CO Word of the Week #9

[MohawkWolfo98]

Quick side question, I'm really curious how you try to play the game together. Do you all start cities at the same time and compare or something?

Yup! I have a much different play style than my friend. We do the same map, chat on discord what we are doing and share screens. I love building parks with controlled skyscraper levels to ensure a beautiful city, and in CS1 constantly checking traffic is above 80% flow. He loves a New York grid skyscraper system with barely any parks. We laugh at each others work, it’s a lot of fun after a long week.

I wonder if they are still friends LOL

Yes although I coughed up another $60 as an apology, since I felt really guilty that I made him buy it and our friendship is like years and years lmao. We lasted about 3 hours in CS2 because landscaping the terrain early on felt like construction simulator, I couldn’t build my parks or sculpt my city the way I wanted, and he was just laughing at me and the Cims XD

 

[Azuvector]

Am so disappointed with CO and Paradox as a console player. Would have been great to get the opportunity to actually play the game on console. I guess the money’s is in PC players. Good luck hope it works out in the end.

Part of the issue I would suspect is console has to meet minimum performance and feature/lack of bugs standards before release, as some console players simply do not ever update after the initial install.

 

[nota.pro]

I stopped playing this game on Nov. 17th full of disappointment. And what I have witnessed since then is just unbelievable. Good luck with the console release, you will need it.

 

[Rommyca]

That's kinda rude. They delayed it from last year to give attention to performance updates. Which they did.
People have bought Ultimate Editions and paid for those DLC that you seem to be sarcastically putting down as just a way for them to rake in money. They can't delay that content anymore because it's been promised.
Apart from that, a lot of people want some extra assets to use and will give much needed variation.

As for you "beaches" comment, this is not a full expansion pack, it's beach properties. Won't come with a beach all of a sudden. The other DLC after this are all water based so I'm sure if things went well, between Ports expansion and Urban Promenades there could've been a beach vibe update to maps.

The beach DLC will be released in finnish Falls. Good time for the swimmers ...
Dog fix IT s like a punch in the eye.
This is migrating from drama to comedy. They are on the good way!

 

[CapnBludd]

I just wonder how much of this editor delay is due the decision of ditching Steam Workshop for PDX Mods

The thing is, they didn't need to ditch the workshop. It's a console/Play store/remote player thing.

I have the Paradox Star Trek game and it uses both the Workshop and PDX mods, it loads mods from BOTH stores and shows you what mod is from what store.

 

[anydaytv]

That's kinda rude. They delayed it from last year to give attention to performance updates. Which they did.
People have bought Ultimate Editions and paid for those DLC that you seem to be sarcastically putting down as just a way for them to rake in money.

As an ultimate edition buyer, I am not one bit offended.
In actual fact, I'm slightly offended that as an ultimate edition buyer, I got no landmarks. Like, seriously?

 

[blackbraids]

I am a fan of cities skylines 2 because of the updated graphics. I was looking forward to having traffic manager in there as well. It's sad to see that it will still take a while for mod support to get to a level where I can expect traffic manager to make an appearance. Hopefully the beta mod support will be solid enough to run the game without a lot of crashes.

 

[danielblack64]

Can whoever’s to blame for the early release just apologise, refund us and then we can all forget any of this happened and meet back here in a year and try again

 

[whilephant]

Seriously? If you play the vanilla game without any custom mod provided by those great modders, you'll face:
1. Bad scalability, The vanilla game's simulation performance drops very fast with the extension of the road network, even though there is already a mod that can improve it at least 2x, CO never even mentioned this problem.
2. Almost can't build interchanges, the collision detection has bugs when removing some roads, and after they change the distance of pillars to 80m, even harder to build interchanges.
3. Land value problem that makes it hard to build low-density or even middle-density residential buildings.
4. Water doesn't run away and keeps flooding buildings and tunnels.
5. The importing and exporting system doesn't work at the beginning of the release (almost fixed but the harbor and station are jammed by huge traffic due to the bad design of their inside road network and pathfinding problem.
6. Huge traffic kills the simulation performance since most citizens can't find parking space, which is because the CO set the capacity of underground parking lots too low, such a simple problem is not fixed after 3 months from release. I doubt if they even played it in depth.
7. .... other 4K BUGS that have been reported

4001. Citizens become homeless and the population drops seriously, I don't know if it's a bug from CO or some mod, I have installed too many mods to make this game barely playable.

ARE WE PLAYING THE SAME GAME?

May I ask what is the name of the mod you mentioned in your post to improve simulation speed? I couldn't find it on Thunderstore, could you please let me know the name of the mod?
Thanks.

 

[boshk]

it's time to just admit defeat and turn on the steam workshop. better luck for skylines 3.

 

[timfrombriz]

I have a theory of why everything is moving so slowly and why emotions have been so high in the WotW's

I think maybe one of the core programmers has left unexpectedly. That means a lot of the technical knowledge walked out the door and finding someone to fill that spot and get up to speed with the codebase is proving difficult.

- Slow progression with fixing bugs
- New bugs being introduced when tackling other bugs
- Most patches are tweaking of numbers, not actual code fixes
- Asset import taking 'months' to solve
- Long delays with getting the modding platform/editor ready
- Asset bundles etc are all done (indicating no problem on the art/3d design teams)

Theres a piece missing of the puzzle I feel with whats been happening with CS2, and I think this would explain a lot.


