• Welcome to SC4 Devotion Forum Archives.

Paradox Interactive announces Cities: Skylines

Started by Tarkus, August 14, 2014, 03:31:42 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

cmdp123789

Question is.. Wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow take the stuff we already have uploaded and re export it into this new game?

If the game is as moddable as they say, and the map is that big.. I'm pretty sure simcity 2013 won't even appear in the city building category anymore...

I have so much expectation for this..!

Bipin

Quote from: cmdp123789 on August 16, 2014, 09:18:00 AM
Question is.. Wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow take the stuff we already have uploaded and re export it into this new game?

If you've still got the 3D model for the BAT, that'd definitely be a possibility.

catty


From memory from a discussion I read on modding in CIM1, CIM1 had solved some of its problems on being able to run a big city by miniaturizing the models used in the game, so if you had a normal sized model that you wanted to include in the game you had to shrink the model down to 1/100 of its original size 
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" DEATH thought about it. "CATS," he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE.

xannepan

#23
Looking forward for this game (and keeping my fingers crossed). I bought CIM2, partly because I wanted to support paradox and seeing the potential for itmto become a real city simulation game.

I didn't play it that much mostly because transit simulators are not really my thing. That will definitely change if they make a great city simulator with modding support from the start.

Things I liked and didn't like of CIM:
Likes:
- Graphics, realistics (although the colorscheme could be a bit less bland and faded...). No silly childish comic-like maxis buildings.
- transportation graphics (trains, buses, people etc) are really fantastic. It is really great to see a metro stop and load/unload lots of passengers, and see the passengers appearing on the street level again... Fantastic.
- The curve-smoothness and flexibility of laying out road, rails, bridges is AWESOME.
- The micromanagment, up to the level of being able to set bus time-tables (optionally)

Dislikes:
- The user interface.. Hope they invest in that part for the city simulator.
- Never got used to their mouse/keyboard navigation (scroll, zooming, rotating). It is not too bad, but with just a few minor improvements they could be excellent.
- the loading screen... Sounds silly, but I just hated the silly screenshot they display when loading a city...
- the streets look a bit empty and too clean.



I am happy about their approach on the simulator side (although still much is unknown). Maxis made a great conceptual mistake on that part. As a physicist I always compare it to simulating a gas cloud. You don't have to simulate the behaviour of each individual molecule to simulate the properties of a gas cloud.

-Alx









Terring7

"The wisest men follow their own direction" Euripides
The Choice is Ours
---
Simtropolis Moderator here. Can I help? Oh, and you can call me Elias (my real name) if you wish.

trabman11

Well, get ready NAM team ( and other SC4 modders, lotter, batters, and hatters)....destiny has arrived!  :D
RISE UP AND FIGHT WITH SUPER BUNNY AND BOB!!!
  (\_/)           ☻/       /  \       
\(='.'=)/        /▌        |☢|       
(")_(")         / \       //||\\
*whispers* ...For what I don't know...I think they are anti-Google+ anarchists  ???

xannepan

Quote from: Tarkus on August 14, 2014, 10:45:48 PM
Also, from the information floating around, apparently, the city tile is 38km x 38km (1444 sq. km).  For non-metric folks (like myself), 38km = 23.56 miles (~555 sq. mi.), and equivalent to a 9.5 x 9.5 large tile region (same area as about 90 large city tiles) in SC4.  I could actually fit most of the county I live in within that area.  Apparently, they're taking a simulation approach more akin to SC4, rather than attempting to duplicate GlassBox, which explains why they're able to go so large.

-Alex

I don't think it is a 38 x 38 km map size, but a 36 km^2 map size (6x6km)

Tarkus

That's certainly possible.  The original quotation said 38x38, but something closer to 6x6 sounds more plausible.

-Alex

Terring7

Still 6x6 is even larger than the 4x4 tiles of SC4.
"The wisest men follow their own direction" Euripides
The Choice is Ours
---
Simtropolis Moderator here. Can I help? Oh, and you can call me Elias (my real name) if you wish.

catty

This question was asked over at the Paradox site, and the answer was

QuoteIt's 36 square km, but not necessarily in a 6x6km square. Expansion options are a bit more open

The expansion bit sounds interesting   :)
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" DEATH thought about it. "CATS," he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE.

xannepan


bap

From what I understood at Paradox site, their city region is a 10x10 km square map (100 sq. km) divided into a 5x5 grid of city tiles, each one with 2x2 km wide (same of a medium sized city tile in SC4). The user can choose to play on up to 9 of these 25 tiles. This makes 9/25=0.36, or 36 sq. km as the added size of a user's city "region". This does not need to be a square. The equivalent 36 sq. km area is quite small. In comparison to SC4, it is the same of having a region made of only a large city tile with a single line of medium city tiles on two of its sides. In terms of real world, you would not be able to put even the central region of a city of the size of Paris inside your Paradox region map (straight line from just Bois de Vincennes to Bois de Boulogne is about 14 km). I hope "expansion" means at least being able to play on all 25 city tiles in the region. But even that is small compared to several regions I see people playing in SC4.  :(


