cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/5266864
I’ve been playing a ton of Cities Skylines II since its release a week ago. After building a 230k population archipelago I started playing around with the in game cinematic video tools and this is the result.
This is 100% in game footage and effects using the Photo Mode. Recorded using the Microsoft/Xbox Game Bar, only editing was to trim the start and end.
*slideshow
It’s a good game though, but needed more time in the oven.
The thing that kept turning me off with Cities Skylines was that the range of city services was too small and citizens weren’t using public transportation enough. It felt unrealistic and dumb compared to real life where I live. To get police station, fire station, schools, parks etc all in range of your residents you have to build so much that there’s no room left for the residents. It seems an impossible equation to solve.
For example in real life, my kids take the bus to the other side of town (6 km away) to go to school; in Cities Skylines they need the school to be at most something like two blocks away. I used to walk 3 km to school when I was a kid. And in real life not everybody needs to go by car or even own one. They can walk on the side of the road. But if you are in a car and an ambulance comes up, you move to the side let it through. In Skylines it can take months (!) for an ambulance to reach its destination, because of traffic.
In short, I can’t apply real-world solutions to problems in the game and that makes it not fun for me. Does the sequel have improvements in this regard?
Yep, the citizens are now far smarter in their path finding. They’ll walk quite a distance now, or follow a route via multiple different transport types.
A feature I’m really enjoying is pedestrians will walk along routes not intended for them if you’ve failed to provide adequate pedestrian routes. They will walk alongside a highway without a pavement if it saves them time. Or even more recklessly I’ve got people finding their way onto my rail tracks to shortcut their way to the station in places I’ve failed to put pedestrian paths.
Each citizen has their own preferences too, They’ll take whatever transport is most suited to them. There’s a surprising amount of depth to it.
When traveling by car or public transport they choose:
Teens - the cheapest route.
Adults - the quickest route.
Seniors - the most comfortable route.
https://cs2.paradoxwikis.com/Citizens#Age
This cost is calculated using multiple factors such as the city’s road network, traveling time, travel cost, agent preferences, and more which we will cover in more detail below. Furthermore, agents will adjust their route based on events along the way. They may change lanes to avoid a car accident or a stopped service vehicle or make room for a vehicle responding to an emergency.
https://cs2.paradoxwikis.com/Traffic
Cars have seen massive improvement as well. They do indeed now pull into another lane to make way for emergency vehicles.
No longer do citizens store them in a magical pocket, they need to find parking which can be roadside or in dedicated parking structures.
Roads can be upgraded to remove roadside parking, given wide pavements, you can add signage to prevent left hand turns etc. But rather enjoyably some more reckless drivers will ignore your road layouts and intentionally take turns they aren’t allowed to, or if a road becomes blocked they will perform an illegal u-turn and find an alternative route.
Honestly, I’m really not understanding why this game is getting so many people complaining. Sure it has bugs, but the core mechanics are working perfectly fine - it’s an incredible feat of software engineering.
I really appreciate the thorough answer, thank you. I think I will give the game a go after they’ve sorted out the worst performance kinks.
Wow damn I only wish I had those urban planning skills. My cities all turn into sprawling traffic-congested nightmares.
Beautiful, while running at a stuttery, jittery 20fps 🤣
One of my favorite improvements is that industries now work like they do in ANNO 1800.
I find myself accidentally pressing ctrl+q a lot.
The game looks absolutely amazing when it’s running well - I’m a huge fan of the first game, so I’m definitely going to get this one as well, I’m just trying my hardest to be patient and wait for the optimisations to come in first…
The elementary school thing you mentioned is definitely still a problem though. The schools are absolutely massive and you need a ridiculous amount if then to have enough coverage in your city, otherwise it’s pretty nice, once they fix some more of the performance issues
I thought uploading video game footage was prohibited on vimeo. I know many years ago I had some removed for that reason.
Interesting. It looks like that was the case in the past but they eventually adapted https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules/
Vimeo was supposed to be the “Professional’s Youtube” that was more of a paid service for businesses and pros. They figured out users wouldn’t migrate there unless they let most other stuff in too though.
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That’s a lot of shimmering. Could really use some AA, but performance is poor enough already.
Is there any way to play Cities Skylines 2 on my MacBook Pro M2 Max without Nvidia game force cloud subscription (free or paid)?
Maybe. Have you tried using Whisky?
No I haven’t tried whisky. I’ll definitely try it this weekend.
Yeah it’s been fun. My city is just shy of 200k and it looks nice and smooth on my laptop, so long as you don’t go up too close to any crowded area.
I haven’t played it yet (and probably won’t, I didn’t like the first) but I enjoy how they actually tried to make it look nice. It’s not like the first game looked awful per se, but it definitely didn’t feel very inviting in my opinion. Everything felt so grey. I know real life cities are grey but this is a video game.
