Hotfix is live | Patch 1.2.1-f1 info.

[Greygor69]

I agree with 95% of what you said. But the "cosmetic" issue is a serious one. True game mechanics is priority, but textures is also very important. The point to building a city is to gaze at what we built and immerse ourselves in the details. Like stones in rivers, the grungy look of an old building and how the "scene" looks that we want to take screen shots of and go in first person to enjoy. If we are looking at crappy textures, it ruins the whole experience. And when I work many hours making my textures and going through all the tedious UV mapping, I want to enjoy the end product as intended. So please, don't take the look of our textures lightly. It's actually a big deal for many of us.

Sure. I don't take it lightly, I'm not affected by it as much as others seem to be and my screens don't look as bad as some that have been posted. But I am aware it's an issue. I, and this is just personally, rate it below people who are saying "my game won't start" and "can't load my old saves", etc.

Hopefully once that is out of the way attention can be focused on the image issues for those with and without the DLC.

To be honest I was more annoyed by the poster I quoted. As a programmer myself "Do you want it quick or do you want it right" started echoing through my head.

 

[Mr Maison]

Sure. I don't take it lightly, I'm not affected by it as much as others seem to be and my screens don't look as bad as some that have been posted. But I am aware it's an issue. I, and this is just personally, rate it below people who are saying "my game won't start" and "can't load my old saves", etc.

Hopefully once that is out of the way attention can be focused on the image issues for those with and without the DLC.

To be honest I was more annoyed by the poster I quoted. As a programmer myself "Do you want it quick or do you want it right" started echoing through my head.

Ok...I agree 100% with that.

 

[armarayo]

BloodyPEnguin's mod is no saviour.. We really need our cities to look at noon like those looked pre-AD.

 

[draqsko]

We got the hot fix patch on the 1st October. At the very most you can say they've had a week to look at this.


It's amazing the number of people who think coding is simple and anything can be fixed in isolation of other factors.

EDIT: I do like how you used images to illustrate your problem, but it's strange that in one the sun is too the left and slightly in front of the viewer. In the other the sun is behind the viewer. Surely that would over-emphasize the issue

First, those two sentences immediately make me think of all the MMOs out there with people complaining they should upgrade the engine of the game, to which one developer replied with (paraphrasing), "Don't worry the interns are copying and pasting the code into the engine as we speak."

The second brings up a good point, if you want to make comparison screenshots, you should take them from the same angles with the sun at the same spot in the sky otherwise you are comparing apples to oranges, not apples to apples. The "sun" in Unity is not a point source but a directional light, and that makes angles important when comparing scenes.

This part isn't directed at you Greygor:

As far as the tropical maps being washed out, have you ever been to the Caribbean? If you have then you'd realize that colors in a tropical area tend to get sun bleached because the sun is directly overhead the entire year. Hate to say it, but the tropical maps are pretty close to what it would look like in real life especially when you consider that monitors are projectors of color and real world object are reflectors of color. You can never get them exactly the same for that reason, but CS comes close.

I mean St. Martin is blindingly bright as are most tropical locations

I should also add, if they do revert it they need to make it a toggle, because I for one like the new look, aside from the European maps which have a distinct yellowing.

 

[vukica]

As far as the tropical maps being washed out, have you ever been to the Caribbean? If you have then you'd realize that colors in a tropical area tend to get sun bleached because the sun is directly overhead the entire year. Hate to say it, but the tropical maps are pretty close to what it would look like in real life especially when you consider that monitors are projectors of color and real world object are reflectors of color. You can never get them exactly the same for that reason, but CS comes close.

I mean St. Martin is blindingly bright as are most tropical locations

And have you ever played one or any of the Tropico games? Never had problems with those. I also didn't have problems with tropical biome in C:S before latest patch.
It shouldn't matter how blinding it is IRL when making a video game. it's not real. it's a game! it's supposed to be fun and pleasant, and not tiring and eye-sore.

unrelated edit:

there was a question something like "do you ppl think coding is easy"

yes, coding IS easy. making it work in the best possible way is hard. coding is 10% or less of what software engineer does. C:S didn't fail in coding, they failed in way of working and achieving results.

another edit:

I should also add, if they do revert it they need to make it a toggle, because I for one like the new look, aside from the European maps which have a distinct yellowing.

absolutely agree! toggle should be available!

 

[Keltia_Vikinga]

I agree with 95% of what you said. But the "cosmetic" issue is a serious one. True game mechanics is priority, but textures is also very important.

I understand some players here but i see that way for my city on yellow tropical = sunny days, now and mainly for that too whie, its indeed real problem.... (plus that fog....)

Main major problem for me is that running daytime related with day/night cycle and economy panel (w/ education, power and etc) not logical at all. Maybe you need to slow down that time to solve this... I don't know but this prob is too bad since it affects the whole....

Also and maybe because that mess with time, I don't understand the frontier between day & night for industries, how is it supposed to work for them ?

 

[Brazilian Joe]

Picturing an overexposed image of the caribbean is not an example of how things look in the tropics. It is an example of bad photography.

Maybe the game needs a dynamic exposure mechanic which adapts the brightness and contrast according to the light sources available on screen. In any case the yellow tint should be fixed.

I think the pollution smog is also too strong.

