.

Will the game has FSR3?

We're working on support for newer versions of FSR as well as DLSS for NVIDIA users, but I'm afraid we don't have an update on when we'd be able to bring you those yet.

 

[co_avanya]

Thank you so much for all the hard work. Already have 100 hours of gameplay.

Will this patch fix the police taking criminals to jail?

Could you elaborate on this issue, or (if you have it) link to a report of this?

Will the land value fix be included before the holidays? Haha, just being a bit nosy here. A big thanks to the team for all the hard work! Happy holidays in advance to you too.

Land value affects the entire city, so there's no quick fix. But we're looking into the situation and how we can improve it based on your feedback, and we'll of course keep you updated once we have news to share.

 

[co_avanya]

I can't wait for vehicles to stop breaking the rules so much. And is there perhaps a way for them to notice when one lane is busy with cars trying to enter a parking lot and just bypass that queue? if that's already going to be included in the patch, it would be so amazing.

If there are multiple lanes in the direction they're moving they should already do this, unless of course they also need to enter the parking lot.

Hello thanks for the update, I've a coupla questions if you dont mind... you mention the asset editor is most behind, can I ask if the map editor is the most ready then will you release this when done or must we wait for both edtors to be ready before we can access them in game?

And also, can I connect paths to the parks yet in this new patch? 'Cos I really, really, really wanna do that.

Thanks

We don't have a definite answer to this yet, but we're looking into whether it makes sense to release separately or stick to our original plan to release support for code modding, map making, and asset creation at the same time.

Ooh, and I forgot to ask... you'd mentioned in another update coupla weeks ago and provided a link where people could apply to beta test the map editor. Im sure there were a billion applications, have you already selected the lucky few?

Thanks again

Applications are still open.

Thank you Mariina! I am excited to see what comes with the patch this week (albeit a bit worried as a modder who will have to update my code)!

Can you shed some light on how soon we might expect code mod developers to be invited to the early access period for the modding tools?

Happy holidays to you and your team! Enjoy your break!

I can answer this one while Mariina is busy elsewhere. We're aiming for a few weeks early access before the release of modding support, but at this time we don't have a timeline or date for when it will start. And fingers crossed your mod doesn't require too much fixing after the patch.

Thank you for your reply. I found a link for a person who reported it on the forum and it was marked as confirmed.

I have the issue where police will arrive and the criminal who is still present will not be taken by police. Sometimes the criminal will walk with the destination of the police station but it will change and they end up going elsewhere.

I look forward to this bug fix as I feel it will add a new challenge to the city with crime and jail populations.

I had to remove the link as it wouldn't let ne post it.

Thanks for the additional details, I managed to find it. I'm afraid we don't have an update on the issue yet. We've been able to reproduce it, and we'll dig into it more when the higher priority issues are sorted.

Thank you @co_martsu (Mariina) for the pretty long word of the week, much appreciated as usual!

While I don't have many questions for most part, as it's straight forward to me, I have some specific questions about this:

I know on the bug board bugs get an actual feedback status once a QA had a look at the item - is something like this going to be planned for suggestions too after the "triage phase"?

Personally I kept adding my suggestions to the official Discord channel (may I add them over here too? Is there some preference?) but I think it would be nice to visibly see some lable like "Feedback Logged" or "Under Review" to the ones added at least over here, just to have a rough overview like on bugs.

Talking about bugs: it would also be helpful to have some similar filters to the forums suggestions on bugs too, something like "Your bugs" as for now I have to search for myself to have them all listed (which unfortunately also displays all bugs I participated on, not just the ones I own )

Thank you again and have some great holidays! Catch some energy for the next round in 2024 (which ofc goes out to all team members ).

Feedback is always welcome on the forum, also if it's been posted elsewhere before. Generally, it's a good idea to add to existing threads on the same topic (if there are any) as that makes it easier for us to reference the feedback in the future.

It's an interesting idea to have labels for that forum, though as the person who notes most of the feedback we get on the forum, I think it might just end up with all threads being marked the same, as we go through everything. So perhaps it wouldn't be so useful. Am I correct in assuming that you're mostly looking for confirmation that your feedback has been noted/received?

 

[co_martsu]

My c2 would be unless this is some dependently on the game side i would like to see them as there ready. You have 3 groups of tools that will have some overlap from the moders / creator side i would think there mostly separate. This would give some of use a tools before others (i'm sore that will upset some people) but it would allow some of use get going. Plus it would let you stress the paradox mods site bit by bit.

Can we get a time frame for mod support i would be happy with we are hopping to have this out by the of the Q? 2024.

The only thing I can say is that we're working as fast as we can and we're hoping to share timelines shortly after we are back to work after the holidays. For the partial release I'm with you that one, but let's see how the different areas come together and what makes most sense.

 

[co_avanya]

I see that there are a lot of patches, and that shows a lot of consideration for your teams. However, I have 2 questions.

