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The days are slowly getting longer here in Finland and there's a glimpse of hope that spring will once again reach us northerners in the upcoming months. It hasn't actually been that cold here lately, more windy and nasty icy/rainy days. Our friends from Paradox dared the winter weather and visited us here in Tampere last week, though they said it's the same in Stockholm. So at least both of us are suffering equally.

We had excellent discussion on where to take Cities: Skylines this year and also talked generally about improving our cooperation, processes, community and modding too. Exciting things are to follow and I hope you stick around to hear more about those in the future. We got excellent feedback from you guys about the previous expansions and I'm hoping you will find the future ones interesting and fun!

It seems there are some rumours going around that the next expansion we are working on is traffic related. I want to make it clear for everyone that we are not doing an overhaul of traffic AI for Cities: Skylines. Most of you know this as I have said it multiple times, but just to make it clear I want to cut the wings of this bird immediately so no further disappointment is caused. Remember to trust only reliable sources and wait for more information before drawing conclusions. We'll reveal everything in due time.

All in all it seems it will be a busy spring for us. On top of the usual development we're sending a bunch of people to GDC at San Francisco at the end of February to get inspired by the great speakers while I will be there purely for work. I'm not sure if that's fair, but what wouldn't I do for the happiness of our team. That's the secret for them being creative and productive I believe (and I don't have to be either really). There's also warm and nice weather so that probably helps too ;)

Cheers,
Mariina

A small bugfixing patch was released today and here are the patch notes:

1.6.3-f1
  • Fixed helicopters not used when building is completely missing road connection
  • Fixed endless sub-building fires
  • Fixed unnecessary thunderstorm warnings
  • Fixed crash when adding building to a style
  • Content manager asset sorting
  • Fixed: Overlapping 'Unsubscribe All' button in Content Manager in ES
  • Fixed: Player is unable to close triggers tabs in Goals panel even when buttons look functional
 
i have a prisoner ninjas!

xD
 

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May I ask, why you do not want to/cannot work on the traffic AI? It clearly is an issue.

Too hard to do within the minimum specification for computer requirements to run the game smoothly would be my guess, but I'd like to hear the reason from CO.
 
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I don't think that traffic AI needs an overhaul, AI is good, the problem is different. The main problem is there are too much cars compared to cities size in Skylines, there is too more cars in small cities. Reasons are two: time and numbers.

The first problem is in-game time, which is too fast. I mean that thing in left corner which moves faster than Usain Bolt. One day in Skylines lasts just a few seconds. Cars, lorries, trucks, trains, everything spawns too often. The second problem are numbers. By numbers i mean capacity of every vehicle in the game. It is just too low. Bus can carry only 20 people, tram 30. I personally use mod, which changes tram capacity to 300 (it is similar to real world) and my trams are still overcrowded very often. However the biggest problem is that cargo vehicles have low capacity too.

When you combine these two thing together you got total mess in traffic. Commercial zones require goods from industrial zones, however, because of in-game time commercial zones go bankrupt if they don't receive goods in one day (by one day I mean half of one day-night cycle). So if a shop is further from the factory, more and more trucks are spawned. However, they have low capacity, so we need even more of them... There are many more examples: Building are full of garbage i the day, when you have 50% garbage budget during the day and 150% during the night (in real world garbage trucks usually drive only at night), again because of time and capacity of garbage truck. House burn down because fire truck needs two weeks to get there (one minute of real time). Everything what i mentioned means that you have to build more fire stations, more recycling plants, more factories. And it brings just more and more cars. Number of cars is much higher than it would be in city with the same population in real world and roads just can't handle it.

Once i had city with 70K citizens, there was a large residential zone and a large industry zone. They were connected with one 4 + 4 lane highway and there was just huge traffic jam on it. I felt sad while watching it, because 4 + 4 highway in real world have capacity around 200 000 cars per day.

Trains spawns too often too, especially those, which enter or leave your city. Even worse is that passenger cars which enter or leave your city are always nearly empty, but they just continue spawning. I have visited a lot of train stations, i am a railway fan, but i have never seen such overcrowded tracks as those in Skylines.

I think that Cities Skylines needs better balance. I understand that we can't use numbers from real world (you would never be able to bring metro for example), but Skylines seems to be balanced for 10 000 citizens. When you reach 50 000 or 100 000 citizens, it is just bigger and bigger mess. If developers want to fix something, they should start with these two things: time and numbers.

AI overhaul fixes nothing. Even if cars were able to use all lines of roads, it would just mean that more cars reach first crossroad in the same time, traffic jam would just move about few meters. Additionally lower cars would also reduce necessary computing power and game could run smoothly.
 
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May I ask, why you do not want to/cannot work on the traffic AI? It clearly is an issue.
I disagree. That traffic AI is fun to play, I'd say!
 
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I agree with you @autobusik2
You explained exactly why CSL with the balance runs it not quite round. I have the same problems with my City, too many cargo-trains and -ships, and often only with 7-15% freight.
This is a big fail in the game, please CO fix the balance.
 
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