Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

I feel betrayed

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Yeah, I was really looking forward to it for like a year. It has lots of potential, but I'm kind of disapointed with the amount of bugs and how unstable the game is, I think it was released in an unfinished state so I REALLY hope the devs fix things and improve it, or allow modders to fix things. It definately has lots of potential, since there are signals and stuff which could let us make proper and complex train networks. Definately excited over any improvements coming for it
Click to expand...
One of the really good features of Train Fever is that unlike CIM2 it allows user mods! There is already a lot of extra content that can be downloaded for free, have a look: EXTERNAL LINK REMOVED -Admin edit
The devs also take an interest in user problems and comments, such as the addition of waypoints that were requested by their fans.
 
Well it's game produced with community cooperation. So must be moddable.

Btw. abstance of CO makes good ad for Train Fever. Good job CO, thanks to this guys i'll buy TF instead of new CiM 2 DLC ;)
 
Norfolk_Chris said:
One of the really good features of Train Fever is that unlike CIM2 it allows user mods! There is already a lot of extra content that can be downloaded for free, have a look: http://www.train-fever.net/
The devs also take an interest in user problems and comments, such as the addition of waypoints that were requested by their fans.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm definately following it, it has lots more potential and the devs even added an extra bus for free! I remember when CiM1 came out and there were no waypoints, of course the devs never added it in until CiM2. It made busses just a useless gimmick since you can't tell them what streets to use!
 
Train Fever is a completely different game. Comparing the two is a disservice to both games. Using the US as an example, it's like comparing a game about Amtrak/Union Pacific(Train Fever, intercity rail) to a game about a LACMTA or NYMTA(CiM2, urban transport). CiM2 is also 1000x more stable than Train Fever at the moment, and 10000x more stable than when CiM2 was first released. It's not like CO hasn't done anything.

As I have said before, CiM2 just needs polish and more bug fixing. I simply don't know of an urban transport as detailed and realistic as CiM2.

That said, I agree with the general sentiment of this thread, there are really only a few things CO had to do make this game near perfect, and it's clear now that the money I spent buying every DLC clearly went more into developing C:Skylines than fixing CiM2.
 
iains said:
Yeah, it's funny how after like 20 years transport tycoon is still the best transport sim with the most depth out there. It's not just about watching busses and trains move it's about making a network.
(
Click to expand...
Well that's kind of typical really... Simcity 4 is still the best city building game (depending of course on who you wish to listen to) and I still attribute depth in game play going down since the whole 3D revolution, when games went 3D (I'm talking mostly about sequels) their art budget went up substantially, and to convert a game over to 3D meant losing a lot of stuff, like deep game play, game features, map sizes etc.

Personally, it is a bit disturbing for them to leave behind a game that has bugs still in it, I do remember a time when developers took really great pride in their games and would work really hard to fix up any bugs in their game as best as they could, but the market has changed, people seem to be more forgiving than they were in the early days of gaming and so developers create a game, leave behind some bugs and move on to their next project to get more money coming into the studio so they can stay floating, salaries have gone up, utilities have gone up, everything has gone up as well as peoples desires to amass as much wealth as they can, they certainly wouldn't want to fix the bugs on their own dime, and if Paradox doesn't want to pay for it (and hey, they're a business too and business's are created to make money, not lose it) then that leaves behind games with bugs.

For me... As long as the bugs are not game breaking I can deal with a few left behind, but I've seen some developers that left behind game breaking bugs and then went on to make their games sequel which absolutely infuriates me.
 
City Builder said:
For me... As long as the bugs are not game breaking I can deal with a few left behind, but I've seen some developers that left behind game breaking bugs and then went on to make their games sequel which absolutely infuriates me.
Click to expand...

That's the thing here though, although I admit that there's a degree of subjectivity about it. For me, CO have now basically abandoned work on CIM2 while there are still some serious game-breaking bugs, and moved on to the sequel. For example:

  • Mac saves being stored in a path which is prohibited by Apple, will be automatically deleted by official Apple procedures, as well as automatically excluded from backups.
  • Pedestrian swarm-circles deadlock for trams at avenue intersections.
  • Various forms of car gridlock which really could be a lot better.
  • Scheduling which is unusable unless you set a time factor of about 20% or slower, which in turn leaves you with a much too slow fast-forward.
 
