CO Word of the Week #9

[Samson1971]

Hello everyone, I read through “Word of the Week #9”, I just think this openness is great.

I was also disappointed at first because my system meets the minimum requirements in terms of graphics card and my I7-5930K is even lower, but now it's a lot of fun to play with Cities Skylines 2.

Even if you didn't read anything about the performance in "Word of the Week #9", I really hope that further work will be done on it.

The seasons are great, everything looks pretty nice, but the fact that in the current version 1.0.18f1, the LOD trees are not covered with snow is a shame, what would generally have been nice in autumn, some trees without leaves are.

What I still miss:

An even bigger roundabout, because with the help of roundabouts you can create very nice large intersections. When you have connected all the streets with the roundabout, you delete the roundabout and have a nice intersection.

It's also great that you can build streets very close together, or separate junctions, the only problem is that with these junctions, the traffic lights stand on their own and have nothing to do with the actual intersection and have their own traffic light circuit .

Especially if you remove a diagonal zebra crossing and create a new one in another place and place a traffic light there, it will not work with the other traffic lights at the intersection.

There are so many streets with different numbers of lanes, you can decide whether you want to have parking lanes, wide sidewalks, green areas and/or trees. What I miss here is the removal or omission of sidewalks.

Especially if you create a separate left-turn or right-turn lane, it doesn't look so great, if there is a sidewalk on one side where no pedestrians ever come, if you use the expressway/motorway for this, it's unpleasant to have that on one side then there is no sidewalk.

In addition, no maximum speed can be set for streets or even individual lanes, so you cannot set a speed limit of 30 km/h on sections of the road.

What's also a shame is that you can't optionally provide streets with side walls or quay walls; you always have to terraform the terrain accordingly and that can often be very time-consuming, as this doesn't always work right away.

Stacking roads and tracks doesn't work correctly either, you can't build a road over tracks parallel, tracks over a road can be done, or it happens again and again that pillars are in the middle of the road instead of using wide double pillars.

It's great that the tram can cross train tracks without any problems, but tram and metro don't work again, and the overhead lines at the crossing of tram and train tracks are at different heights, that needs to be improved.

As an elevated version, trams and train tracks cannot cross each other, which is exactly how it is when a sidewalk is connected to an elevated street, the bridge parapet remains intact, it is possible for pedestrians to use the sidewalk, but visually it is not that great If you use a pedestrian street, it can easily be connected to an elevated street.

There are single-lane train tracks that can be used in both directions, there is no suitable track for the tram and metro. You can trick the single-lane tram track so that the tram can travel in both directions over the single-lane tram track, but find it a bit complicated, there is no option at all for the metro.

What's also unpleasant is that level crossings, if they are at too shallow an angle to the train track, the closed barriers protrude into the track.

[parts not in English moderated out]

 

[TripleAgent]

Let's start with modding. I want to apologize for the miscommunication around release time that modding support was imminent. We had a disconnect in information between the community team at Paradox who handle the streams, and our development team. I completely understand that the communications at the time set expectations that we have not lived up to, and I want to apologize for not communicating the situation sooner. It took us longer than it should to realize this information was out there and to update you on the modding situation. We can't undo that, but we have discussed how we can avoid situations like that in the future and make sure that everyone on the community side, whether on our side or Paradox's side, is up-to-date on the situation so we can set expectations you can count on.

I also completely understand the frustration you feel learning that modding, and particularly asset import, are coming later than hoped. Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first. On top of that, we have encountered issues with the asset import, which has delayed the Editor. We are also frustrated by these issues as modding is important to us and we know that a lot of you are looking forward to playing with custom content. All I can say is that we're working on resolving these issues as fast as possible and that we will continue to update you on the progress. This week it means the news that it could take months to resolve, hopefully we'll have some good news to share on the situation in the future. Bad news always sucks, but being open with you about our progress means also sharing the bad news. You deserve to know what's up, and it is of course completely understandable that the news is followed by frustration. I'd like to take the chance to thank you all for remaining constructive. It means a lot to me, personally, and to us as a company, that we can continue to have constructive conversations.