Haljackey

The Reddit AMA in a nutshell




**I know probably can't get specifics, but would you describe this as a more expansive or larger area to build a city on than the (very restricted) tiny room in simcity 2013? I often find that game revolves around tearing down one thing to fix something and causing another problem in the process because of the small room.**


It's a lot bigger. About 36km2. We've optimized the game for cities of that size. BUT - The sweetest feature is that we'll have an option where you can uncouple the limitation and go bigger. but that's up to you and your hardware :)

**Will it feature regions like in SimCity?**

Nope. It's an interesting concept/feature if done correctly though. But we don't expect you to depend on other players/cities in order to build a big sweet city.

There are no regions, but map tiles have attributes like a possibility for a certain outside connection (seaside for harbor, train tracks for train connection) and natural resources. So selecting map tiles to expand to lets you choose what kind of a city you want to play.

**Are there "neighbor" AI cities that offer/request utilities?**

There is an outside world, but it just buys any surplus your city produces and offers resources and goods if your city needs something. To get the highest tax income your city would produce everything itself, but the outside world is there to help you.

**So, it will be like other titles, where you develop just one big city? Or there are districts, or something like that?**


There are districts that you can set yourself and set different policies in the districts to make them be different from each other.

**Will there be any agricultural building/zoning options? If I wanted to make a small town with farm land surrounding it, would it be possible?**

Totally possible. Agriculture is in the game.

**This question is regarding how you plan on making cities feel like they are living in breathing. For example, in SC4, the NIMBY/YIMBY system was pretty powerful and made the city feel alive. For example, you could make buildings historical, or buildings would become abandoned if there were too many NIMBY's in the area, or the economy was bad. Furthermore, streetscaping would change based upon the wealth level of the neighborhood. I realize this is a somewhat complicated question, but what mechanics do you have in place to make cities in this game feel like they are living and breathing?**

Buildings level up, becoming more fancy. There's also low density zones for making places look more like suburbs and high density for creating a city center. It is possible to for example have an area of low level high density buildings that can look like a ghetto next to a city center of high level high density buildings. Abandoned buildings are there, and you can leave burned down buildings on the map if you like.
There are also little things, like if garbage collection facilities are overburdened, the buildings start to pile full trash cans on the curb. Or the fact that when the ground gets polluted around an industrial area, the trees on the ground become dried up and brown.
We really want the world to feel alive and are making many neat details to tell you who lives where and how they are doing!

Cities is built on Unity in the same way as CiM2

**So when you say hardcore, how hardcore are we talking? What kinds of things can we expect that will make this a truly immersive sim in terms of city building and city feel?**

Somewhere between SC4 and Cities XL? We don't want to go overboard and Dwarf Fortress it - but still allow depth. We expect modders to do really, really hardcore stuff. Depending on what people ask for we're shift post release content/feature in that direction. We are aiming to make a game that is easy to learn but has depth for players who really want to delve deep into optimizing the city. It's not so much the difficulty of the game, but the amount of things you can tweak in your city.

**As Cities Skylines follows Cities in Motion, how extensive will the transit infrastructure options be? E.g. dirt roads, streets, roads, one-way roads, avenues, highways, underground/elevated roads, trains, subways, monorails, maglev, ferries, helipads, various sized airports, etc...**

The only ones we don't currently have from your list are underground roads, monorails, maglec, helicopters and airport sizes, so I think we have a pretty nice amount of options! The different road types are very flexible and work for different things, I made a gorgeous and well working roundabout yesterday using the highway road type.

**Is there a option of naming and renaming streets? (at best, given evry a estate a number/adress - maybe automatically?**

At the moment there no street names planned. City districts can be created and named, and each building has a name automatically generated.

**Can you please explain a bit more what you mean with modding support? Will we (the community) be able to create and load own 3D-Models?**

Yes, actually, with specially designed tools :) We will reveal a bit more on the exact nature of the modding tools later, they are still in development. So, we are looking into that, but here is also where we really hope the community will go at it. The game will ship (according to plan) with built-in tools to import 3d objects, and to be able to share them easily on Steam Workshop.

**Will there be landmarks (Ie famous like the Statute of Liberty or Eiffel Tower)?**

What kind of city builder would it be if we didn't?

