Free Content Update Details

[boformer 3,169]

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Last week it was cake and sparkling wine but this week it's all business here at Colossal Order. For Chirpy turning 1 year last Thursday Paradox announced an upcoming free update and I'm so happy I get to finally talk about it. I asked Cities: Skylines lead artist Janne to help me out with this one for some pro tips so read below what Landscaping is all about!

Modifying terrain ingame has never been part of the grand vision of Colossal Order. We clearly wanted to have editor features and the gameplay separated, so that the maps are made in the editor and the city built ingame. However there are cases when modifying the terrain makes sense while building the city. Therefore we have been working on tools that allow slight modification, or landscaping, to be added to the game: Shift, Level, Soften and Slope tool. All of these have three brush sizes and strengths available that allow small changes to the terrain. Just remember that the dirt is not simply added or removed like in the map editor, but will actually have to be moved from one place to another.

Janne wanted to share his experience with the landscaping tools:

“I've been playing the game and testing our new landscaping tools a lot lately and I think you can do really cool stuff with them. For me, it might be the biggest time consumer in the game to date. I've noticed some stuff along the way and I thought I should share some tips with you guys, just to make things a little bit smoother when you start shoveling that soil. Landscaping tools are great! You can do lots of stuff with these (but not without a cost you know). You also have to make sure you keep an eye on soil availability.

I've found it handy (and pretty cool too) to have a sort of mining area in some remote spot on the map, where I can get more soil if needed and dump the extra if it's causing me problems. That's how I don't get holes everywhere in the map if I suddenly need more soil to fill my shoreline or something like that. I usually create some gravel roads and maybe zone few ore industrial buildings around the mining area too to make it look prettier.”



On top of the landscaping tools to adjust the terrain in game the update will bring canals, quays and flood walls. The water structures will give more flexibility and options for forming different looking cities. The canals will make it possible to guide the water around the map and having the water intakes and outlets placed closer the city. There are some limitations to the canals, like the fixed width which has been chosen so that the water intake and outlet fit there, but is not too wide for the canals to flood easily. The depth can be build in three different levels and is upgradeable later on. The quays will make the shores look more neat and also make it easier to place the beach assets introduced in After Dark expansion. Water structures therefore have two purposes in the game: to allow more control over the water in the maps and making visually interesting choices for the city. I personally think this is one of the best features for Cities: Skylines, because what is more fun than to guide poop water around the city (and after a massive error in design having the flood walls is a benefit)!

Janne on the other hand is using the canals to avoid poop water:

“I use canals a lot to make sure my citizens are getting fresh water from their taps and the sewage water is going as far as it possibly can. I also like to reroute water and get myself in deep trouble. Like with quays, I use landscaping tools to level the terrain little bit in the areas where I want canal to be. It will take time to water find it's direction when you place canal so be patient. Three different canal depths will help you to get water level where you want it. In case of flooding, flood wall snaps charmingly right on the edge of canals and I sometimes also use water pumps to get rid of the overflowing water. When you are playing around with landscaping tools and canals, you might notice (the hard way) that water have to have a place to go. And I'm pretty sure the place where it goes is not the right one for the player. Luckily we have flood walls now, so your city doesn't go all Venice if you shovel the soil too much. With combination of landscaping tools and flood walls, you can make pretty cool wave breakers too.

You can create very nice and tidy shorelines with quays. You can place harbors and piers on quays and snap the road to be perfectly aligned with them. I've noticed I use landscaping tools a lot with quays. First I straighten and level the shoreline roughly, and only after it's relatively straight, I select quay and place it. If you have problem getting it exactly where you want, try to turn snapping off and see if that helps.

If you are landscaping with simulation paused, you might get “cannot build on water” message when placing quays. That's because you have moved the terrain, but water is still where it was before soil was moved. Just let the simulation run a bit so the water can settle in its new surroundings and you should be fine. After you've placed a quay you can again use landscaping tools to clean-up terrain if there's any visible problem areas.”

All the new tools are found under landscaping button in the main panel alongside paths, trees and rocks. The old decoration service will be called Parks and Plazas and will include only those. There's also a new infoview for the different terrain heights.



Wait, did I say ROCKS?! Let Janne explain:

“Map editor now has lots of terrain props. We've added all kinds of cool stuff from castle ruins to abandoned cars and fallen trees. There is some Stonehenge-type standing stones and pier ruins and then there's rocks. There's rocks that vary from quite small (car sized) to a bit larger boulders all the way to bedrock areas and large rock formations. Some of these you can paint with brush, some are placeable and then there's some that are created like roads. With all these different types of props, we've tried to create a good collection of assets that feeds the imagination of players and modders when they get their hands on the update. There's already lots of stuff in the workshop that I think will get converted to terrain props fairly quickly and new ones will follow for sure. Amount of items there is insane! I still hope that at some point, we have some time in our schedule when we can go trough our own wishlist and make some new great stuff such as ancient statues and ground covering vegetation for you guys to play with.