 

[vukica]

so, how's the next patch going? any epiphanies?

 

[TotalyMoo]

so, how's the next patch going? any epiphanies?

Trotting along. Our producers are in Tampere right now discussing... stuff. Waiting for an ETA currently

 

[jcitron]

I'll let a bug out and get everyone annoyed at me.

Did anyone here ever think that perhaps the game engine isn't the problem in all cases here? We have to remember that the content was created when there wasn't anything called dynamic lighting in the original game. Now we have dynamic lighting, light and dark, and the ability to case light from models. If the objects were created using the original texture tables, like the sand for example in the tropics, we're going to see over saturated colors which makes things brighter and "hot" or over exposed.

So what we have is a game engine that has gotten ahead of the content and it's going to take some time for both to be on an equal playing field.

To me totally unplayable is something that crashes to the desktop, causes BSODs on the PC platform or an Error Occurred on the Mac. That's unplayable. Needing to find a temporary workaround until the content creators and developer have come up with a working solution to the program does not make it unplayable.

That said, I did find a temporary workaround for the overly saturated textures. I turned off the field of view and removed set the color filtering to none. This seems to bring the colors back to normal and more like it was before After Dark came out.

Taking cover before the eggs get thrown at me.

 

[vukica]

..removed set the color filtering to none...

explain this to me? what is colour filtering, where can i find it etc? do you mean the colour correction?

we already had that discussion and it turned out it's not that bad for every one. tropical and boreal are crap in most cases, temperate is sometimes ok.
i *have* to use one of the recent color corrections from workshop if i want to avoid severe headache and still play the game.
in about a month i'll be back home with my desktop amd rig, and i wonder how it will look like compared to nvidia. (intel looks slightly better).

p.s. there is no FoV in vanilla. you probably mean "depth of field", used to be called tilt shift.

 

[jcitron]

explain this to me? what is colour filtering, where can i find it etc? do you mean the colour correction?

we already had that discussion and it turned out it's not that bad for every one. tropical and boreal are crap in most cases, temperate is sometimes ok.
i *have* to use one of the recent color corrections from workshop if i want to avoid severe headache and still play the game.
in about a month i'll be back home with my desktop amd rig, and i wonder how it will look like compared to nvidia. (intel looks slightly better).

p.s. there is no FoV in vanilla. you probably mean "depth of field", used to be called tilt shift.

Yeah I meant depth of field... It was late and the section of my brain that controls my terminology function failed. I kept hitting that "Can't remember what it's called wall".

I use the vanilla graphics and have never tried any of the workshop settings for the color correction. This may also have to do with your monitor settings. I know, and I hate to push things back on to the user when there are problems - I used to work in tech support and this isn't always the case but sometimes it is... Anyway. I don't have my displays very bright because I find LCD displays to be too harsh anyway so maybe I'm lucky that the display settings I have plus the vanilla works for me. With that said, I would use the workshop provided color correction until the developer has come up with a fix. Once that's done, you can always swap back to "vanilla" settings afterwards.

Having visited tropical areas myself, as well as other southern locations in the US, I will say the sun is a lot harsher than it is in the northern area of the country where I come from, and our sunlight always has a yellowish tint to it unlike the south where it seems so much whiter and is of course hotter.

 

[draqsko]

Having visited tropical areas myself, as well as other southern locations in the US, I will say the sun is a lot harsher than it is in the northern area of the country where I come from, and our sunlight always has a yellowish tint to it unlike the south where it seems so much whiter and is of course hotter.

Pretty much my experience with going to Houston and New Orleans during the summer and I live in southern New England. It was squint or wear sunglasses during the day and the sunlight itself was definitely much whiter than back home. As far as being hotter, not so much because that depends on airflow as well. The first time I went to Houston, PVD airport was 105 F and Houston Hobby was 90 F during the day. Adiabatic compression at work, because the wind was coming from the west over the Berkshires and as the air descends it gets compressed.

 

[jcitron]

Pretty much my experience with going to Houston and New Orleans during the summer and I live in southern New England. It was squint or wear sunglasses during the day and the sunlight itself was definitely much whiter than back home. As far as being hotter, not so much because that depends on airflow as well. The first time I went to Houston, PVD airport was 105 F and Houston Hobby was 90 F during the day. Adiabatic compression at work, because the wind was coming from the west over the Berkshires and as the air descends it gets compressed.

Interesting you would say that about adiabatic heating. This is something that affects all kinds of weather patterns including those big super cell thunderstorms they get out in the Midwest and we see once in awhile back east. I did find it hotter though than at home. I too come from Southern New England - on the Mass-New Hampshire border and about 14 miles from Plum Island beach. We get that sea breeze which keeps us cooler, and warmer too.

Where I did find it quite, almost breathtakingly hot, was out in eastern New Mexico. I was out that way in 2010 on a storm chase. We had no storms to chase until the next day so we visited Carlsbad Caverns in Carlsbad New Mexico. The limestone was extremely bright white, blindingly white in fact, and even for the 2nd week in April it was hot - like in the mid-90s. But yeah those tiny Berkshires and Hoosac range there definitely make a bit of a difference for us back east.

What was weird was going from 38 F with snow still on the ground to 78 in Wichita KS, then 88 F in Oklahoma City, then hotter in New Mexico.