Asset import problem really confuses me. At its core its just a bunch of points and triangles, and uv's to generate a textured mesh. Their using a 3rd party LOD product to generate the downscaled LOD mesh's automatically. Wheres the technical problem in this pipeline? A player has any 3D asset, export the data out into your own custom format as part of the mod asset they player wants to distribute, import it back in at runtime as a mesh, and treat it like any other Unity Mesh object. Bobs your uncle.

 

[boshk]

We're working to fix the technical issues with the asset import, but it may take us months to resolve, which means anything that relies on the asset import will wait for it. Of course, we hope to resolve the issues sooner, but we want to be honest with you and not set too high expectations. Unfortunately, these issues are not easy to solve, but we'll get there as soon as we can.

cant they just be added into the game with a patch? how did the assets that come iwth the game get into the game?

 

[Toast____]

Guys, the solution is easy:

use chat GPT to finish the game.

 

[Vil.FML]

Welcome back to the weekly update on what’s happening at Colossal Order and what to expect for Cities: Skylines II. Last week we had in-depth conversations with our publisher Paradox Interactive on the priorities and goals for Cities: Skylines II for 2024. There’s really nothing new when it comes to the previous statements: Modding support, console versions, and the Expansion Pass content are to be worked on and released during the year.

That 'bug fixing' wasn't in the priorities and goals statements, really doesn't do well on the development team and community relationship.

People bought the game knowing the state of the game and it's bugs, maybe because CO had a good reputation with development and communication with the player base. But now it not being mentioned as a priority (and concern) for the team's year and communicated to the Publishers makes the CS2 community concerned about the development.

I know that bugs are being addressed, as there were constant patches rolling out up until last year. But, is it a high priority? Are major team resources being used for this purpose? By the WotWs posted up until last year, it seemed that way. But with this goals and priorities mentioned, it gives space to doubts.

Before those bigger releases, we’ll have one more patch coming out. After this, we’ll include the bug fixes and performance improvements in the releases to reduce the amount of individual patches.

The in-game experience improves when minor patches go out, and also makes look like CO addresses bugs day-to-day. A patch is a patch. Releasing more patches gives more space to feedback.

I hope that bug fixing was just obviated, because I genuinely enjoy the game. I do have some mods that have increased the QoL but even before them I was having a blast (and still do), going close to a hundred hours on a single map. The base is definitely there and its good.

Greetings from south America, Chile.

 

[Raxter77]

Asset import problem really confuses me. At its core its just a bunch of points and triangles, and uv's to generate a textured mesh. Their using a 3rd party LOD product to generate the downscaled LOD mesh's automatically. Wheres the technical problem in this pipeline? A player has any 3D asset, export the data out into your own custom format as part of the mod asset they player wants to distribute, import it back in at runtime as a mesh, and treat it like any other Unity Mesh object. Bobs your uncle.

Speaking as a person who has used many 3rd party plugins for Unity professionally, it would not surprise me in the slightest if said product is causing their issues. The Unity Asset Store is a cesspool of broken, half-baked, and unsupported tools that are constantly being undermined by Unity themselves changing how their engine works. Honestly, when I learned CS1 was made in Unity I was amazed that any developer could accomplish what CO did. When I learned CS2 was still built in Unity with everything it aspired to do, my immediate reaction was intense worry for the game.

 

[anydaytv]

We're working to fix the technical issues with the asset import, but it may take us months to resolve, which means anything that relies on the asset import will wait for it. Of course, we hope to resolve the issues sooner, but we want to be honest with you and not set too high expectations. Unfortunately, these issues are not easy to solve, but we'll get there as soon as we can.

While I can appreciate you trying to not set expectations too high (now), considering your glowing review of assets from CS1, didn't you guys think - out of literally everything else on the table, that this is the one thing that the community would expect?

I mean, you've pretty successfully set the bar astonishingly low.

This community isn't even creating thread after thread, railing against of improvements made from CS1 to CS2. (Hey, negativity is always loud, right?)
All people can think about is getting the game on par with the previous one in terms of scope.

cant they just be added into the game with a patch? how did the assets that come iwth the game get into the game?

It's Unity, it'll eventually get solved with a patch or without one. I honestly can't imagine what the issues are if it's simply graphically related.
Anyone can enlighten me?

edit:

Speaking as a person who has used many 3rd party plugins for Unity professionally, it would not surprise me in the slightest if said product is causing their issues. The Unity Asset Store is a cesspool of broken, half-baked, and unsupported tools that are constantly being undermined by Unity themselves changing how their engine works. Honestly, when I learned CS1 was made in Unity I was amazed that any developer could accomplish what CO did. When I learned CS2 was still built in Unity with everything it aspired to do, my immediate reaction was intense worry for the game.

I'm so confused, wouldn't these sorts of things be version locked by the development team long before getting to this point?

 

[mikeny]

I can't wait for the beach and pier packs and expansion packs! I've been bouncing between CS and CS II but I've also haven't been on much since my father passed away 3 yrs ago.

To be honest, I've been playing CS to get my mind off things and it helps

 

[Otis85402]

I think maybe one of the core programmers has left unexpectedly.

This is also what I think but I don't expect them to be honest about such a thing. Though if they said "look our lead guy quit and we're just devastated" that would be them sharing useful information and I would be ok with it. The truth will set you free, CS2 devs!

 

[Potoroo]

They mentioned "Finnish Fall" because in previous posts, people were stating that their references to Seasons was unclear because the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have different seasons.
Also, Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere is late-September to late-December.

They should just stop using seasons for this sort of thing altogether. Just say Q3 and be done with it. No confusion there.

 

[BoraBora]

cant they just be added into the game with a patch? how did the assets that come iwth the game get into the game?

With developers tools.