Cities: Skylines II News

I'm posting the Word of the Week on behalf of Mariina.

Last week I promised to give you an update on where we are with the modding of Cities: Skylines II. The Editor is in the works and we shared an updated version of it with the closed Modding Beta group for a feedback round just last Friday. The Editor currently includes only maps and support for code modding and we’re looking forward to getting those ready for an initial release. I’m calling it an initial release as we will be adding to the modding tools throughout the game's lifetime, just like we did with Cities: Skylines.

We do not have the asset import feature available yet, so the creators are currently unable to import their own assets into the game. After we have the import feature in place we’ll be running it through the Modding Beta group. When the asset part of the Editor is ready, we’ll have the Paradox Mods nicely populated with the Region pack assets that the asset creators have been working on. The assets are looking amazing, and I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun choosing the ones most fitting to your cities! If you haven’t already, check out the Region Pack teaser here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Our goal is to release the Editor as soon as possible, and we will keep you updated on the progress. We expect it will take a couple of months to get the Editor in a shape where we can release it, but we don’t have a concrete timeline yet as we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep. Once the Editor is out we will continue to work on it with your feedback and suggestions to help us prioritize the most wanted features and improvements. We’re very much looking forward to seeing your creations and mods too!

As an update on console, the game will have all the intended Editor features in place when the console versions are released, so you’ll be able to catch up to the PC players in no time. The Editor on console will be on par with the PC version in all but two features: code modding and asset importing as these are not possible within the console restrictions. However, you will be able to download user-created assets from Paradox Mods and create custom maps! The performance improvements we are currently working on also benefit the console version, and we’re actively working on the console versions so they will be ready for you in the first half of 2024.

In the last three weeks, we’ve had a very quick pace with the patches. There is one more of those landing soon, but after that, we’ll be focusing on bigger fixes that take longer to work on. The team is now focusing on LODs and improving GPU performances, and while geometric LODs are largely automated, there are a ton of tweaks and adjustments required. We are expecting a relevant performance boost with these asset fixes. The workload is significant and unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to improve the performance at once, instead, it requires several tasks completed before we are happy with it. This results in less frequent updates so we won’t have weekly patches going forward. Please check the future Word of the Weeks for more information, as I plan to keep writing one every week until further notice.

Before I go, here’s a link to last week’s patch notes if you want to check what it brought! Thanks to everyone who reported an issue and gave feedback. Your effort is most appreciated!

Sincerely,
Mariina

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