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Hello everyone !

Included in the free update we are bringing with the upcoming Snowfall DLC, there is a brand new tool being introduced which enables modders/content creators to make even more amazing user-made content for Cities: Skylines.
We call that tool the Theme Editor and it allows you to create "Custom Map Themes".

As you all well know by now, the game ships with various themes, 5 so far (including the upcoming Winter) and each theme emulates a different "fictional" geographical location.
Each element of these themes is created and tweaked to our best to provide a unique city building experience in each environment, this includes visual settings but also collections of buildings, trees and props.
With the Theme Editor, we wanted to bring the ability to expand on these base themes so you could create more unique and personal visual variations.
You can pick any of our base theme and override most of their properties to make them your own.
The Theme Editor, however, does not allow customization of Asset collections as we have previously introduced the District Styles for that purpose, but is focused primarily on the visuals and mood of a map.

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Without further ado, let's dig into what more precisely you will be able to fiddle with.
You can access the Theme Editor in the Tools sub-menu, where the Map and Asset Editor currently hang out.
You will first need to select the built-in base theme you wish to start from, this is an essential choice as it is not officially possible to change the base theme afterwards. So for example it is not possible to change from Winter to Tropical.
You can also load an existing map theme you acquired from the Steam Workshop or already started working on.

Once in the editor, you will notice a familiar interface and a pre-loaded map, which displays most of the features you can tweak. As usual, all the hard work can be done from the properties panels that can be opened from the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

The Terrain Properties panel allows you to override the terrain diffuse and normal map textures as well as their tiling settings. You can also toggle the detail meshes on/off per layer, such as the decorative grass, the fertile land grass and the rocks in cliffs, and control grass color offsets used for various effects in the game, such as pollution...

It is good to know that the sand and cliff normal textures are packed into a single texture in the effort to minimize usage of resources, which is the reason why there is only one tiling slider for both cliff and sand normals.

The grass color offsets control the color of the grass in various gameplay-related states.
For example, let's say the Pollution offset is (0.03, 0.015, 0.040). In a fully polluted area, this amount would be added to the color when rendering the grass, making it slightly more purple (because the values are the biggest for red and blue). For less polluted areas, the amount is interpolated between (0, 0, 0) and the values given.

p4VGLyG.png


The Water Properties panel enables control over the water textures and colors.
For the water foam texture, some experimentation may be required, the red channel roughly corresponds to the opacity of the foam, while the green channel is mostly used for rendering polluted water.

The Atmosphere Properties panel is focused on the sky properties. From the sky tint to the dramatic effect of sun rising/settings using Rayleigh and Mie scattering values, moon and sun sizes and so forth...
The free camera tool in the lower right corner of the screen may be useful to get a good angle to look at the sky when experimenting with the values in this panel.

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The Structures Properties panel is focused on roads and buildings default textures.
The upward road diffuse texture is the main pavement texture defining the look of the roads. It will be combined with the textures of the road assets themselves, which provide things like lane markings and details. The downward road diffuse is for similar purposes but for downward-pointing surfaces such as the undersides of bridges.
Building base textures are used for the bases of buildings that are visible on uneven ground. Floor diffuse can be seen through the windows of buildings. Light color palette is used for the night lighting colors for the building windows.

The World properties panel allows to define temperature ranges for a map theme and the probabilities of weather effect during gameplay.

Unfortunately, not all of the effects (grass color offsets and building/road textures mainly) can be currently previewed in the editor, so they will require some experimentation.

All textures referred to as normal map are industry standard normal maps such as:
CM7PNj4.png

While there are no strong restrictions on the texture formats and sizes being used, rgb or rgba images of power of two size (512x512, 1024x1024...) are recommended as we will try to convert and resize other formats and sizes at import time which may produce suboptimal results.
After assigning a new texture, the UI for that texture will be temporary disabled as we crunch the texture to the internal format required. During that process, the text "Compressing texture..." will be displayed in next to the menu button in the top right of the screen.

Once you are happy with a theme, the saving/sharing process works just as in the other tools. When a theme is ready to be published, check the publish box in the Save panel to make it available when starting a new map.
Do keep in mind local assets and workshop assets are considered unique, so the suggested workflow is to share a theme on the workshop before creating a map with it. Then when the map is shared, the custom map theme can be set as a required item for the map in the Steam Workshop.

Of course the map theme can also be overridden for existing maps or save games using the new drop-down in the New game, Load game, and Load map panels, which lists all the available overrides based on the base theme your map or save game is currently using.

