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Everyone loves free updates! With Green Cities, we have lots of free features and improvements for you.


First of all, let me mention probably the tiniest addition: three new parks. Sounds pretty small, right? The real deal here is that one of the parks is a floating building that you can place on water, and another one can also be placed on water but sits on pillars. The third is there just for fun. These new buildings types mean that modders can now also make pillar buildings and floating buildings by using these parks as templates. So while they are small, they open the door for lots of interesting new buildings. Some new trees are also coming with the update.


A larger thing is the info view toggling. Previously, when placing a building or for example painting a district, you could only see the one information overlay that had been selected for the tool. We have done lots of work to open up some information overlays to allow for more control when using tools and placing buildings. For example you can now choose to look at traffic congestion or noise pollution when zoning, to find the best spots for new housing. This feature is most useful when painting districts to be used as specialized areas. Now you can set the information overlay to show natural resources, so it is easy to place those natural resource reliant districts just where you want them.


overlays.png



One of my personal favourites are the electric cars. Citizens can now have Edison (yeah, see what we did there? ;D) electric cars in several models as their personal vehicles. These vehicles appear on the roads among other cars and don’t need any extra effort from the player to appear. There is an actual benefit to them, as they do not produce as much noise as regular combustion engine vehicles.

Now that we come to noise pollution, it has big changes. Before Green Cities noise pollution is calculated based on road type and traffic congestion. With Green Cities, the free update changes this mechanic for all players. The new way of calculating noise pollution handles vehicles and their noise pollution values. This provides more accurate results, so that trucks generate more noise than other vehicles, as the road noise polluting is calculated by the vehicles using it and their noise pollution ratings. The change in existing saves is not huge, but allows for future use of more accurate noise pollution and more differences to vehicles. In the paid expansion, policies let you guide citizens towards using electric vehicles and owning them. For the free update, we wanted to give the updated noise pollution system to everyone, and spice up the look of the game by adding electric vehicles.


noisepollution.png



There are couple of other small additions: new props have been added for decoration and the intersection rules that came as a free update with Mass Transit can now be used on train tracks intersections as well. One that I like very much was inspired by a conversation I had at EGX Rezzed 2017 at London with the person who runs LuetinGaming channel on Youtube. I watch game videos, but had not previously thought of how important it might be to allow players to adjust how need icons show in the game. Need icons don’t always mean you need to immediately do something about the issue, for example one way road ends show an icon and leaving them sit is a perfectly viable way to play the game. However, when doing a video, these icons can look messy and distract from the video topic. The free camera mode does not help, if you plan on playing, not only showing the city. To remedy this the game now has a checkbox in the gameplay options to turn off distant need icons. This makes the need icons show less and be less distractive. Feedback from different kinds of players is always very welcome, so don’t hesitate to talk to us if there’s something that could make your game better. We don’t have the resources to make all dreams come true, and we have our own vision of what Skylines is, but ideas are always very welcome!


hideicons.png



And last but not the least, we are finally opening up road modding. Another dev diary will go into details of how to create your own roads, but the main thing is that this will be possible with the Green Cities free update. I can’t wait what you will come up with regarding roads!


trainintersections.png
 
VERY GOOD!
Waiting to see what we will be able to do in the road modding?

Cannot yet buy or pre-order on Steam. You should get this sorted soon, as I have the money now, but could spend that money on something else by the 19th?

1500+ hours already on CS...
 
The "Info View Toggling" sounds the most helpful to me.

The noise pollution change would be better if it took terrain and regular trees into account. (Might be too computationally expensive though.)

Interesting to see intersection rules being added to rail. Too bad the "yield" option is still not there.

Road modding could be good as well, but I'll have to wait until next week to decide what I think of that.
 
The train intersection rules will be most helpful! Now I can get the cargo trains moving toot sweet so they stop blocking up passenger rail on the way out of town!
 
Also coming with the free update:
  • European theme City service and unique buildings will be available to other themes & vice versa when Europe / vanilla style is enabled
 
Thank you! I really like the changes to the UI. Unfortunately, there still has been no mention of specialized commercial or industrial levels or specialized commercial density. I love this game and making assets for it but I don't want to be forced to use Ploppable RICO to get low density hotels/motels or high density nightclubs. I'd also love to see different wealth levels of hotels.
 
Also coming with the free update:
  • European theme City service and unique buildings will be available to other themes & vice versa when Europe / vanilla style is enabled

This is very good news.

Now that we come to noise pollution, it has big changes. Before Green Cities noise pollution is calculated based on road type and traffic congestion. With Green Cities, the free update changes this mechanic for all players. The new way of calculating noise pollution handles vehicles and their noise pollution values. This provides more accurate results, so that trucks generate more noise than other vehicles, as the road noise polluting is calculated by the vehicles using it and their noise pollution ratings.

I'm a little disappointed with this. I was really hoping that trees and parks would provide noise barriers. Maybe next time?
 
Before Green Cities noise pollution is calculated based on road type and traffic congestion. With Green Cities, the free update changes this mechanic for all players. The new way of calculating noise pollution handles vehicles and their noise pollution values. This provides more accurate results, so that trucks generate more noise than other vehicles, as the road noise polluting is calculated by the vehicles using it and their noise pollution ratings.
View attachment 304383

Two questions about how the change to noise pollution calculation interact with road types.

Will different types of roads have noise pollution reduction values eg tree lined streets?

If cars move through an area faster or slower or are stuck in traffic, how will it impact noise pollution? For example, where 10 cars go slowly along a 1 lane street compared to 10 cars that zip past on a 6 lane one way road, which area will have higher noise pollution or will they be the same?
 
First of all, let me mention probably the tiniest addition: three new parks. Sounds pretty small, right? The real deal here is that one of the parks is a floating building that you can place on water, and another one can also be placed on water but sits on pillars. The third is there just for fun. These new buildings types mean that modders can now also make pillar buildings and floating buildings by using these parks as templates. So while they are small, they open the door for lots of interesting new buildings. Some new trees are also coming with the update.

That's great news for the creators among us! :)

The new way of calculating noise pollution handles vehicles and their noise pollution values. This provides more accurate results, so that trucks generate more noise than other vehicles, as the road noise polluting is calculated by the vehicles using it and their noise pollution ratings. The change in existing saves is not huge, but allows for future use of more accurate noise pollution and more differences to vehicles. In the paid expansion, policies let you guide citizens towards using electric vehicles and owning them. For the free update, we wanted to give the updated noise pollution system to everyone, and spice up the look of the game by adding electric vehicles.

I like this feature - but when it comes to noise I think (in future) more could be improved as the way the game handles noise isn't well from my point of view:

Service Buildings like train and metro stations generate noise on their own - everytime I see this I ask myself why they do so. Even if there is no traffic and no "Cim" is using that station it generates noise. I think that in this is not necessary.

The noise in this case should only be produced by vehicles and people entering this station. More people → more noise → more vehicles → even more noise → no people / no traffic → no noise.

The same thing applies to commercial buildings and landmarks. No customers → no noise.
The only commercial-type buildings which should create noise on their own would be night clubs as they play loud music while active ;)

Industrial buildings, power plants and trash service buildings are good as they are, cause they generate noise while active irl (Turbines running, trash crushing and stuff).

So, people could be totally fine with a trainstation next to their condo if there is a train arriving only few times / day with some people taking a ride - right now they won't be satisfied at all ;)

So - if you are going to expand that improvement to people besides vehicles (planes, trains, ships (uh, wait - ships don't still have engine sounds? ;) ...) the static noise value on most buildings could be ignored and the noise simulation would be more dynamically ;)

For simulated people I'd like to see some simulation depending on their groupe: kids should generate more noise as adults. Elder people should produce less then adults. So if adults generate a noise level of 1 kids would generate 1.5 and elder people 0.5 ;) or something like this. Tourists would create something like 1.25 as they probably are louder than residents ;)

If we'd do so big schools would be more noisy than small ones and areas which attract elder people would be more silent than regular areas.

and the intersection rules that came as a free update with Mass Transit can now be used on train tracks intersections as well.

