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CO Word of the Week #7

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
 
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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.
And what about people in countries that do not use the Gregorian calendar? Do they have to do extra conversions? Thats not fair.:rolleyes:
 
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Please, make cargo terminals working properly. I have hundreds of tons of products. And all 16 trucks in each terminal are moving those between terminals. And that is all.
 
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.
 
And what about people in countries that do not use the Gregorian calendar? Do they have to do extra conversions? Thats not fair.:rolleyes:
The Gregorian calendar is a globally accepted standard.

Using yyyy/mm/dd is a globally accepted standard.

Using summer winter autumn spring is NOT a globally accepted standard.

When you're customer base is global, you should use globally accepted standards. That's how things have worked for decades.
 
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I'm sorry you are having difficulty playing the game but stating that the game is unplayable and everyone needs to start over after 200k is factually incorrect:

View attachment 1061828

By definition, every sim game will slow down as the city grows. This has been the case forever. I remember having dead slow cities in SC2K, 3K, and SC4, which were not agent based simulations. The more there is to process, the slower it will be.

Perhaps you could share your system specs with us? In any case, I truly hope the upcoming patches help out with the performance issues you are experiencing, as the game gets really fun and challenging at higher populations!

Let's see what this week's patch brings us!
Of course.

RTX 4090
i9 13900k
32gb ram
 
Maybe I am missing something, but it seems that one cannot have cities with "infinite" populations (or more realistically, cities with populations in the mid to high 6 digits or even 7 digits) without putting extreme stress on both the CPU and GPU which certainly have to be the limiting factors. On consoles those limitations should be obvious and players should be told that there are maximum populations per each map within a range of some sort. In the case of PC players who all have different types of CPU's and GPU's, there also must be obvious limitations as to population size, but it would be more difficult for CO to project these limits, but nevertheless those limits must be addressed so that players know the practical population limits of the cities they are building.

It is obvious that some players only seem to care about building cities with the largest populations possible, whereas others like me prefer to build multiple cities and communities with varying populations. CO needs to recognize that they have a wide audience of players of all ages and abilities and objectives (which I assume they already do) and not succumb to only meeting the demands of the those PC players who demand both population maximums and perfection as to how the game performs at different levels. Maybe there needs to be TWO versions of the game: CS 2 and CS 2 Pro!
Sure, I’m not expecting infinite population, or a few millions. I was expecting that by today’s standards, the game will become unplayable at about 1 million, with my specs (posted in a comment above).

But it happens after 200/250k. Not just to me, but to most of the people with high-end/extreme PC’s I’ve spoken to on discord.
 
Sure, I’m not expecting infinite population, or a few millions. I was expecting that by today’s standards, the game will become unplayable at about 1 million, with my specs (posted in a comment above).

But it happens after 200/250k. Not just to me, but to most of the people with high-end/extreme PC’s I’ve spoken to on discord.
Thanks for sharing your specs! It's very odd as I have similar specs (AMD 7950X, 64GB, 4090) and I haven't experienced these issues. I'm up to 910k since we last spoke and while the game is not running as fast as on a fresh city, it is still very much playable.

I wonder if it would be possible to examine system logs for people experiencing these issues. Perhaps there's a common cause?

I have found that managing and getting rid of traffic jams helps tremendously with performance.
 
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Cool to shut the company down during the holidays. That way employees can recharge their batteries and celebrate with their loved ones. I am fortunate to work at such a company too and it makes a huge difference.

Enjoy the holidays! :D
 
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Thanks for sharing your specs! It's very odd as I have similar specs (AMD 7950X, 64GB, 4090) and I haven't experienced these issues. I'm up to 910k since we last spoke and while the game is not running as fast as on a fresh city, it is still very much playable.

I wonder if it would be possible to examine system logs for people experiencing these issues. Perhaps there's a common cause?

I have found that managing and getting rid of traffic jams helps tremendously with performance.
Wow, almost a million population--I had wondered if that was even achievable. I just ordered an i7-13700F RTX 4060 32GB system for my first gaming computer which has to also function as my work at home desktop as I found a deal from Costco online for $300 discount on a $1299 computer as that was all my budget allowed--hope it works half as good as your system!
 
