Ever looked at the Steam Workshop and groaned because you saw something great but your games already take forever to load?
Currently when we load a game it looks up the list of subscribed assets we have turned on and and loads them in to the game and ignores the assets we have turned off. This is global across all saves. If you turn off an asset and load up a game that asset will disappear from wherever you planted it in the game.
Lets say I create a city named Banana and with a Tropical theme and I only want tropical related assets to load when I play it. I would turn off all assets and then painstakingly go through my content manager asset list and select all my beach umbrellas and tiki huts etc. 50 assets interspersed between 300 other assets and many more props, it would take all afternoon!
So now I go back to my other map and I have to turn everything on again.
When I go back to Banana I would have to spend another afternoon going through my list again to find my tropical assets. Except I wouldn't because it would be faster to just wait an extra 5 minutes for my game to load up with everything switched on.
Solution
The game loads assets from 2 lists. It loads assets from the Universal List first and then loads any items not already loaded from the City List.
"City List" When you create a new map an Asset list is created eg "Banana" is city name and the name of the asset list which lists all assets that are unique to this playthrough.
"Universal List" this is the current default list. This list would contain all assets that we want to be available across all maps. When you subscribe to an asset it is automatically turned on in here.
This should be the default method for games that have Steam Workshop and distinct playthroughs. eg Skyrim would have been great if you had unique mod sets per character. Why load up heavy armor mods if you are playing a stealth archer?
This would add to the permanence of our cities. We would no longer feel like we can not work on our Banana city anymore because we can't remember what assets it had, which we would lose permanently if we hit the save button.
In addition it would be incredibly useful if the Content Manager had a drop down menu for
Show All
User Created Assets (assets I have created stored locally and including the subscribed workshop copies)
Props
Education
Commercial - Liesure
Industrial
Industrial - Oil
etc
The current method of shove everything in to a massive list is scary. By far the largest amount of items in my list is props and it is difficult to find anything if you don't know the exact name.
It would be very handy also if the lists can be made accessible from within the game. Maybe items can be added and removed from the game on the fly but if not you could add a Save List button with a message stating that change will take effect when you reload the game. This would allow us to easily remove items we want from future loadings of the game. Also if you think "you know what that intersection I have would be great about there but it isn't currrently On" you can switch it on now and use it next time you reload.
P.S.
It would be a nice touch to group save games by city name which is also something Skyrim didn't have.
Currently when we load a game it looks up the list of subscribed assets we have turned on and and loads them in to the game and ignores the assets we have turned off. This is global across all saves. If you turn off an asset and load up a game that asset will disappear from wherever you planted it in the game.
Lets say I create a city named Banana and with a Tropical theme and I only want tropical related assets to load when I play it. I would turn off all assets and then painstakingly go through my content manager asset list and select all my beach umbrellas and tiki huts etc. 50 assets interspersed between 300 other assets and many more props, it would take all afternoon!
So now I go back to my other map and I have to turn everything on again.
When I go back to Banana I would have to spend another afternoon going through my list again to find my tropical assets. Except I wouldn't because it would be faster to just wait an extra 5 minutes for my game to load up with everything switched on.
Solution
The game loads assets from 2 lists. It loads assets from the Universal List first and then loads any items not already loaded from the City List.
"City List" When you create a new map an Asset list is created eg "Banana" is city name and the name of the asset list which lists all assets that are unique to this playthrough.
"Universal List" this is the current default list. This list would contain all assets that we want to be available across all maps. When you subscribe to an asset it is automatically turned on in here.
This should be the default method for games that have Steam Workshop and distinct playthroughs. eg Skyrim would have been great if you had unique mod sets per character. Why load up heavy armor mods if you are playing a stealth archer?
This would add to the permanence of our cities. We would no longer feel like we can not work on our Banana city anymore because we can't remember what assets it had, which we would lose permanently if we hit the save button.
In addition it would be incredibly useful if the Content Manager had a drop down menu for
Show All
User Created Assets (assets I have created stored locally and including the subscribed workshop copies)
Props
Education
Commercial - Liesure
Industrial
Industrial - Oil
etc
The current method of shove everything in to a massive list is scary. By far the largest amount of items in my list is props and it is difficult to find anything if you don't know the exact name.
It would be very handy also if the lists can be made accessible from within the game. Maybe items can be added and removed from the game on the fly but if not you could add a Save List button with a message stating that change will take effect when you reload the game. This would allow us to easily remove items we want from future loadings of the game. Also if you think "you know what that intersection I have would be great about there but it isn't currrently On" you can switch it on now and use it next time you reload.
P.S.
It would be a nice touch to group save games by city name which is also something Skyrim didn't have.
