Any chance that we can ever have larger maps / no building limits?

[Need4Camaro 50]

I'm aware of the agent limitations and building limits.

I'm also aware that most of this is hard coded into the game itself

The main thing that irritates me so much about this game. 81 tiles is decent but I would love to have a city building game where building multiple cities throughout a large region is possible. Preferably I would really like to have a map the size of a world much like space engineers.

I personally don't think the agent based system is good enough of an excuse as to why we can't have that. Several games also use agents but offer much larger maps sizes than C:S although these are not city builder games. I personally feel that the agents only within your immediate vicinity should be rendered / loaded but still allow players to travel freely through the region.

What would it take to get truly larger maps? The current map size even at 81 tiles (somewhere around 150 square miles) is about the size of Spartanburg SC.

[Turjan 1,048]

The current map size is a bit larger than the city of Munich, which has 1.43 million inhabitants. Of course, you won't be able to build Munich. I guess what it takes to have larger maps is a different game.

[Need4Camaro 50]

9 hours ago, Turjan said:

The current map size is a bit larger than the city of Munich, which has 1.43 million inhabitants. Of course, you won't be able to build Munich. I guess what it takes to have larger maps is a different game.

 

Do you think Paradox Interactive may actually do something like this? It seems like they are only focusing on mod content for the current title.

Edit: I guess what I should really ask is this, if we had the opportunity to have world sized maps and no limits to buildings WITHOUT taxing our computers any further than they already are, would you be willing to support the idea? 

[Delta2k5 311]

16 hours ago, Need4Camaro said:

81 tiles is decent but I would love to have a city building game where building multiple cities throughout a large region is possible. Preferably I would really like to have a map the size of a world much like space engineers.

I don't get what you want from the modding community to be honest? Isn't that general talk - so you probably are in the wrong forum? Or I don't get the point putting this into "Modding - Open Discussion".

16 hours ago, Need4Camaro said:

I personally don't think the agent based system is good enough of an excuse as to why we can't have that. Several games also use agents but offer much larger maps sizes than C:S although these are not city builder games.

Even if you say that you are aware on the agent limits I don't think you are aware of where those agents are used:

• Traffic, divided by citizen cars, tourist cars, buses, taxis, trams, goods, ferries, ships, airplanes, helicopters, pedestrians, bicycles, service vehicles like garbage trucks, police cars, ambulances, fire trucks...
• Surface water simulation 
• Electricity, Water and sewage simulation (agents get consumed and generated dynamically!)
• Animals roaming around

That said imagine that every citizen is simulated by one agent which has to monitor the following things:

• Network speed in general
• Network speed changes in general
• Route calculation every few seconds to stay on the best possible track
• Other agents (collision avoidance)
• Traffic light status
• Intersection status
• Decision which road to take when
• Closed roads (if some fire is going on)

This individual way of simulating things leads to much larger needs in computing. "Other games" choose to do something like this by reducing the amount of agents and simulating groups instead (e.g. Planet Coaster) which is better in respect to performance. Still Planet Coaster just simulates virtual people using agents. In other games also one system does not depend on another, so there is no need to simulate everything for the whole time. THIS is different in S:C (People are needed for a distant factory to create goods -> people have to travel there -> traffic has to be simulated -> resources have to be simulated -> water, electricity and goods have to be simulated -> the goods have to be delivered to commercial buildings and so on. So you cannot simply set agents to "idle" in here at a distant part of the city.

 

So, I'll skip to this by now:

14 hours ago, Need4Camaro said:

I guess what I should really ask is this, if we had the opportunity to have world sized maps and no limits to buildings WITHOUT taxing our computers any further than they already are, would you be willing to support the idea? 

No. I won't. This would mean you gonna recreate the whole simulation system + you'd have to use some other engine which basically means to create a whole new game just for maps larger than what we already have. This is simply out of scope for modding as a hobby - that sounds like some two year full-time job by five devs...

[Need4Camaro 50]

Fair enough, I probably did put this in the wrong area but what I am mainly looking for is to see if it is "technically" possible.

I was aware mainly what the agents are used for ect however regarding the idle portion in a different part of the city, I still believe in a sense this can be accomplished while not damaging the CIM economy and over taxing one's PC ... by literally taking the average output over a course set of span time that the agents (for example workers at a factory) achieve over a time and then the average time that it takes goods to be produced by said factory and sent to their respective commercial districts to be sold and the average time it takes all buildings (assuming requirements are met) to raise a level.. When the user leaves the area, (and by that I mean by a pretty decent margin.) the simulation will cease to run agents in that area and will continue to run based on averages that were produced when agents were in the area. Agents coming FROM that are could still be produced much like neighbor connections --- based on the averages produces from that area but while the user is not there, so long as a light weight database is in place to continue running the simulation I don't see a need to have those agents loaded. Would something of that nature be technically possible?

 

Edit: By possible, I'm aware the game would literally have to be re-created.. this wouldn't necessarily be a mod, so I see what you are saying when you say this thread is in the wrong location.

[Avanya 2,605]

On 22/1/2018 at 7:45 PM, Need4Camaro said:

I personally don't think the agent based system is good enough of an excuse as to why we can't have that. Several games also use agents but offer much larger maps sizes than C:S although these are not city builder games. I personally feel that the agents only within your immediate vicinity should be rendered / loaded but still allow players to travel freely through the region.