Hi @co_avanya, thank you for the answer.

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?
Your assumption is basically correct - I guess that should be enough on that end :)

An example from a different game/sim related forum actually exists:

1702421670082.png


Feedback-logged in this example means that it's provided to the actual developing team members for review iirc, kinda like the story was created as an improvement item and is now sitting in the Jira backlog for further refinement/decision ;)
 
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Wow, almost a million population--I had wondered if that was even achievable. I just ordered an i7-13700F RTX 4060 32GB system for my first gaming computer which has to also function as my work at home desktop as I found a deal from Costco online for $300 discount on a $1299 computer as that was all my budget allowed--hope it works half as good as your system!
I think you should be fine! Traffic is becoming a HUGE issue for me. I'm building mass transit left and right but there is simply too much people on the road now. Trying to fill those pesky "Lack of Labor" warnings lol
 
The Gregorian calendar is a globally accepted standard.

Using yyyy/mm/dd is a globally accepted standard.

Using summer winter autumn spring is NOT a globally accepted standard.

When you're customer base is global, you should use globally accepted standards. That's how things have worked for decades.
But all maps are on the northern hemisphere or am I wrong? Then it's correct right? Would be fair to have the months / seasons reversed if there is a map on the southern hemisphere. Suggestion?
 
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There are southern hemisphere maps in the game ;)

The point here was that Mariina inadvertently specified "spring" as a time period from her northern European perspective, whereas in the southern hemisphere it will be autumn. While one person says that something like this can happen, the next sees their universal human rights disregarded. Well, it happens. People are just different.
 
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Please fix upgrading the highway that's not on the ground not aligned(upgrading an elevated, quay, retaining wall highway not aligned)PLS FIX
 

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But all maps are on the northern hemisphere or am I wrong? Then it's correct right? Would be fair to have the months / seasons reversed if there is a map on the southern hemisphere. Suggestion?

There are southern hemisphere maps in the game ;)

The point here was that Mariina inadvertently specified "spring" as a time period from her northern European perspective, whereas in the southern hemisphere it will be autumn. While one person says that something like this can happen, the next sees their universal human rights disregarded. Well, it happens. People are just different.
What ClemiMD said.

The WotW includes a phrase that something is coming in Spring. It would be better to state coming in Q2 2024, or March - May.

For instance, I could easily interpret that the worse offending performance issues won't be sorted out till October next year (southern Spring). That's quite a big difference to March, the actual intended period.

Or what if the WotW stated the worst performance bugs will be sorted by end of Summer. To me, that means performance will be fixed by February. The intent may actually be August.

It's about the expectations that are being set. Easily resolved just by using global standard terms like quarter or month.
 
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What ClemiMD said.

The WotW includes a phrase that something is coming in Spring. It would be better to state coming in Q2 2024, or March - May.

For instance, I could easily interpret that the worse offending performance issues won't be sorted out till October next year (southern Spring). That's quite a big difference to March, the actual intended period.

Or what if the WotW stated the worst performance bugs will be sorted by end of Summer. To me, that means performance will be fixed by February. The intent may actually be August.

It's about the expectations that are being set. Easily resolved just by using global standard terms like quarter or month.
Sometimes I think people are really looking into every sentence to find something negative to say. Life is short, cheer up!

Disney + Ubisoft also announced their roadmap for the new Avatar game. Guess what they use in their gigantic marketing campaign, video trailers and websites...

- STORY PACK #1: THE SKY BREAKER
Face the RDA and protect the unity of the clans. Coming Summer 2024.
- STORY PACK #2: SECRETS OF THE SPIRES
Engage in epic aerial combat on your banshee to uncover the secrets of this new canyon region and restore the peace before it’s too late! Coming Fall 2024.

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/avatar/frontiers-of-pandora/post-launch


It seems that no one actually misunderstood what was written in WOW, but some are choosing to misunderstand it.
 
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Hyvaa joulua! Thank you for all your efforts. Several aspects of Cities Skylines 2 are incredibly good, Roads, trees, landscape, all the Signature buildings- Fantastic.

Stay focused on the core of the game improvements, it take time to make a masterpiece.
 
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