Kaschperl

I myself have a hard time trying to see what exactly they were going for with CS2. I gave it a chance and was disappointed, and I dare say CS2 is a long way from the great game its predecessor has become (albeit much to the credit of the modding community - but SC4 was no different in that respect). What bugs me the most is that a bunch of weird design decisions (that would likely have gotten axed had there been a more focused development process, imo) made it into the game. What I'm talking about is things that hardly add to the experience yet obviously were regarded as being worth spending valuable development time on. The worst culprit in my opinion is the simulation in general, which apparently simulates weird-ass details like every single citizen's exact wage and prices for vegetables... like, come on. This is something neither I nor the developers should have to deal with in a city building game. Worst thing about it is that they obviously made it so convoluted that they still need to balance and patch strange variables like these, trying to fix unnecessary details such as parks overflowing with homeless people. It feels to me like they got into a rabbithole trying to perfect the simulation but got to a point where they lost focus and it got out of hand. Graphically, the game can look really good under very specific conditions and the vanilla assets look much more realistic than those in CS1. However most of the time the presentation is oddly plain and sterile - CS1 just had way more life and pop to it despite having less refined graphics (it can look especially stunning at night time). Grass and concrete look utterly drab and boring in CS2 and there's hardly any structure to be seen. Everything looks like it's made of construction paper and feels devoid of detail. Seasonal changes are too abrupt - 1st of December comes around and suddenly the game feels like someone flicked a switch labeled "Turn everything blue". The snow effect is weird. Add to that graphical glitches that haven't been fixed since day one, like weird artifacts outside city boundaries and broken emissive vehicle LODs, and you've got yourself a sour tasting pixel soup. What is beyond me is how they've not even used their full potential in some cases even though it would have hardly meant any extra work. To me, the maps are the worst aspect in that regard. I only recently learned from browsing user-created maps that the map sections you get to purchase don't need to be rectangular - they can actually be any shape under the sun. Yet all the vanilla maps I know use stupid squares that don't comform to the landscape. Why? No clue. Another big oof to me is that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have someone make some beautiful vanilla maps. The tools were all there apparently. Yet what we got were the same amateurishly created vanilla maps as we got in CS1 - a height map likely created in MS paint with some sad trees aimlessly sprinkled across it, done. Couldn't they have hired someone to do it right, as they did with their region packs? Not to mention other half-assed features like traffic accidents that regularly send cars flying across half the map, "forest fires" that consist of a single burning pine tree on an uninhabited end of the map and strangely out of place radio announcements that will term said flaming plant a natural disaster. Well... I'll give the game some more time, but I find myself having so much more fun playing CS1, I doubt the day will ever come that I'll switch over to its sequel.

Hey there, I'm a bit surprised the modding forums are kinda dead right now, I just took a peek and saw you needed help Cities Skylines for some reason massively overblows brightness and saturation on imported asset textures. You're not doing anything wrong, it's just the way it is. The solution is to simply turn down the brightness and saturation on your textures by quite a chunk in your image editing application of choice. I can't tell by how much exactly, you may have to experiment a bit to get it to look right in game.

Interestingly the first copy of the game I had was a German budget version, and until I got the GOG version a few months ago I had never heard some of the sound effects because apparently my older version had the problem too. The first time I was in a close zoom level and I heard a fire truck's siren that came from a vehicle and not the station I was fairly shocked I have to admit. That means I'm not sure whether I'm missing any sounds that should be there in the GOG version, since it's likely that I don't know they're even there. I once checked out the game's SFX folder and found a bunch of sounds I had never heard, but I thought it was cut content left in the files for whatever reason.

Hey xonedl, thanks for your reply. I suppose you're a lot closer to being an expert at this game than I am, so I appreciate your tips very much The two things you talked about, not downloading small items and organizing stuff in collections, are what I've been doing before. I guess that's what I'm stuck with then, so maybe I should just do that more consequently. Perhaps I can get myself back into CSL after taking another break from it. Cheers!