You can't really make that comparison. Other games might use completely different engines or use agents in a very different way. Just because it's agents doesn't mean it works remotely similarly to Cities: Skylines. Also if agents aren't loaded, they can't travel anywhere. You can't have them and not have them at the same time. If they don't exist, the game can't know where they're going or coming from. If it knows, then they exist and use resources. Even calculating things from averages (and calculating the averages, which need to be updated on a regular basis) takes resources. Plus what would happen to agents when you're not looking at them? Do they pause? Do they disappear and then new ones spawn when you come back?

If there was an easy solution to practically increase limits, CO would have done so by now (BTW the developer is Colossal Order, Paradox is the publisher ). But there's a lot of things that are limited by the engine. Cities: Skylines is using Unity and not one custom made for the purpose. For example it can't do lazy loading, so all buildings are loaded even if you aren't using them and even if you're not looking at them, they're still there. There's only so much the devs can do within these limits. What you're talking about prob isn't even possible with the current engine, so they'd have to make an engine or switch to another one. That's just not something you do with a game that's already released. 

It might be possible to have something like a region screen with static images/low poly models of a city, from where you'd then load into your city, but you wouldn't be able to move freely between them and the maps would still look like they do know. It wouldn't really do anything other than give you a visual feeling that your cities are connected in a larger scale.

[mgomrjsurf 16]

I second it and for the Game to load faster and gives no Errors because that's not letting me Play Game and if can't use Assets/Mods then can't play Game.

[Linoa06 1,374]

Perhaps in a few years, someone will have undertaken that project or the devs will have increased the limits further out (they do with each patch).

Until then, it's going to be a massive undertaking, not something readily possible.

[ghosty20 150]

I think until the bulk of potential customers have anything above a toaster in terms of a computer system, then the likely hood of seeing a building limit increase is probably quite slim.. Heck there are still folks out there still using Windows XP.. Either way only time will tell what CO decide to do..

[UrbanLegend 63]

Space Engineers is an interesting choice for comparison.  Much like Cities Skylines, that's another game I feel where the technology hasn't quite kept up with the player communities imagination.

[Quboid 0]

I'd be happy with smaller map sizes. There are a lot of things I'd like to see improved, all of which would hurt performance, and the frame-rate is perhaps what I'd want to see improved most. Something's got to give and while I would like spread out regions, in practice I never use most of the maps I play.

Instead of a 9x9 grid where you pick 9 tiles from 25, how about a 5x5 grid with the 9 central tiles playable. Obviously modders would immediately open up all 25. If CSL2 went this route, and had more agents/props/network elements/frames-per-second/terrain-grid-fidelity as a result, I'd be happy.

[Turjan 1,048]

@Quboid That won't help. The empty 9x9 grid we have at the moment doesn't really bring down performance in any way. It's the size of your built-up city that is most important. Depending on your processor, the issues will hit at 50k, 100k or some other population size. The simulation is what kills performance most.

There is something in the graphics engine that is a bit fishy, as even Nvidia wants me to set texture quality to medium, despite my okayish graphics card, but that is independent of city size.

[Quboid 0]

@Turgan Good point about an empty 9x9 map giving good performance (not 7x7 as I said earlier, sorry), that means that whatever performance improvement there could be will be small and not worthwhile.

The simulation is the most important part, but it's not all. I could get about 50K until I got into detailing in a big way, then my CPU would be slowing things down at about 10K (even while RAM, VRAM and GPU were not maxed out). Also, there's little performance difference between paused, 1x and 9x speed (with Speed Slider mod). I don't understand this - shouldn't detail affect the GPU more than the CPU? - but something other than cims are hammering the CPU.

[rsc204 21,857]

34 minutes ago, Quboid said:

I don't understand this - shouldn't detail affect the GPU more than the CPU?

That all depends on how stretched either component becomes really. If your GPU can keep up with it's demands, displaying things, but the CPU can not, i.e. doing the math behind the simulation, you'll get performance issues. Similarly, if the CPU is running along just fine, but the GPU is out of texture memory or at 100% utilisation, you'll experience problems. The key differentiator is that for GPU issues, you can alter settings like detail, resolution, 3D settings (things like AA) and potentially resolve the bottleneck. But if your CPU is running at it's limit, you can't really do anything about it.

[Avanya 2,605]

Just a note of detailing. There's a definate difference in placing props freely in the game and having props sitting in buildings. I have no idea why, but there's definately something about props placed outside buildings that isn't as optimized as buildings (which I guess makes sense considering props need a mod to allow us to place them in game).

[Turjan 1,048]

Some of the vanilla maps come with placed props (all those little rocks etc.). I have been using the "Sandy Beaches" map recently, and that had more than a third of the prop limit used up "out of the box".

[Avanya 2,605]

Yeah, rocks are the only props I know of that we can place without mods. I'm not sure if they work differently, but I would doubt it. There's prob just so few of them that we don't notice anything compared to when we detail using lots of props in an area. But it's pretty interesting that we can have an area full of props placed inside buildings and not have the same performance hit that we get when they're placed by hand outside buildings. I'm not a programmer, so beyond the observations of the difference I can't really say much, but if modders can find what's causing the difference, that could lead to less a performance hit when detailing with props (or ideally CO would open up for us to place props).