Upcoming Patch & Content

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Hello Cities Mayors,
We wanted to provide you with an update on the status of our upcoming patches and content.

Economy Re-work
The initial implementation of the economy re-work is done, and the patch is currently being polished. Our internal team, along with feedback from our Beta group, indicates we are heading in the right direction, and we are excited to share it with you soon. This patch will not address everything, but to ensure it meets the expectations of our wider community, we want to give it a few more weeks so we can take action on more of the feedback we have received from the Beta group. The goal of the patch is to address the community feedback we have received in regards to the economy; increase the importance of managing the economy, increase the challenge, and make it clearer to the player how the economy is affected by your choices. Currently, we aim to release the patch in the window June 3rd - June 19th and we will be detailing the update further in upcoming Dev Diaries.

Upcoming Creator Packs
As a result of this extended feedback and adjustment period for the economy patch, the Creator Packs will be pushed to post-summer. Even though the Creator Packs require relatively little time for implementation from Colossal Order, we want to make sure the upcoming economy patch has the intended result, and that we have time to also evaluate your feedback before we release any new paid content. This means we will move the Creator Packs to release after the summer lock.

What is "summer lock"?
In accordance with Swedish and Finnish vacation laws and union agreements, both Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order observe a general holiday period during the month of July and parts of August, where employees have the right to four consecutive weeks of vacation. This means that our staffing levels are reduced on both the development and publishing side. Therefore, we avoid scheduling any updates during this time period. As there is always a potential risk when patching a game, we always want to have the necessary personnel available in case any critical bug is introduced so we can fix it within a reasonable timeframe. Hence, we do not plan for patches or updates in the month of July or early August.

Upcoming Patches
The patch, scheduled for release soon, primarily focuses on the economy. However, there are some other requested improvements included such as an update to the building upgrade system. This means you will be able to place building upgrades more freely around the main buildings and also delete and move specific upgrades. We will provide detailed patch notes in connection to the patch as usual.

The next patch, expected after summer, will introduce some free content and other frequent requests, such as new service buildings and vehicles, as well as the addition of a surface tool to allow more freedom to paint the areas around buildings. We are also making progress with the technical difficulties that are blocking the release of the asset editor; we cannot confirm if it will be ready for the first patch after summer, so no promises just yet, but we are doing everything we can to make it so.

Consoles
We had a Beta build delivery at the end of April which has undergone extensive performance and stability tests. These results showed that we are not hitting the stability and performance targets that we want to reach. Fixing these crashes and improving the FPS is the highest priority when it comes to the console builds. The development team is working diligently and has already fixed some of the issues from these tests, and we still hope we can keep the timeline for an October release. But, to set expectations, the window for an October release is shrinking and it might have to be delayed further.

Player Feedback
We have two groups testing our patches and providing valuable feedback before public release: a long-standing group of dedicated modders and a newer group of community representatives and prominent modders who joined through the application process last year. We recently held a more intimate meeting with representatives from the community, who shared their insights and conveyed those of their follower base, on what they wish to see in the game. Once the economy patch is out, we will also launch a survey to gather feedback from you, the broader community. This will ensure that we understand your experience and continue heading in the right direction. We are also continuously reading posts you share on our official channels and we appreciate all the good and constructive feedback we have received over the past few weeks.
Thank you for being a part of our community and for your continued passion for Cities: Skylines II. Stay tuned for further updates on the economy patch and the timeline for upcoming patches and new content.

// The Cities Team

 

[SimNationJan]

Any update regarding support of mods in GeForce now??

We are working with our partners to try to find a solution, and if we do you will let you all know!

By paint you mean drawing those surfaces like its possible with mods already, similar to drawing lots for the specialized industry or actually some kind of paint brush?

Also, is the limitiation of "around buldings" intended, so it can only be used around buildings or was that just a figure of speech and we will also be able to draw those surfaces in areas where there arent any buildings?

Currently, it is planned in the same way that is available through DevUI and with certain mods. However, we wanted to implement it as an option for those that do not use mods.

Thank you for the update

Since you always say you love player feedback, why not open an open optional beta branch on Steam like most of the games of this genre do this days?

I could only help you get more feedback, track down bugs and system configuration specific problems you might miss otherwise. It will also relieve some pressure that people think that nothing is being worked on.

A lot of studios from smaller games to big games like Diablo 4, Sea Of Thieves, Elder Scrolls, No Man Sky, Manor Lords, etc do this.

Between the team size and their current priorities, this is not something CO can support at this time.

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Are CO implying here that the 8 regional creator packs are going to be paid DLC?

This has been communicated previously as being free additional content, and given the disaster that post-launch has been this would murder any vein of recovery CO/PDX would hope to create

The Region Packs are different from the Creator Packs. While these and future Creator Packs will be paid, the Region Packs that are only waiting for some more development of the Asset Editor will be free and available as soon as we are able to finalize them!

The Region Packs will be available for free on PDXMods!

 

[co_avanya]

@co_avanya

When the Asset Editor releases in Beta this fall, is the plan still that it will only support buildings?

I know that trees, cims, and vehicles were on your internal list of assets to include in the future. I'm wondering if the amount of work/time that has gone into polishing/fixing the asset import/saving pipeline has allowed for parallel development of other asset types within the editor?

The only thing I can promise right now is buildings. We'll need the asset pipeline to be in a more final state to properly determine what needs to be done (if anything) to get other asset types working.

 

[co_avanya]

Could we, at some point, get an actual thorough answer on why the asset editor is taking so long? Like, what the actual problems are?

A thorough answer means I need to pick the brains of a few of our (currently very busy) programmers, but I'll look into whether this is something we can cover at some point. Perhaps a dev diary on the asset import and the challenges we faced makes sense when we add the asset pipeline.

 

[co_avanya]

No, it does not and you should have noticed that by yourself while typing.

Where is the difference in the quoted procedure to CS1's procedure?
Wasn't it possible to import assets in CS1? Oh yes, it was.
Did we have to install Unity for that? No, we did not.
Was it future proof, so that it did work for years? Yes, it did.

And out of a sudden, all that isn't possible anymore?
It should be obvious that here some vital information was not given. Under the assumption that said information is available at CO at all.

Cities: Skylines II uses a variation of the standard PBR pipeline (with metallic/glossiness), while Cities: Skylines uses specular. We've also added a bunch of new texture maps that allow for more color variation control and emissive textures. For any asset creators, you can find more details on the official wiki. Furthermore Cities: Skylines uses an older version of Unity, which changed significantly from Unity 5.6 that Cities: Skylines is using to the modern version we're using today for Cities: Skylines II.

The editor we built for Cities: Skylines or the solutions we used for it would not work with Cities: Skylines II and would not be able to import the textures we're using for assets in Cities: Skylines II.