And yet, from October 16, one week away from release, directly from CO:

First and foremost, our in-game editor is currently in its beta phase and will launch shortly after release.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...d-performance-for-cities-skylines-ii.1601865/

How was the editor in the beta phase in 10/16 and soon to be ready "shortly after release"? That's two days before the stream comments on 10/18. Maddie's comments were in line with what CO's announcements were on its own forum! It's hard to blame the disconnect between CO and PDX when it seems like CO was making very similar representations around the same time when they were aware of the massive issues with modding.

 

[S.C. Watson]

that void will be filled with wild and baseless speculation like what we're seeing here.

Monday should be fun.

Not seeing a lot of baseless speculation - no one, I don't think, is expecting PDX or CO to issue refunds. There's a lot of inquiries as to whether or not this will happen, but not an expectation that it will. I think everyone involved full expects that PDX and CO will continue to ignore the topic.

And, yes. Monday's Word Salad of the Week will be interesting.

 

[Krazel]

Not seeing a lot of baseless speculation - no one, I don't think, is expecting PDX or CO to issue refunds. There's a lot of inquiries as to whether or not this will happen, but not an expectation that it will. I think everyone involved full expects that PDX and CO will continue to ignore the topic.

And, yes. Monday's Word Salad of the Week will be interesting.

Pretty sure most of us are done with words. I'm sure there's at least a few people like me who check to see if there's a patch then go play something else. There are such massive algorithmic and core function issues I just don't want to play until they're addressed. At least some of them.

43 days since the last patch. 43. I'm starting to get a chilling feeling that they're moving their resources to other areas of their business or other games. And until I see a massive overhaul on a game that is lacking so much, there's a lot of us that are just done. They need to earn some goodwill back with the community.

 

[CensoredLOL]

Pretty sure most of us are done with words. I'm sure there's at least a few people like me who check to see if there's a patch then go play something else. There are such massive algorithmic and core function issues I just don't want to play until they're addressed. At least some of them.

43 days since the last patch. 43. I'm starting to get a chilling feeling that they're moving their resources to other areas of their business or other games. And until I see a massive overhaul on a game that is lacking so much, there's a lot of us that are just done. They need to earn some goodwill back with the community.

Like I asked previously:

10. Is CO still committed to a 10 year life cycle for this game, or will you pull the plug after contractual obligations (preorder DLC/console release) are met?

 

[recar521]

Monday should be fun.

Indeed! Sad to say but this discussion is now more entertaining than the game!

 

[TripleAgent]

Not seeing a lot of baseless speculation - no one, I don't think, is expecting PDX or CO to issue refunds. There's a lot of inquiries as to whether or not this will happen, but not an expectation that it will. I think everyone involved full expects that PDX and CO will continue to ignore the topic.

And, yes. Monday's Word Salad of the Week will be interesting.

Yeah, I think there's an expectation that they should give refunds but not an expectation that they will because considering they've let so much of their community and goodwill burn down it probably won't be nearly as effective than if they'd done the right thing in November.

Frankly I'm not sure why they don't just publicly release the partially functional beta mod tools now, if that standard is good enough for the game to be released for full price it should be good enough for the free mod tools...

 

[Krazel]

Like I asked previously:

Right now there's less than 8k people playing on steam and the 24 hour peak is less than 8k as well. I fail to understand how this isn't a "all hands on deck, we have to get moving" situation. Meaning everyone get going and we release a tested patch. Which will probably have its own issues. They've been back in the office for a while now, there's no excuse. UNLESS, they really have moved on and are barely putting resources into this anymore.. Either way, we (the consumer) lose.

 

[erkinalp]

I don't know why the max amount is $2 billion but I do know that a 32 bit int maxes out at 2,147,483,647 so this was a bit silly and kind of betrayed your tech background bonafides. Even more the post from her acknowledges the issue and it seems like its on priority to be fixed.

The fix would break all saves or require a compulsory save version migration though.

 

[erkinalp]

Sorry, didn't see this. The answer is no, and the reason is consoles. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all have strict requirements for submitting to their stores that are often changing. There are specific versions of Unity that are supported for submitting builds, and they change which ones they accept annually or even more frequently than that. So a game like CS2 that's been in development for several years might have had to upgrade to newer versions of Unity several times in order to be able to push builds to consoles.

Cities:Skylines 2 is not a pure Unity game. It's mostly its own engine based on a heavily modified Unity.

 

[Ptterz]

You're definitely playing a different game. I don't agree with all the statements saying the game is in general not playable, but there are at least two game breaking issues (land value and industry taxation) that break a running game.