**Will there different road types (american, german, english etc) just like in City xl?**

We don't have roads divided by geographical location, but there is a nice selection of roads, like decorated versions with lower noise pollution of each type, highways and special highway ramps.

**How much will the game cost or what price range are you aiming for?**

We're looking at starting at $29.99 - that's HALF of some other management games. But we'll likely have some kind of Digital deluxe edition, or even a super collectors edition (if there's interest) - is there? No Early access. It'll be around $29.99 - half of some other management games ;)

**This question is regarding parks. I think giving players robust tools for placing parks really can add realism to a city. For example, fountains, plazas, zoos, bike paths, and trails are typically found in real life cities. Will this game offer players multiple types of parks?**

Yes! We are working on a tool that actually lets you create unique parks with the game assets and place those. There are also pre-made parks, naturally. We want to give the player room to be creative with parks, just having the same few types is too boring!

**Are there plans to generate in-game maps using external map data (e.g. OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, etc)? Most of us love the idea of running our own home towns.**

As the basic goal in the game is to build a city we haven't planned that you could generate in game maps (road networks etc). However with the map editor you'll be able to create a landscape of your choosing to start building the city on. Importing a height map makes the landscape pretty realistic starting point.

**Would someone who was bored with Sim City a long time ago actually enjoy this game?**

For the record. I played and enjoyed the latest Sim City about 6 hours. We're building a game you can play for 600 hours.

**Will the game have regions like SimCity 4 and what will be the maximum city size?**

The map consists of tiles. Each tile is 2 km x 2 km and one city can have nine of those. You get to choose the tiles from 25 tiles on the map. The area is all seamless so you can have a pretty huge city! There are no regions, but there is a world outside the map that buys excess goods and ships resources if your city needs something.T he maximum city size is 9 map tiles, one map tile is 2km x 2km. You start with the first one and then get to unlock more land for your city.

**Will there be other types of transport than metro and buses? In DLC?**

When the game comes out there will be airplanes, trains and ships for outside connections. Currently buses and metros are only planned for inner city transport, because we felt having two options for transport on the roads might be a bit too much. Maybe later then, I love trams ;D

**Will there be beautification options for roads? i.e. having a garden along the middle of an avenue, having a street lined with trees, etc...**

Yes, there will be plenty of options for different road types.

**Will there be any future tech within Cities Skylines? E.g. fusion/microwave power plants, fully automated cars, personal air cars, arcologies, etc...**

The game timeline lets you go a little bit into the future, so there are plausible inventions like a fusion power plant.

**Coming from a transport focused playstyle, have you decided on whether you'll be keeping the same depth there? Or will you be making sure that players don't have to play a whole game (and spend their time managing it) within this game?**

Transportation is made lighter and more streamlined, since Skylines in not about it but rather the cities. We do have many options, like planes, trains, metro and buses, but you don't have to go to ticket prices or setting schedules.

**Will there be hand-made buildings or they will be procedurally generated?**

The buildings are handmade with love from our talented artists!

**Will it be possible for citizens from one town travel to another for work? So you could have a suburban area in one zone and people will commute to work in the main metropolitan city in another?
Will be there be a way to fill in oddly shaped gaps between buildings/roads with grass or pavement? I loved this feature in Cities XL.
Is building stuff zone-based (like Sim City), or you choose what to build and where (like Tropico), or somewhere in between?
The trailer looks fairly grid-based. Will you be able to rotate buildings/zones, and how flexible is rotating (ie: can rotate 45º like in Tropico, or free rotate)
Take your time with the game and make it the best city sim ever, I'm looking forward to it!**

Lets see if I can answer all of these! Citizens work only inside your city. But with the large map size you can have smaller cities on the same map. I like to do a suburb, then a city center and a industrial area separately. People move around the map and you just have to make sure to have good highway connections between your towns. You can place decoration items freely. We want to help fill the odd gaps, so our grid system is made to not create many gaps and the decoration tools that are still being worked on will help with fixing the few there will be.
Building is zone based, except for city services. Basically you mark zones for residential area, commercial area, industrial area and office area, and place things like hospitals, schools and police stations yourself. Building roads creates grid. The roads themselves are not ties to a grid, so you can place the roads in any way you want, including curved, and plop buildings next to them. Thank you, we are very proud of the game and want to make it great!

**Currently, There're no Linux/SteamOS in the system requirements on the game's Steam page. Will these operating systems be supported at launch (or later)?**

Linux/OSX will be supported!

There's many different road types: small, large, decorated version of each, highway, highway with noise barriers, gravel road... Transportation is streamlined from CiM 2, so the tool for making lines is easier and faster to use and no timetables or ticket prices need to be set. The timetable depends on how much budget you give to transportation: the depots get the amount of vehicles they can with the money and divide the vehicles to lines based on line length. You get income from tickets.