Like mentioned before, there's three types of terrain props in the update: Props, buildings and net. All of them are mainly done to be used in map editor but the props and buildings are exposed in the asset editor too. In the game-side you only have rocks available. We wanted these terrain props to be something you discover in the game rather than being something you just “build”. You might suddenly find medieval castle that is blocking your new highway route and at that point, you have to make a decision to either bulldoze it and lose it forever or find a way to build your road around it. There might even be some weird ancient stone pillars standing in the bottom of the lake, you never know.”



So there you go, plenty of new things available soon! We're working hard to getting the update ready for you during March. So get ready to get your hands dirty landscaping!


Cheers,
Mariina & Janne

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/co-word-of-the-week-3-11-2016.913753/

 

Everything about this sounds great

Realistic terraforming, canals, quays, sea-walls, rocks, ruins, draggable walls, a better park menu...

[Kaputnik 27]

9 minutes ago, boformer said:

Some of these you can paint with brush, some are placeable and then there's some that are created like roads.

New possibilities for modders? Or could you always do that?

Sounds like a fantastic update, can't wait!

[boformer 3,169]

3 minutes ago, Kaputnik said:

New possibilities for modders? Or could you always do that?

Sounds like a fantastic update, can't wait!

Possibly we will be able to make dragable fences, hedges and walls

Also, I have a feeling that the quay walls could be used for sunken highways....

[Ryno917 102]

All sounds great to me! I just hope the walls are easily modable (more easy than roads, anyways) so we can get some really nice variation in them. The walls pictured don't look very nice - very utilitarian and plain. Good for an industrial area, but not a downtown waterfront.

 

Great stuff! I'm quite surprised this is all coming in a free update!

[Cool_Z 1,547]

23 minutes ago, Ryno917 said:

All sounds great to me! I just hope the walls are easily modable (more easy than roads, anyways) so we can get some really nice variation in them. The walls pictured don't look very nice - very utilitarian and plain. Good for an industrial area, but not a downtown waterfront.

 

Great stuff! I'm quite surprised this is all coming in a free update!

They said from the start that paying dlcs would be alterning with free updates. Good to see they kept their word.

[Ryno917 102]

27 minutes ago, Cool_Z said:

They said from the start that paying dlcs would be alterning with free updates. Good to see they kept their word.

Yep - I'm just surprised at how much they've packed into this one. I was expecting the free updates to be about half the size of this one. Good on them!

[Judazzz 1,936]

6 minutes ago, Ryno917 said:

Yep - I'm just surprised at how much they've packed into this one. I was expecting the free updates to be about half the size of this one. Good on them!

Well, the free Euro update was quite extensive as well, given it added not only a whole new biome and building set, but also a couple dozen new generic growables.

Very excited about this upcoming update - hopefully a modder will make all new props, paths and such available in-game as well.

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Seawalls? Brilliant! One small step for function, one giant leap for aesthetics.

[Koesj 659]

The tick-tock DLC approach is also the reason I'll keep supporting CO by buying their payable DLC as long as I'm playing the game. We've gotten a relative glut of free stuff that they could've easily charged decent amounts of money for, so even if some of AD or Snowfall's trappings weren't right up my alley, they already made up for that that with the wall-to-wall buildings and now this terrain DLC.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

I wonder if I'm every gonna get out of my test cities and actually play a real map. Not getting enough sleep is becoming worse now. So much to do already and now this. I feel like a huge pile of work orders was dumped on my desk.....in a very pleasant way.

 

[Roadman20 601]

Yay, seawalls!  Not really digging the plain look, but it's a step forward nonetheless.  Other features are intriguing.

[Horus_Kol 118]

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Just remember that the dirt is not simply added or removed like in the map editor, but will actually have to be moved from one place to another

I like this idea - it brings a cost to terraforming in-game.

Looking forward to all the props and other things, too

[Chesh 173]

would be awesome if canals could transport freight

[Msprintz 25]

I like where this is going, maybe with the addition of these features, they can at some point include strip mining.  Would be rather ingenious and a first among simulations to include it. 

[gfvsims 169]

This all sounds great! Thanks for posting the details here, boformer.

[ghosty20 150]

This DLC is going to be very cool and I like the fact that what you remove from one area has to put somewhere else as it is in real life none of this magic disappearing earth from past city builder games..