Nice! Did I spot a railway signal in the screenshot? ;) Maybe we can get some realistic signals aswell at some point to improve the railway usability... (something like the traffic lights)

And last but not the least, we are finally opening up road modding. Another dev diary will go into details of how to create your own roads, but the main thing is that this will be possible with the Green Cities free update. I can’t wait what you will come up with regarding roads!

Cannot wait to see how this turns out! Really neat :)
 
Nice things. But atm the Greencitiesaddon is not that attractice. Still missing a lot things, that a a green city shoudl have

things that districts have to create theire power on all solarroofs, better (zereo)waste management, craddle-to-craddle-industries... Small local power-and heatplants with networks and much more... eco-friendly tourism, nature protected areas,...

Still missing a real green city logistics and mobilty with some cool cargobikes, e-cargotrucks, drone delivery, carsharing, Multimodalstations, bike services (f.e. Sharing-systems) und better effects for the enviroment.. . Carparking and fees, City-tollstation... And of course, real green car-free districts.

Good work so far.
 
Two questions about how the change to noise pollution calculation interact with road types.

Will different types of roads have noise pollution reduction values eg tree lined streets?

If cars move through an area faster or slower or are stuck in traffic, how will it impact noise pollution? For example, where 10 cars go slowly along a 1 lane street compared to 10 cars that zip past on a 6 lane one way road, which area will have higher noise pollution or will they be the same?

Actual driving speed does not matter with noise pollution, but the road types with higher speed limits cause higher noise pollution. Streets with trees have lower noise pollution values, but standalone trees don't lower noise pollution at the moment. It is an interesting idea though and we'll investigate it further. So same amount of same kind of cars on the same type of street should create same noise pollution value.
 
Toggling stop signs and traffic lights is such an important (and awesome) function! Yet there is no way of creating a keyboard shortcut in the game settings that would allow you to immediately use this function. PLEASE make it possible to create a shortcut for this!
 
Also coming with the free update:
  • European theme City service and unique buildings will be available to other themes & vice versa when Europe / vanilla style is enabled
I have one question : Is it possible to enable European theme with vanilla theme together in the game? Is it possible to choose what type of district i want? New theme with different styles of buildings could upgrade this very nice game. Can you make a new type of buses (double decker), trams or trains? I like spend time with this game. :)
 
That's great news for the creators among us! :)



I like this feature - but when it comes to noise I think (in future) more could be improved as the way the game handles noise isn't well from my point of view:

Service Buildings like train and metro stations generate noise on their own - everytime I see this I ask myself why they do so. Even if there is no traffic and no "Cim" is using that station it generates noise. I think that in this is not necessary.

The noise in this case should only be produced by vehicles and people entering this station. More people → more noise → more vehicles → even more noise → no people / no traffic → no noise.

The same thing applies to commercial buildings and landmarks. No customers → no noise.
The only commercial-type buildings which should create noise on their own would be night clubs as they play loud music while active ;)

Industrial buildings, power plants and trash service buildings are good as they are, cause they generate noise while active irl (Turbines running, trash crushing and stuff).

So, people could be totally fine with a trainstation next to their condo if there is a train arriving only few times / day with some people taking a ride - right now they won't be satisfied at all ;)

So - if you are going to expand that improvement to people besides vehicles (planes, trains, ships (uh, wait - ships don't still have engine sounds? ;) ...) the static noise value on most buildings could be ignored and the noise simulation would be more dynamically ;)

For simulated people I'd like to see some simulation depending on their groupe: kids should generate more noise as adults. Elder people should produce less then adults. So if adults generate a noise level of 1 kids would generate 1.5 and elder people 0.5 ;) or something like this. Tourists would create something like 1.25 as they probably are louder than residents ;)

If we'd do so big schools would be more noisy than small ones and areas which attract elder people would be more silent than regular areas.



Nice! Did I spot a railway signal in the screenshot? ;) Maybe we can get some realistic signals aswell at some point to improve the railway usability... (something like the traffic lights)



Cannot wait to see how this turns out! Really neat :)

;););););););););););););););););););)

:D