**How extensive and detailed will the taxation/ordinances/policies go?

I know it sounds like a weird question, but the big things that SC2013 and SCS needed was the schtuff that SC3000 and SC4 love to use: charts and graphs.**

Taxation and budget are all there, how much you want to fine tune it is a bit up to the player. Policies is something we are really sinking our teeth into, and hope to be able to deliver toons, from the really important like industrial policies, to the more mundane like pet ban.

**In Cities in Motion 2 you employ a brush style to determine fare zones - will this concept be implemented in Cities:Skylines? In particular for zoning, parks/greenspace, and identifying cultural / business centers?**

Yeah, this is done via the district tool where you can zone your city in different districts and set local policies and specialisations.

**I've never played any of your city games, although I've thought about it quite a bit and I really enjoyed SimCity even though lots of people hated it. Will I love this game? Can you explain some of the similarities and differences between this and SimCity?**

You are talking about the newest SimCity, right? Skylines takes inspiration from earlier SimCity games, so it's a bit less casual than the newest one and has more micromanagement, thought some of the optimization is optional so player who just enjoy building can play it "lightly", without going into all the details.

**Will it incorporate some kind of CiM public transport system or will it be more in the line of 'place bus stops in places and buses find their own routes'?**

The player is allowed to make bus lines by placing drops and drawing lines, but the vehicles go to the lines automatically from their depots.

**Are buildings dependent on lots (a polygon) or do they grow dynamically based on zoning? If dynamic, can roads expand lanes and not require the building to be destroyed?**

Buildings do have lots, but there are buildings of all lot sizes so there won't be any weird looking empty space left. If you upgrade or downgrade an existing road, the zoning is preserved but if the road size changes, buildings are automatically destroyed (only zoned buildings! You can't accidentally destroy for example a hospital) and new ones spawn.




I'll be watching this one. Looks like a mash-up of all kinds of city builders and simulators out there. Could be awesome.

figui

i'll be looking for more news about this promising game!
first forums inhabitant from Uruguay..   first forums citizen from Uruguay..  first forums councilman from Uruguay..   first forums mayor from Uruguay..  first forums governor from Uruguay..
...i'm still the only one from Uruguay!

________

xannepan

I took part in the AMA. I must say I am really looking forward to this game!

Besides Halljackey's overview there is a lot more information on Reddit.
Some things to really look forward to, and some (slight) dissapointments, and some wait-and-see. For example:
There won't be any day-night cycle, but it is not clear if that also implies no night view mode that you could manually switch.

There won't be any weather and climate options from start. (Hinting towards and expansion pack)

They are still looking into wall-2-wall building placement. (Would be my biggest dissapointment if there was none)

They seem to be working on river/seawalls

Limited terraforming in game, but there will be a map editor

Nature beautification is on their agenda, ponds, waterfalls, streams and lots of different trees are there. They were excitee about my suggestion to add animals and ambient sounds.

No trams from start (DLC)

36km^2 regular map size, but unrestricted depending on your hardware.
Single city tiles are 2x2 km^2 but as you play, other (including direclty neighbouring) tiles (max 25) will be unlocked, so you can make a huge city without seams. Sounds a great approach to me.

3D Building models are based on FBX Format. They consider bringing out the detailed specs for custom content a bit before release.


Well that's all i can remember for now.
AMA is still open today by the way

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2e3uku/we_are_colossal_order_paradox_interactive_the/?sort=top








catty

Quote from: xannepan on August 20, 2014, 10:08:26 PM
I took part in the AMA. I must say I am really looking forward to this game!...

I saw your posts   :thumbsup:  must admit if it had been any other software company making a new city builder game I'd be taking everything they say with a grain of salt, but I was on their forums when they were designing CIM1 and then again for CIM2 and I've got to admit I have a lot of confidence that whatever they come up with is going to be great, may not be quite what we were dreaming of, but we will be able to build cities

()stsfd()
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" DEATH thought about it. "CATS," he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE.

noahclem

This game looks more and more exciting! My interest is definitely piqued.

FrankU

Yes, promising indeed.

One question: what about sea levels? Will it be possible to have several water levels at the same time? Lowest one for sea, higher ones for canals, rivers, lakes? And waterfalls in between?

sunv123

The amount of hard work going into the game and making it as enjoyable as possible is mind-blowing. :o I'll be watching and by the way it's going right now, it'll be a must-get on my list.

Quote**Would someone who was bored with Sim City a long time ago actually enjoy this game?**

For the record. I played and enjoyed the latest Sim City about 6 hours. We're building a game you can play for 600 hours.
:D
Provo, a city apart Updated July 4.