[Judazzz 1,936]

6 hours ago, ghosty20 said:

This DLC is going to be very cool and I like the fact that what you remove from one area has to put somewhere else as it is in real life none of this magic disappearing earth from past city builder games..

When I'm doing some terraforming I always pretend the soil is quickly and efficiently loaded onto barges and shipped off to another city at lightning speed  But apart from some terrain/slope smoothing, I don't terraform much - I try to work as much as possible with the geography I'm dealt with, rather than trying to bend it to my will.

Having said that, I'm pretty curious about this novel approach to terraforming and what extras it brings to the table.

[ghosty20 150]

32 minutes ago, Judazzz said:

When I'm doing some terraforming I always pretend the soil is quickly and efficiently loaded onto barges and shipped off to another city at lightning speed  But apart from some terrain/slope smoothing, I don't terraform much - I try to work as much as possible with the geography I'm dealt with, rather than trying to bend it to my will.

Having said that, I'm pretty curious about this novel approach to terraforming and what extras it brings to the table.

By the sounds of it, it has a lot of possibilities in how you can shape the land as you would in real life..  Looking at the thread this post came from someone suggested if they could use the hole they dug as a landfill which got an interesting reply from one of the devs..  Also when you think about it you could do things like they do in places like Japan where they have made man made islands for extra living space..

And maybe one could make realistic looking terraced land for housing and farms, and as some are hoping for making sunken roads and so on will have to wait and see what this DLC will do when they release it..

On another note one of the funny/sad things was of all the posts in that thread there was one sad sack that was being negative about this free DLC..

[Linoa06 1,374]

On 3/15/2016 at 4:34 PM, boformer said:

 

Everything about this sounds great

Realistic terraforming, canals, quays, sea-walls, rocks, ruins, draggable walls, a better park menu...

It better not screw over save files....again.

[TekindusT 3,809]

And how many assets/mods will be updated after this DLC is released? I don't want to start yet another city from scratch after each update.

[boformer 3,169]

19 hours ago, TekindusT said:

And how many assets/mods will be updated after this DLC is released? I don't want to start yet another city from scratch after each update.

Assets should still work, as well as simple mods using the official stable API.

All mods going beyond that (TM, T++, Rush Hour, Precision Engineering, Fine Road Heights) may need an update.

[mutton noir 170]

Well this should silence the majority of naysayers. Sounds like an excellent set of new toys for the toolkit that will enhance gameplay considerably and all for free! What other studio does this? Really looking forward to this expansion. It also means that I can delete a whole bunch of assets I've currently subscribed to. Fingers crossed mods will be updated quickly where necessary with limited disruption (still recovering from Snowfall). Thanks to everyone at CO. 

[Horus_Kol 118]

4 hours ago, mutton noir said:

Well this should silence the majority of naysayers.

Nah, they'll just get a new list of things to say nay

[idcaf 65]

18 hours ago, boformer said:

Assets should still work, as well as simple mods using the official stable API.

All mods going beyond that (TM, T++, Rush Hour, Precision Engineering, Fine Road Heights) may need an update.

Is there any way to disable the update?
Fine road Heights is the single most crucial and essential mod there is to this game and it's not only incompatible with each new DLC or expansion pack but also with each new major patch, and I'm sick of waiting days and days for the fixes.

(Sorry for negativity, i'm just incredibly frustrated at this, as I know some day, it will stop being compatible all together and i'm stuck with those demonically bad vanilla slopes)

[boformer 3,169]

Set Steam into offline mode.

[Vals Loeder 27]

Great news. I love this terraforming idea.

[Cool_Z 1,547]

On 18/3/2016 at 1:26 PM, idcaf said:

(Sorry for negativity, i'm just incredibly frustrated at this, as I know some day, it will stop being compatible all together and i'm stuck with those demonically bad vanilla slopes)

It will actually be the opposite, someday big big game updates wills top and most of the mods will stay compatible for good. 

[Kaputnik 27]

Patch notes in newest word of the week: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/co-word-of-the-week-4-12-2016-patch-notes-1-4-0-f3.915105/

Also: Vanilla fine road heights?

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We have gotten a lot of requests about the road elevation being too steep. Therefore the roads, paths, tunnels and tracks now have a new button in the Option panel where you can select snapping and straight or curve type. The button has 3 states and can be used to cycle through 3 preset heights for the elevation step when using page up and page down. This will give a little bit more precision to laying those roads. Placing of the dams should also get slightly easier with the terrain topography visible in the build view.

