The first developer diary has been released.
The road lines look more clean then the previous version. Hopefully the wobbly lines are gone. Theres a parallel road tool so highway curves should be easier. Also, there are retaining walls now. Woo!
I’ve never been so excited to read about roads.
Two things that I liked in that dev diary:
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Parking and parking lots becoming necessary. That was sorely missing in CS1, if I recall. That will make for some interesting design decisions as you dedicate density and land to cars
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Road maintenance. They said snowplows will also deploy along the roads. Hopefully that means true seasons
Ok, one post is all it took to for me to go from ‘wait and see’ to ‘when is the damn pre-order up’.
I’m curious to see what’s different about “replacing” rather than “upgrading” roads. I’m hoping this means it’s possible to widen roads in-place.
Looking forward to the next video:
Feature #2: Traffic AI
Managing traffic in a growing city was a core part of Cities: Skylines, and for the sequel we wanted to bring you a more advanced system to make the city feel more realistic and alive.
Love me some traffic management!
Here’s a good breakdown of the tools:
What I’d love to see is the ability to put narrowboats in canals. I thought those were so cool when I took a trip to England. I don’t think you could ever put small boats in canals in the first game.
Here’s another developer diary video that shows more of the road tools in action. It also includes some of the new premade interchanges.
The interchanges are really the only thing that wasn’t in the previous video. I watched it earlier today and felt it was a bit of a waste of time.
That sounds amazing. I am so excited by the addition of parking, traffic accidents and true road maintenance.
I am in wait and see about the more dynamic pathfinding personalities they tout… but looks cool
This all sounds very encouraging:
This means pathfinding calculations are more numerous and more in-depth than in Cities: Skylines as the agents have more features affecting their decisions. However, the calculations are more efficient, resulting in higher performance across the board as the pathfinding and simulation among other calculations take advantage of all the available processing power of the multicore CPUs.
Also, as a major improvement to the first game in the series, Cities: Skylines II doesn’t feature hard limits for agents moving about in the city. Overall, the performance of the simulation and pathfinding is vastly improved which means larger populations are possible. The only real limits to the simulation are the hardware limitations on the platform running the game.
I’m worried the agent aspect might be an issue. Most of the shots of traffic look as busy as an early Sunday morning. Can the game handle enough agents to create a lively city like the first game? In this shot the map size is impressive but looking closer it’s a ghost town.
“Conform or be cast out”
I just played Cities Skylines for a few hours again, and came up to the long-term dilemma of the game, which is that it is mostly a city-painting model toolset and not a game. Hopefully they can implement more challenges, scenarios, and game types where a strategy is needed.
That said, transportation has to be the core dilemma of modern cities and if they’re taking a true crack at improvements there, I’m still buying it and playing the heck out of it.
It is a true sandbox.
For me, the joys came in both building out to my vision - a pretty college campus along a lake, or a stadium and entertainment district, a sprawling rural industry - but also in solving the problems that come up with growth.
Spending hours solving a higheway interchange or intersection, then watching it work. Or trying to figure out how to get industry moving smoothly to freight trains. Going back and adding in subways. Stuff like that I found really satisfying. So the challenges for me come in the optimization to fix the problems that i created.
I too prefer the sandbox. Add scenarios and challenges, but keep the sandbox.
For sure, but I like silly in-game achievements and rewards and I still wonder if it could use a bit more challenges there. Traffic is a great challenge and getting a bus system and metro running is super fun.
Latest feature video:
And associated design diary:
And the City Planner Plays deep dive:
Oh wow, a feature video that’s about something other than transportation:
