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Hello again! This time we will take a peek at how the game systems actually work. Some of the main goals for us at Colossal Order where to create fun systems which interact with each other, and to have simulated individual citizens.

At the heart of Cities: Skylines is how the individual citizens and goods move around the city. Citizens have a name, age, a home and a workplace, unless they are students at the university or too young to work. Citizens travel to work, go shopping and occasionally visit leisure locations like parks. Not all citizens own cars, so some walk and others drive. If public transportation is available, most of the people without cars will use it for longer trips. Even people with cars use public transportation if they notice driving with their own car might be slower because of the traffic.

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Because simulating individual citizens takes some processing power, we opted to cut down the number of citizens. Some residential buildings have a quite low amount of people living in them compared to the size of the building. We felt choosing individual citizens over realistic numbers brought more to the game. So while your high-rise might have only 12 households, everyone has a name and a logical pattern of moving around the city.

Goods are produced in industrial areas and transported to commercial areas to be sold to citizens and tourists. This means that wherever there’s a commercial area, there will be trucks driving to and from it. To produce goods, industrial areas use raw materials. If the city produces raw materials by specialized industry, the industry will automatically get them shipped from the specialized production facilities. Industry prefers materials from inside the city, but if none are available, they will order raw materials from outside locations. Materials arriving from outside locations come by truck if no train or cargo ship connections are available, which will put a stress on the road system.

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To avoid traffic jams, vehicles choose their route so that they try to avoid busiest spots in the city. They also like to choose lanes early to avoid switching lanes and blocking off two lanes in the process if they are trying to push their way into a line of cars and have to wait. If the traffic does not flow well, there’s a traffic info view to show the spots where problems lie. Using roundabouts, elevated roads and building roads to get the vehicles straight to where they are going is are a big part of the game.

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Everything is connected. If you build a Fire Station that sends out fire engines to put out fires, the service vehicles can only get to the fires if the roads are not crowded with other vehicles. But just having a Fire Station near by raises the happiness of residential houses. A raise in happiness means the residents are less likely to turn to crime, even if they are unemployed for some time.

Karoliina Korppoo, Colossal Order, lead designer on Cities: Skylines
 
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Welcome back CO...

12 families to a building? roughly 4 persons in a family....there is no way a city will have 1,000,000 people...

This is fine, because I don't think that is your goal? Atleast you are being upfront about it. CO isn't fudging the numbers like SC2013 or CXL or the other games...they had like 200 people in a small house which is ridiculous just to have their cities seem big.
 
"We felt choosing individual citizens over realistic numbers brought more to the game. So while your high-rise might have only 12 households, everyone has a name and a logical pattern of moving around the city."
Beside that. I'm very disapointed about this blog; the title says "simulation" which I though Its gona be long one. It didnt and not only It reveals very too little ( almost nothing) we now know game has to downgrade households to optimize?

Because I think Simcity did very bold move and tried to simulate everything but the current house PC is not ready for that bold (insane) ideas! They have failed but you guys throw **** every time you promote the game: "This has offline game, will simulate everything, It has million citizens" and so on... So here we are again, I'm guessing you guys figured out too that this insanly simulation is imposiable too.
 
1. Traffic - interesting to hear that there will be traffic and congestion considerations for Cims' routing, rather than just shortest distance. A cool twist would be if Cims' routing initially is poorer (e.g. some degree of randomness/direct pathing), but improves once a facility, e.g. a airport, is added - due to now available traffic helicopter services (or similar logic).

2. Cim population scale - for all those concerned about 12 Cims per tower, keep in mind that essentially any isometric game has some degree of abstraction - i.e. a single solider unit in a RTS actually represents dozens or hundreds in the scale of a true epic battle. In this case perhaps 1 Cim = 100 Cims (with a highrise thus having 1200 "imputed" residents). Perhaps a way to placate both camps is to have a toggle which displays your population as either strictly the number of computed agents (Cims), or the imputed number for a city of similar size/development in the real world.
 
I suppose the processing load comes from the number of cims x frequency at which things need updating. I wonder if the number of cims could be increased if the frequency at which things are recalculated for them was reduced? How often are things recalculated at the moment - every time the situation changes (like, you build a park, a bunch of people get happier and that makes them shop more)?
 
When you say a hi rise will have around 12 families in it, what size is it exactly? Also, surely if there is a reduced population like this, wont this effect all other areas, such as schools, utilities, services & most importantly transportation. At least the traffic congestion should be minimal.

I am not knocking you as I think the game looks great & I am happy for the sims to be meaningful, but just wondered how this will effect the game in general.
 
I'm very disapointed about this blog; the title says "simulation" which I though Its gona be long one.

I found that the blog had a lot of info...

Because I think Simcity did very bold move and tried to simulate everything but the current house PC is not ready for that bold (insane) ideas! They have failed but you guys throw **** every time you promote the game: "This has offline game, will simulate everything, It has million citizens" and so on... So here we are again, I'm guessing you guys figured out too that this insanly simulation is imposiable too.

SC2013 did innovate and brought some new ideas to the genre BUT they had piss poor execution and I'm not sure if they even had a QA team. It's questionable if SC2013 even had 5,000 in that tiny neighbourhood space and still had traffic problems because the AI was so brain dead. It's been a year and they still haven't fixed it, but who cares now with C:SL soon to be out...

Do you have a quote for the million citizen thing? I know there was another thread about how crazy/impossible it would be to simulate/display a million of anything even on a 30" monitor. I think my screen would be one big blob of pixels. Other posters bring up the million number up but I've yet to see CO explicitly say it

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/12/17/cities-skylines/

If there is a lot of room to build(more than SC2013 close to CXL). If the city seems busy and alive (not like CXL) and shows actual numbers instead of fudging the numbers like the other city builders then I couldcare less if the counter on the bottom say 1,000,000 or not.
 
Nice to see a new Dev Diary, but it seems a little information light. I sort of expected more from the thread title than "it will simulate things".


Maybe I'm just overly grumpy as it's my first day back in work :(

Anyway onwards and upwards, still really looking forward to this.

And yes I still hate that little blue bird in the interface :mad:
 
In simcity 4 it was possible to have cities without industry, will this game also let you cheat RCI demand like that by not providing industry, or will commercial demand not rise up because they do not get satisfactory materials from factories?

Btw, game looks great :)
 
Wow, more pics (wish there were more than 3, but that's fine).

I personally think that it's a better idea to simulate the individual people than to have one building have a realistic population. I think that was a good choice, and I like it. I think there should be a few more households in one apartment though, because this might limit some aspects to the game, like parking and wider roads, since you won't get that high of a population.
 
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