Cities: Skylines II News

Hi everyone. We have another patch for you today with a bunch of gameplay fixes addressing the garbage issues and stray pets Mariina discussed in Monday's CO Word of the Week. We continue to investigate the issues you have reported, but we wanted to bring you these fixes right away.

Please note that existing garbage notifications in your current saves may not clear properly unless the building is rebuilt, however, new buildings and saves created after this patch shouldn't have this issue.

Bug fixes & improvements:

• Balanced Garbage production and accumulation calculations
  
• Fixed garbage truck accidentally adding garbage load when calculating garbage amount estimate for the path
  
• Fixed garbage resource "Trade value" showing negative value in statistics
  
• Balanced Incinerator Plant electricity output
  
• Fixed various character clothing issues
  
• Balanced stray pets in the city
  
• Increased pathfind penalty for unsafe u-turns on highway
  
• Fixed incorrect traffic lane-changing behavior when one or more lanes are merged to one from the left side
  
• Balanced Water Consumption of multiple City Service buildings
  
• Fixed wrong zoning grid offset when opposite side of pedestrian street, alley or gravel road has retaining wall. (This can cause some zoning issues that cannot be automatically fixed if this type of location is already zoned in a save)
  
• Fixed cars signaling wrong side when leaving roundabout with left-hand traffic (Takes effect on existing saves only after touching roads near the roundabout with road tool)
  
• Fixed parking fee policy available for subway stations even though they don't have parking spaces
  
• Fixed an issue with randomization of radio ads per brand influence in a city
  
• Fixed faulty unicode and non-alphanumerical characters support to Microsoft cloud saves
  
• Fixes various occurrences of randomly bright windows on vehicles
  
• Matched Transportation infoview stop legend colors to stop icon colors
  
• Performance optimization to polygon area triangulation and validation
  
• Fix for potential error: Inspector failed to parse HTTP data on connection
  

Another week, another patch! If you missed them then you can find the full patch notes here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-notes-for-1-0-12f1-hotfix-steam.1606507/

The most discussed change in this patch was the removal of a radio ad after it was pointed out to us that it came off as offensive. We want Cities: Skylines II to be welcoming to all, so we decided to remove said radio ad. I was, however, surprised by the tone of the discussion. The best part of the Cities: Skylines community has been how helpful and kind its members are to each other, and we hope to see that continue with Cities: Skylines II. I would like everyone to keep that in mind when you join community discussions. I would urge everyone to leave constructive criticism and remember that if there’s an issue with the game it’s not appropriate to attack a fellow community member or single out a developer or a partner of Colossal Order. We are reading all the feedback and we are more inclined to take polite feedback (including criticism) back to the dev team. You can be a part of a positive community if you so choose.

This week we are really digging into Garbage. It looked like the Garbage feature in the game has bugs that affect the balance of it in an unwanted way. The work started earlier by identifying the following issues:
Garbage collection bug, that is caused by the garbage trucks just disappearing mid-journey.
Garbage accumulates too little and City Service buildings that process garbage are out of balance.
Garbage City service buildings which are just placed get their storages filled with garbage seemingly out of nowhere which then prevents them from collecting garbage from the city.

Now that these bugs are fixed we can look into the balance of the feature as the processing buildings don’t go through the garbage quickly enough and this causes issues with the export. If the city doesn’t handle the garbage internally, excess garbage is exported outside of the city. The downside of exporting is that it takes time and causes traffic leading to unhappy citizens, so it’s beneficial to process the garbage in the city for a faster outcome to please the crowds.

Another issue I mentioned last week was about stray dogs. In the next patch, the amount of them is fixed so that we don’t end up with an insane number of abandoned packs of dogs all over the city. Newlyweds should just welcome their partner’s dogs to the family and not leave them behind. Plans to fix this issue caused immediate debate if we should turn this bug into a feature. I for one would absolutely welcome the idea of an animal shelter DLC with a bunch of policies and all sorts of animals needing rescue in the city!

While on the topic of DLCs, we will not release new paid content for Cities: Skylines II before the outstanding performance issues are fixed to our standards. As a small team, we must focus on the task at hand to avoid spreading too thin. We are also very much looking forward to starting to go through your suggestions for Cities: Skylines II, such as adding some beloved quality-of-life improvements already familiar from the predecessor that were missed in the sequel due to priorities and time constraints.

My pledge to you is that Colossal Order will keep working on Cities: Skylines II so it will reach its full potential. To reach that potential we also need to talk about modding. Next week I’ll be focusing on the status of the Editor and what it will have when it’s ready for release. Check out the video below to get an idea of what’s coming!

Sincerely,
Mariina

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hi everyone. We have another hotfix for you today with improvements and bug fixes, see the list below for details.

Please note! With existing save games, most simulation fixes require the simulation to run for a while to take effect.