XYldPFG.png


In the future, we plan on adding the ability to load any maps or save games using the currently loaded theme as a preview map for the purpose of better fine tuning and to preview some of the properties that currently cannot be previewed in the Theme Editor, such as the building base texture, pollution related settings and so forth.
We also plan on adding support for more values, such as the ability to customize the detail meshes for grass/rocks and gain more control over the fog and weather effects.
Finally we will also improve the way to pick a theme override when creating a new game or loading an existing one.

That's about it, I hope you will enjoy this editor as much as we do and we can't wait to see what ideas you are going to come up with!
Cheers

-damsku
 
Is it just me... or does it look like you're trying to create a Martian landscape in those images? ;-)
 
I'm sorry to sound hurt but thats because I am a bit, I love the new theme editor, it does away with my most popular mod Terrain Themes Mod, and that's fine, in fact I am honored, but it saddens me that I've not even been mentioned at all like you did for other modders who's work you've incorporated into the game, Oh well, such is life I guess. Thanks for an awesome dlc and free content nonetheless.
 
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Hi T.P.B,

I am very sorry you feel hurt and we do not want members of the community to feel hurt when revealing features of upcoming updates!
But as great minds think alike, in our efforts to improve the game and add features to it, it is unavoidable our work will overlap at some degree with modders and content creators work.
While the work the community does is certainly inspiring and blows our minds, and while we do heavily rely on community feedback to prioritize and bend our tasks list to respond better to what you want to see and play, we have had and have long term plans and a lot of the things we are working on currently to make Skylines a better game were already planned pre-release of the game.
That said, do continue making amazing mods and content, as people who subscribed to and enjoy these mods will be able to keep doing so, regardless if we bring a similar feature to the stock game!
Cheers :)
 
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You didn't mention anything about being able to change the temperature probabilities here. My biggest question, is what happens when we change the temperature probabilities to be between freezing and hot temperatures? Will it snow? Is it like creating Seasons? This is the most useful thing I see the Theme Editor being used for.
 
This is probably the new secret weapon that will shoot down lots of negative nancy's. This feature will truly unlease creative potential stimulating a ton of awesome new maps/worlds in which to play and as a result a complete sub genre of assets/mods. A clever move by CO that takes Cities Skylines to a whole different level
 
You didn't mention anything about being able to change the temperature probabilities here. My biggest question, is what happens when we change the temperature probabilities to be between freezing and hot temperatures? Will it snow? Is it like creating Seasons? This is the most useful thing I see the Theme Editor being used for.

I remember that they showed and mentioned in the stream that you'll be able to set a temperature range in this editor (min/max), but you cannot create entirely new snow themes with snow as they are part of the DLC. You can only do look-alike snow maps using textures unfortunately. So it's not like creating seasons. Temperatures will rise till high noon and then fall - they will fall also when rain starts.
 
This is probably the new secret weapon that will shoot down lots of negative nancy's. This feature will truly unlease creative potential stimulating a ton of awesome new maps/worlds in which to play and as a result a complete sub genre of assets/mods. A clever move by CO that takes Cities Skylines to a whole different level

I don't think so. Right now the theme editor looks like a very nice, but mainly cosmetic feature that allows you to control texture colors, sun position, weather cycle and such. None of these affect simulation in any way. Only changing the temperature range, snowing frequency affects simulation.

Patch will be out soon, then we'll know for sure.
 
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I remember that they showed and mentioned in the stream that you'll be able to set a temperature range in this editor (min/max), but you cannot create entirely new snow themes with snow as they are part of the DLC. You can only do look-alike snow maps using textures unfortunately. So it's not like creating seasons. Temperatures will rise till high noon and then fall - they will fall also when rain starts.

yeah, but if it's so easy to make it possible to snow and be hot on the same map just by using the editor, why didn't they just say so to begin with, considering how much negative criticism they've received for locking snow to winter maps.

if you can essentially create seasons by using the theme editor, why didn't they just say so?
 
Second part of my question is - at what point do winter items like heating, snow plows, parks etc. get unlocked if you change the temperature?

Ate these items only ever available if you choose Winter as a starter theme in the theme editor, or do they become unlocked when you make the theme a certain temperature?
 
Maps either have snow or they don't. There are no seasons (nor changing from normal to winter within a same map) in the game at this time and the temperature settings in the Theme Editor can not be used to create seasons either. The temperature settings affects the needs for heating in Winter maps.
Also winter items are only available in Winter based themes and are only part of the Snowfall DLC.
Hope this covers your questions!