Do you have to start a city from scratch with each new patch for the corrections to be taken into account? I ask this because the addition of bus stops at the international airport was only carried out after its reconstruction. So I see that the updates are not done automatically on cities that have already been started?

And my other question concerns waste. Since my 250,000 inhabitants, many buildings present problems of waste recovery by garbage collectors despite the construction of multiple landfills, incinerators etc... very few garbage trucks (a third I would say) go out into the city while many buildings have an accumulation of waste...

Thank you for your reply

Fixes to prefabs or assets (like buildings and roads) usually need to be rebuilt before they take effect, but the fixes to the simulation take effect with time. We haven't had a patch that required starting a new city, we always try to avoid that so you can keep playing your existing cities, but the simulation changes can take quite a while to take effect. The more your city was affected by a bug, the longer it will likely take for it to recover after a fix.

I'm not a native English speaker, so I might lose something in translation, but the way it sounds to me is "things we promised long time ago will be ready whenever we feel like getting back to work and we are not gonna give you any time frames because we don't want to be kept accountable and because we don't want to stop the inflow of money from the naive players who might buy our game in the meantime"

How is it possible that almost two months after the release there is no understanding of what needs to be done to fix a part of the game that "supposedly" should have been mostly ready at the time of the release?

It's not unheard of for at least part of the company to work through the holidays when there are urgent things that have to done. If everybody in the company wants to have time off for the holidays - the company should have planned in advance and either complete (most) of the game before release, or tell us "hey, we want to celebrate holidays, so we will release the game in 2024"...

Can we at least get some dates here? Like:
December 22 - January 2 - the company is closed,
January 5 - the next patch with the following things is supposed to come out
January 15 - our CEO will finally be in the office and release the next word of the week..

Not giving us any truthful updates just looks like you want to drag people for as long as possible, so they would miss their refund windows...

First off, your English is great and easy to understand.

I completely understand that it can be frustrating to see us go on holiday when there is work to be done. For some companies, it may make sense to work through the holidays, either with a smaller team or with everyone, but we're not a huge team (around 30 people total) and we will be working on Cities: Skylines II for a long time. It's important to us that we maintain a healthy work-life balance so our team members don't get burnt out. We also need them in 6 months and in 2 years when we're continuing to expand the game with new features. The holiday break allows everyone to recharge and come back with fresh eyes to continue the work that needs to be done in the new year.

I feel like labels for feedback would be nice, they exist for bug reports, people there can see clearly if their voice has been heard or not, however with feedback there is no such thing and it leaves you in a sort of uncertainty, not knowing whether your voice has been heard or not, whether it has been seen or not and then further considered or rejected as an idea

Thank you for this feedback. I'll look into what our options are, though it is extremely rare that an idea is rejected. It's only the things that aren't feasible (like combining several games into one) or ideas that stray very far from a modern city builder, that are not added to our community wishlist. I would love to have the community wishlist public, but I'm still looking for a good system for it. It's already a bit too long for a forum post.

Playtime 376hrs… my city is at 360k and something has happened for my citizens to decide to move out So I’m slowly losing people. Not asking for a fix to my situation here but what’s hard is that I feel like I have no information available to me to figure out what’s going on.

Everyones happy, only complaint is postal service yet they are moving out.

So my question is - are we going to get better data views that will tell us what’s going on under the hub?

Are you seeing just a decline in the population or also buildings getting abandoned as citizens are moving out?

Can I finally play the game after this patch? The unity bug has not been resolved since launch.

Could you elaborate on the issue you're having?

Are there any plans of Hard mod?
It would be great if there was an option to turn off or decrease lump of money every milestone and subsidies.

We hear the desire for more challenging gameplay. A hard mode is on our wishlist, but at this time I'm afraid it isn't the highest priority.

 

[co_martsu]

Seriously, how hard is it to say Q2 2024, or April-May. There is no confusion then, and shows some respect to your customers. When you're selling globally there is no excuse.

Thank you for the feedback, I'll be sure to be more mindful in the future!

 

[co_avanya]

P.s. CO_Avanya, I appreciate you responding. I guess you're one of the few CO employees who tries to take the gaming job seriously...

I don't think it's a fair assumption, that because we have designated personnel to handle community feedback and someone doesn't take part in that, they cannot take their job seriously. We have an incredibly dedicated team of (absolutely lovely!) people who are working hard to solve the issues that are currently affecting the game. Mariina and I make sure to share relevant information with the rest of the team, so they can focus on their specific tasks. As community manager, that's my role on the team, which of course means you get to see a lot more of me than anyone else.

Specifically the Unity 2022.3.7f1_9480356cee4d error which prevents me from even starting up the game.
Opened a bug report since Oct 24, 2023. See https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/game-crashes-after-launching-from-game-pass.1603473/
There are many similar reports on the forum as well.. I'm not the only one.

Thank you for the link. We're investigating the crash reports we receive, but I'm afraid I don't have a concrete update on this.