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TL, DR: There's some new tabs with cool data in the budget panel, go check them out :)


Hi everybody, it's time for Colossal Order's next word of the week!

I'll quickly introduce myself, I'm Lukas the UI programmer, and it looks like it's my turn now to write this thing - so here we go!

Since I mostly work with Cities: Skylines UI, I will write about a UI feature that was released with our recent Green Cities update, but not mentioned very much yet in trailers or marketing updates: A partial redesign of our budget panel.

Before Green Cities, the section in question looked like this:

1.png


As you can see, it already was somewhat cluttered and not very easy to read. Not our most favourite panel to look at, to be honest.

Then with Green Cities, we decided to add a new commercial specialization to this. And an office specialization. Oh, and separate statistics for tax income from the new self sufficient residential housing, with five different levels for each low and high density buildings. Sounds like more content than would still fit in there? Well yes, it was =).

And so we decided to redesign the whole thing. We added tabs with detailed information on residential, commercial and industrial/office tax income, and one separate tab for showing income and expenses of the city's public transport system.

This allowed us to summarize and simplify the main income/expenses overview, which now looks like this:

2.png


The tabs for residential, commercial and industrial specializations now each include a bar chart showing detailed info on where that sweet tax money is coming from. For owners of Green Cities, the same bar chart also visualizes how much of your residential housing is self sufficient:

3.png


The overviews for commercial and industrial tax income look similar, but also include any available specializations. Maybe most importantly, the pie chart on the right shows how much of your overall income the tab you are currently looking at makes, so you can easily tell if the numbers you are looking at are relevant in the big picture.

Finally, public transportation got its own tab showing both income and expenses for each transportation type, and how profitable it is.

4.png


Don't worry too much if your public transport system is not profitable, it may have other benefits (e.g. less traffic from cars, more tourism income) that are not measured here.

Have fun with the new statistics, I hope they'll give you some interesting new insights into your city!

Cheers, Lukas
 
Would be nice to see things like:
Income from Tourists:
- From Tourist specialized
- From Leisure Specialized (Do they spend money at parks and Unique Buildings?)
- From regular commercial
- From Public Transit
- From anywhere else
- Total

Maybe compared to non-tourists at the same things as well.

Anything else we can learn about tourists.
 
Tourism Income.PNG

This tab has now been added to the budget panel. The number that was "tourism" in the old version of the panel only showed income from tourist money spent in commercial zones, now also the income from tourist money spent in public transportation and total tourism income is shown. It was not possible to break down the income from tourism in commercial zones into all the different commercial specializations for space reasons.

I hope this helps, thanks again for the feedback! :)

@Grapplehoeker