 

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1.4.0-f3

• Landscaping tools - Tools to edit terrain heights (Shift, Level, Smooth, Slopes), 3 brush sizes and 3 strengths are available in the option bar.
• Paths - Paths were moved from Decorations to Landscaping Paths
• Trees - Trees were moved from the Props Decorations group to Landscaping Trees
• Rocks - Added rocks objects
• Water Structures - contains Floodwalls, Quays and Canals

• Decoration service renamed to Parks&Plazas
• Parks - The Standard parks
• Plazas - The Plazas style parks
• Others parks - The parks which don't belong in the 2 categories above
• Tourism & Leisure - After Dark DLC only, contains all the park assets from After Dark
• Winter Parks - Snowfall DLC only, contains all the park assets from Snowfall and only shows if you are in a Winter map

• New categories for Unique Buildings
• The Environment panel of the Map editor now contains several terrain props such as ruined/abandoned buildings and rocks.
• The roads, paths, tunnels and tracks now have a new button in the Option panel where you can select snapping and straight or curve type. The button has 3 states and can be used to cycle through 3 preset heights for the elevation step when using page up and page down.
• New steam achievements implemented
• Default maps updated with new environment props
• Dam placement shows terrain topography

• Blurry cliff textures improved
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Text: SPA/FRE/RUS : In-Game: Line color will overlap the Line Name in the Public Transport - Lines detail window.
• Fixed: PDX Accounts creation lacks countries (Montenegro added).
• Fixed: Suggestion: Expansion 2: UI: The Lines Detail panel could be easier to access.
• Fixed: Suggestion: Expansion 2: UI: The total number of transport lines could be added in the Lines Detail panel.
• Fixed: Asset Editor: You can have two rows of Roads buttons at the same time
• Fixed: Main Menu: Tools: Mouse wheel scroll does not work in the "map theme" selection screen. (Fixed also in theme selections.)
• Fixed: Expansion 1: Design: The Prisoners and Cyclists statistics are displayed in the City Statistic even if the After Dark expansion has not been purchased.
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Public Transport Lines can only be sorted in one direction
• Fixed: Expansion: Design: Vehicles coming out of Cargo Hubs have incorrect path causing looping and traffic issues.
• Fixed: Theme Editor: Changing the water normal for a theme does not get saved
• Fixed: Faulty transition when connecting bicycle path to pavement path
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Theme Editor: Grass color offset values doesn't get updated on the map immediately
• Fixed: Expansion 2: It is difficult to understand the impact of Heating on the budget
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Pathfinding: Sometimes, snow plows and road maintenance vehicles do not complete their work shift and disappear.

• Fixed: Expansion 2: "Unsubscribe all" and "disable all" are missing a letter in 1600x900 resolution
• Fixed: Keybinding strings under the Theme Editor tab are unlocalized
• Fixed: Strings regarding themes in New Game and Load Game menus are unlocalized
• Fixed: Text in Asset Editor tab of the Keymapping menu is cut-off in several languages
• Fixed: Several entries in Keymapping \ Asset Editor are unlocalized
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Snowfall map names in the New Game menu are unlocalized in Korean
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Water & Sewage tooltip in Budget menu does not mention Heating.
• Fixed: "Last updated" text overlaps button in several languages in the Content Manager
• Fixed: The "Included in x styles" text does not get updated when switching language settings
• Fixed: LOC: POL: The "Households" text in a district's Info Panel is overlapping with the Population graph.
• Fixed: LOC: ALL: Map Editor: Import and Export Heightmap not localized.
• Fixed: Expansion 2: Some of the new Snowfall props aren't localised in the Asset Editor
• Fixed: Expansion 1: "2x3_Nightclub01" has wrong sort of names
• Fixed: German language - 'Reset Configuration' button is inconsistent (big letters) with other buttons
• Fixed: Gameplay option "dynamic weather" is translated wrong to German
• Fixed: LOC: FRE/POR/RUS/POL/GER: Text: The warning message when changing resolutions is cut-off.
• Fixed: Several non-winter maps in the New Games panel are not localised in any language except English

• Modding: Added few serializers for some data types to go into CRPs (DepotAI.SpawnPoint, PropInfo.Effect, BuildingInfo.SubInfo, PropInfo.ParkingSpace, PropInfo.SpecialPlace)
• Modding: Improved error handling for mods causing exceptions during the ILoading interface callbacks and consequently disabling other mods
• Modding: Added profiling ability for custom content loading (using the --enabled-dev-ui toggle, Show loading profile and Show custom content)

 

 

[mrsmartman 200]

Praise the Chirper!

 

 

http://colossalorder.fi/ChirpyContest/

[Koesj 659]

Canals look to be a versatile addition and I love the way those seawalls are as easily drawable as a regular road. Trying to load up a save without -noworkshop enabled for the first time, wish me luck!

 

e: no dice!