Hello Simtropolitans! I've got a bit of a problem with motivating myself to play CSL which mainly has to do with modding, so hold your horses: I really want to play and enjoy this game, but each time I've come back to it in the past years it manages to frustrate me in a matter of hours. In comparison modding SC4 extensively was fun while modding CSL to be on par with SC4's visual beauty still having it feel like playing a game rather than a map editor is a pain in the *** if not impossible. I was very excited to see it being released five years ago, which I assume most of us were, and it was great in the beginning. Cool mods came up and of course I downloaded them, since I was used to the refined look andfeel of SC4 and wanted to try everything to get as close to that as possible. I thought CSL had a bright future in front of itself and it would be the city builder I've been waiting for the past decade. However, it didn't turn out as great as I had hoped. On the way there, over the course of 1 1/2 years, the looks of the game definitely improved a lot but the experience deteriorated at a rate faster than that. At the end it felt like I was spending 1/3 of the time playing while being busy with mod management the rest of the time. I'm frustrated with the tons of fixes and additions whithout which I feel it really shows that this game was developed by a tiny team. To me, vanilla CSL is an eyesore with questionable design decisions galore, bad sound design and unstable simulation, all in all inferior to SC4. I'm aware that modding SimCity 4 reqires at least the same amount of files and downloading. However the Steam Workshop, while being a good tool for games which require few mods, is not the right thing for CSL where I'm subscribed to dozens of items before I can even start looking for building assets. Compared to downloading and moving a file to a folder manually, which isn't a lot more work, this is the worse solution. The way the workshop is structured encourages tiny assets to be uploaded separately. I find myself on the workshop klicking buttons to download SINGLE AC ROOF UNITS so a building will look like it's supposed to. This wasn't the case in SC4 because it would have been ridiculous to ask users to go to someone else's website and downloading their props one by one for a buidling to be complete. And it still is ridiculous, but for some reason people many content creators don't care about that in CSL. The only difference is that the separate websites are now located under one single domain in the steam workshop, which practically changes nothing. Where are universally used prop packs? Themed asset packs, maybe even with props included? Building variety packs? Workshop collections, I have to say, are a horrible excuse to proper packs, because the items still can't be managed in groups in-game. The in-game management consits of scrolling through endless lists of an unordered item mess. There's no way to organize stuff, neither in-game nor in the workshop. Some merciful people make prop packs, usually very small ones, but then there's building creators who use those and single props to subscribe to side by side, which makes no sense. It worked so well in SC4. Maybe that's because platforms had to be created by users themselves to host the files so a certain level of moderation was present opposed to just being able to throw everything on the god-given workshop and letting users manage the misery, but I don't know. Another thing that's in the way is a ton of DLCs with no end in sight, as is to be expected with a Paradox game. I see that they're targeting more casual player as well, but I just hope it ends at some point. Mods need to be updated every once in a while and I've seen a bunch of good mods go down the drain by not getting updated any more, so that's a bummer. Obviously I can't be bothered to throw more money at this game at the moment so I'm stuck with AD and snowfall so far. I don't want you to get me wrong, I appreciate every creation and useful addition to CSL very much. The problem is the organisation of the huge mass of items there is, and I feel like that should be manageable, since SC4 showed that it could be done. You may also say: why don't you just play SC4 then? I do, but obviously there's so much potential in CSL, and I want it to be better that what I've managed to make it. There's fantastic screenshots and videos out there, so I know it's possible, I want to find out what could help getting the best out of the game. Maybe it simply is a lot of patience. So my question is: does anyone else feel like that, or am I doing something wrong? I know everyone's play style is different but I hope you see what I mean. I would be grateful to hear suggestions for breaking the vicious circle of needing more mods to make the game better while having more mods making the game management a pain. Maybe transferring workshop items to the offline mod folder is the way to go, though I remember having read somewhere that the number of mods is limited then. Or maybe I just haven't found the right content creators, maybe there's a good mod manageing application, I don't know. I didn't want to sound too dramatic, but I guess I needed to vent a bit How do you manage your mods, have you found a better way, or are we stuck with what we have?

Hi there! I'm the original author of the North America Road Textures (just the pack, not the Core mod). I haven't visited the ST forums in a while and now that I did, I was happy (and a bit surprised) to see that you still like my textures and go out of your way to make them work. I have to admit I haven't played the game in a long time, and I can't help with the question you asked. I still remember there were some quirks to the Core mod, like apr maps that wouldn't have any effect on rendering for example, so I was never 100% sure whether everything was actually correct, I only tried to make things look okay I hope you can make some progress sooner or later! If you ever decide to put the updated roads on the Workshop, you can shoot me a PM here or on Steam and I'll happily leave a note on my texture pack to redirect to your updated mod. I'm of course totally fine with the textures being re-published

Go for it! Hope you have fun You'll get familiar enough with modding sooner or later if you're interested in it, so don't worry. I'm glad that I could help.