On top of that, there are lots of gameplay issues, missing features and questionable design decisions.

Then we have a very different idea of "game breaking" since none of the bugs there is at the moment prevents you from actually playing the game. They merely affect some of the features and/or functionalities in a way that they may not work as expected.

 

[TripleAgent]

They merely affect some of the features and/or functionalities in a way that they may not work as expected

Those "features and/or functionalities" that aren't working as expected are critical parts of the underlying simulation that makes up the entire game if you aren't a map painter.

 

[Krazel]

Those "features and/or functionalities" that aren't working as expected are critical parts of the underlying simulation that makes up the entire game if you aren't a map painter.

This 100%. If the "game" is just placing down objects then yes, it isn't broken. If it is literally anything other than that, it is game breaking.

 

[Askorti]

And yet, from October 16, one week away from release, directly from CO:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...d-performance-for-cities-skylines-ii.1601865/

How was the editor in the beta phase in 10/16 and soon to be ready "shortly after release"? That's two days before the stream comments on 10/18. Maddie's comments were in line with what CO's announcements were on its own forum! It's hard to blame the disconnect between CO and PDX when it seems like CO was making very similar representations around the same time when they were aware of the massive issues with modding.

I think more attention should be brought to this.

So it wasn't just a disconnect between PDX and CO that led to the community being misled. CO themselves gave us information that was simply not true. Unless, of course, "shortly after release" can be counted in months, and not what most people would expect, weeks.

 

[unmerged(524934)]

I think more attention should be brought to this.

So it wasn't just a disconnect between PDX and CO that led to the community being mislead. CO themselves gave us information that was simply not true. Unless, of course, "shortly after release" can be counted in months, and not what most people would expect, weeks.

Yep, this looks bad for CO, no doubt about it - just one more thing to add to @co_martsu's "oops sorry about that but hey, look over there, packs of fwuffy stray dogs awww!" list of things to talk about this coming Monday I guess.

 

[timfrombriz]

Being lied to since pre release, waiting a month while their on vacation with a game breaking patch, to finally read the first update spent half talking about a toxic community. Then a week later after silence get told everything previous said is a lie, you have many months to wait still, have a nice week.

Its nothing but a middle finger towards players. Thats how it feels for me.

Its not about money for me, its on principals. If you burn me, im going to burn you twice as hard.

Dont mess with an Aussie, we live with spiders and kangaroos.

[P.S Have another nice weekend off Colossal Order, ill be working on mine because I own my responsibilites]

 

[TheLazyHangman]

Instead, the focus is creating a platform that will allow mods on console

It won't even add mods on console, just assets and maps, regardless of how they phrase it.

But that's not even the best part.

Remember the free creator packs that we had in CS1? Those will also be released via PDX Mods for CS2 (like the already announced Region packs), and here is the real magic trick: PDX Mods will not even be supported on GeForce Now! So no future content AT ALL for GFN users. Isn't that sweet?

 

[timfrombriz]

It won't even add mods on console, just assets and maps, regardless of how they phrase it.

But that's not even the best part.

Remember the free creator packs that we had in CS1? Those will also be released via PDX Mods for CS2 (like the already announced Region packs), and here is the real magic trick: PDX Mods will not even be supported on GeForce Now! So no future content AT ALL for GFN users. Isn't that sweet?

All part of the long term profit plan to sell community mods, Watson.

I can see why PDX were salivating at this idea at the meeting.

 

[erkinalp]

All part of the long term profit plan to sell community mods, Watson.

Commissioned assets like seen in Valve games and Cities:Skylines 1, or forced pricing of content given away by us like Udemy?

 

[Gonzoez]

It won't even add mods on console, just assets and maps, regardless of how they phrase it.

But that's not even the best part.

Remember the free creator packs that we had in CS1? Those will also be released via PDX Mods for CS2 (like the already announced Region packs), and here is the real magic trick: PDX Mods will not even be supported on GeForce Now! So no future content AT ALL for GFN users. Isn't that sweet?

Yeah, releasing this game on GFN feels like double insult, because we will ONLY be able to play Vanilla "game", since even devtools are not allowed on GFN, forget the mod support...

It feels like the one reason to add this to GFN was to sell a few more copies of the game...