• Increased leisure probability to balance the "No customers" situation with commercial companies
  
• Improved balance of companies' profit
  
• Tuned down companies ordering input resources when their storage don't have enough space
  
• Fixed trade resource bug preventing some resources from being consumed
  
• Fixed miscalculation in college/university eligible count
  
• Improved conditions for companies to move away when bankrupt
  
• Fixed a dependency error with land value causing potential instability
  
• Fixed an issue where loading a new map would cause water state to get out of sync with the save data
  
• Slightly increased Windows emission intensity
  
• Optimizations for area lights
  
• Prefer rendering small objects after large ones when possible to improve GPU performances in some cases
  
• Improved shadow LOD calculations to cull irrelevant shadow casters earlier
  
• Reduced situations where trees and alpha clipped objects would lead to virtual texturing space running out
  
• Fixed citizens hanging around at park areas on regular building lots never getting inside the building
  
• Decreased resolution of unnecessary large character textures
  
• Removed Spasm radio ad (due to offensive content)
  
• Added missing localization ID for Paradox account linking
  

Quick note: I'm posting this and future CO Word of the Week on behalf of Mariina.

"Hi Everyone, welcome to our little weekly update, CO Word of the Week, where we share what Colossal Order is doing right now, and what you can expect for Cities: Skylines II as a result.

CO Word of the Week originally ran from March 2016 until early 2018 and was mainly written by me, Mariina, the CEO of Colossal Order, but we also had some other team members as guest authors every once in a while so I can’t take all the credit. Now, in the name of transparency, it’s time to dig this old concept from the toolbox and start sharing!

To write this very first Word of the Week (please feel free to suggest an abbreviation) I needed to go back to the source. I searched the Cities: Skylines forum for the original posts and was extremely happy to find the very first one:

Hi everyone! I'm Mariina or better known here on the forum as co_martsu. I am the ceo of Colossal Order, the developer of Cities: Skylines. We work together with our publisher Paradox Interactive to bringing you the best city builder ever made and the quest toward that goal continues.

Big part of developing the game further is communication with the players and the community. We have been active in reading the feedback but haven't had as much time to comment as we would have hoped for. Therefore the idea is that I will be writing an update on a semiregular basis on what Colossal Order is up to so that you players can hear first hand what is going on in the development of Cities: Skylines.
Disclaimer: Some things are secret and I will try not to get assassinated by the Paradox marketing department so we'll keep this strictly to the points I'm allowed to talk about. I understand you probably don't value my life as much as I do, but we'll make this work, I'm sure!

The mission remains the same: We want to bring you the best city builder ever made!
And as I have grown older I am no longer afraid of the marketing department so no holding back.

As you may have noticed Cities: Skylines II was released last week and we are happy the game is finally out! However, the launch was overshadowed by technical issues which caused disappointment, and rightfully so. We are happy to see that many players do enjoy the game and for those who are currently unable to play, I want you to know that we are working on a number of fixes and improvements to address your reports.

The first hotfix patch was quick to roll out on Steam last week and this morning the patch for Microsoft Store and Game Pass finally made it live. We will have to see how we can speed up the patching process so we don’t have players waiting for these important fixes longer than necessary. The patch included optimization for LODs, or Level of Detail, which means that the game renders fewer details when the camera is far away from the object. Finding optimal LOD levels is a balancing act between visual fidelity and performance, and we’ll be addressing this in future patches. Yes, including the characters and their teeth! We also identified some offenders such as the depth of field, global illumination, and fog, all now tweaked for improved performance. Additionally, the patch included fixes for a few crash bugs and stutter cases.

This week we will continue to go through the forum reports and fix the most urgent issues. The work on the assets and LODs continues, but it’s a task spanning over a longer period of time as there are quite a few different types of assets needing special attention. On top of the performance work, we are looking into gameplay issues you have reported. We have fixes being tested for education, where college/university eligibility is not shown correctly in the UI, and for trading, where it looks like the citizens are not consuming all different commercial types correctly resulting in not enough customers for the local business. We are currently investigating a garbage problem and it seems that some citizens are abandoning their dogs resulting in a huge dog pack just stranded in the city. Not cool, citizens, not cool at all.

The performance improvements and bug fixes take top priority until we have reached a level we are satisfied with. All the performance improvements will benefit the development of the console platforms and we hope to bring the game to Xbox Series X/S and PS5 as soon as possible!

I want to thank everyone for the reports, they’re very helpful and we appreciate you taking the time to provide us with the information we need. We will go through all of the reports as fast as we can. If you are experiencing a crash or performance issue please create a report on our support forum found here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/cities-skylines-2-bug-reports.1162/

I will be back next week to give you an update on how the work is progressing. Until then, thank you to everyone for the patience and support, it means a lot to us.

Sincerely,
Mariina"