The one by BloodyPenguin is indeed the correct one. Unfortunately, the Steam Workshop - especially for Cities:Skylines - has become an absolute bloody mess. I imagine it must be hell to navigate for a beginner without guidance. In case you have multiple choices of similar mods, chances are that all of them except one are dead. Thus a good way to see whether the mod you're looking at is the one you want is by checking the "last update" timestamp. There are a few good modding guides on the workshop itself in case you want any more mods, like this one: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1411897315 Hope this helps!

This project looks promising already. Great work so far! I had already given up on waiting for something like this to be made. Thanks for picking this up again!

I'm not against multiplayer at all, irrespective of the technical feasability. Some people actually played (or still play?) a sort of SC4 multiplayer where they have a common region stored on a server. That way people could download their map tile, work on it, submit it, view the other player's cities and trade with them. I've also seen multiplayer sessions like that where mods were allowed, everyone simply needed to have the same mods installed. If I understood @AmiPolizeiFunk correctly then that's pretty close to what he imagined regarding the concept, and it's even closer to what SC5 already has. From my point of view that's a nice form of having something like a multiplayer experience without many dependencies: the only things that need to be done are keeping the maps synced and make sure that everyone has the same mods installed when they play in the multiplayer region. SC4 is very suited for this kind of multiplayer: it has (proper, not the SC5-style) built-in regions and mod packs can easily be switched around (while merely trying to have interchangable mod packs in C:S will most likely make your brain melt). Of course there would be many things to think about if a region system was to be introduced in CSL too, like traffic connections, trade and what not, so to me it appears to be least suitable for multiplayer out of the three games I mentioned.

I'm utterly unimpressed by this announcement, but it's free, so we can't complain...

I have to agree with the others, the building looks beautiful even though it has a relatively simple shape! May I ask what the tri count is on this?

This is fantastic. I've been looking for a way to make variations like this for ages and wasn't aware that this is possible. Thanks so much!

Since I'm not a console player I'd have to ask all those questions as well at the first look, and they all have a point. However I can imagine that there are potential buyers out there for all the CSL-related stuff that CO makes. The kind of people on this forum don't seem to be the game's main target group, to me it's clear that they rather try to target a segment of players who play the game more casually, perhaps even children. The art style speaks for itself, and all the DLC features that seem half-baked to us may be alright for people who don't deal with the game and it's inner workings as much. As for the controls I think it might actually work out just fine if it's well done. I once played Tropico on a console and I was surprised of how well it handled with the controller. Of course nothing beats mouse controls for this type of game though. Anyway, the console release isn't for the dedicated players and modders, in other words most of the people who are active in this forum section. Maybe we have to be aware of the bigger picture and deal with it. To be honest, from the announcements before the game was released I expected something that was better thought-out than the game we actually got. I think most of us will agree when I say that the modding tools and support aren't the greatest, even though they were included at least. Realism wasn't as high on the developer's list as it would have been on mine and many others' who have to make CSL feel as realistic as possible via modding. Everything about ths game feels like a compromise somehow, but without the success that this ensured we might not even have the half-decent platform to build upon that CSL is now. I still haven't lost all my hopes for future DLCs, but they have been dwindling since the release of Snowfall.

Hey there! Seems like you're talking about a variant of a Diverging Diamond Interchange in your second solution. That's an intersection style where the directions of traffic are swapped on a short road segment to eliminate left turns across oncoming lanes. Maybe you could look at some real-life examples on the internet to see how the real ones are built. The only way of having that in-game would be two separate two-lane one way roads next to each other, which will most likely require some mods like Road Anarchy in order to be built on such a short segment. Other than that, I believe the setup as it is now isn't unrealistic. The Turning Lane Avenue from Network Extensions has a suicide lane in the middle which can be used in both directions, so that's the closest you could get to having "no" designated lanes at all. I think it would technically be possible to have multiple of those suicide lanes next to each other, but I don't believe that there are enough cases where anything like that would be needed for anyone to implement that