Murph9000 said:
Pedestrian swarm-circles deadlock for trams at avenue intersections.
Click to expand...
I've only ever seen this happen when tram stops have been placed too close to the intersection so the front of the vehicle (or the buffer zone they all seem to have) is obstructing the pedestrian crossing, which seems to confuse pedestrians as they are forced to take a more roundabout route.

Murph9000 said:
Scheduling which is unusable unless you set a time factor of about 20% or slower, which in turn leaves you with a much too slow fast-forward.
Click to expand...
Bearing in mind that scheduling was first requested for CiM1 where vehicles just went round the loop continuously and generally ended up unevenly spaced or bunched together, I don't think this is wholly a fair comment. Scheduling might not be as flexible and advanced as players want (e.g. connected services, variable frequency over a day, etc) but in terms of making sure a line operates smoothly with vehicles nicely distributed it does a pretty good job! So far I've only been playing through the two campaigns (base game and European Cities) at the default speed setting and I'm quite happy using a standard schedule all week.

Murph9000 said:
Mac saves being stored in a path which is prohibited by Apple, will be automatically deleted by official Apple procedures, as well as automatically excluded from backups.
Click to expand...
Although I don't have a Mac, I do agree that if this is the case then it is rather a serious flaw. But it's the only one I think could be considered "game-breaking".
 
slornie said:
I've only ever seen this happen when tram stops have been placed too close to the intersection so the front of the vehicle (or the buffer zone they all seem to have) is obstructing the pedestrian crossing, which seems to confuse pedestrians as they are forced to take a more roundabout route.
Click to expand...

This bug happens quite a lot on the avenues if there are many people crossing at once and you have a relatively high frequency. Most of my game i go around deleting avenues to prevent this from happening.
 
Developing games like this is very hard, and the level of complexity entailed by simulating networks in particular can be far higher than is immediately apparent. I have worked for quite a number of years developing a fork of the open source transport simulator Simutrans (the fork is Simutrans-Experimental), and the many of the things that are not working well in CIM2 are some of the hardest problems that I have dealt with in Simutrans-Experimental (and that the developers of the main Simutrans, in turn, have dealt with). Passengers choosing which line to board, for example, is a problem that is nowhere near as simple as it may at first appear, and it took years to get this right in Simutrans-Experimental. Doing city growth properly (so that the growth is based on local transport quality rather than the overall number of people transported in a city) I have not even started yet, but planning the feature in detail shows just how complex that it is. In many cases, the problem is not just how difficult that it is to code, but how much in the way of computational resources will be consumed if the most obvious and accurate simulation method is chosen such as to make the game unplayably unresponsive in all but the smallest of maps. In many cases, the computational load increases with the square of the number of things to be simulated. Finding the right approximation that achieves a workable balance between detail and computational efficiency is very hard (in Simutrans-Experimental, private car journeys are simulated only very approximately rather than the route calculated for each one for this reason). This phenomenon is probably behind the failure of the 2013 edition of SimCity: the developers chose to use an agent model, greatly increasing the computational load of the simulation. In order to make it work at an acceptable level of responsiveness, they had to fudge a great many simulation parameters and restrict players to very small maps.

In many cases, what are described as bugs are not just a few lines of code with a small error or two in them: they are either inevitable compromises to save on computational load or effects of not getting the conceptual design of the underlying systems right, which, to correct, would require very substantial, fundamental change that would have widespread knock-on effects elsewhere, and take vast amounts of programming resources.

The point of this post is not to make excuses for Colossal Order or Paradox Interactive (whom I am neither seeking to attack nor defend - and I should notice that the Apple path bug probably really is something that is just a small mistake in a few lines of code), but rather that it is highly doubtful that simulation games of this sort of complexity ever can be written satisfactorily by commercial developers.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Same here. I've only just bought CIM and CIM2, but already I'm beginning to get frustrated with all the features that are missing. They feel half-finished, and yet all I'm hearing is promotion for Skylines and CIM3?

Why would I buy another game from a company that can't finish anything it starts?
 
Murph9000 said:
  • Various forms of car gridlock which really could be a lot better.
Click to expand...

That's the thing which repeatedly kills this for me. Cars switching lanes to create major traffic jams to rejoin the road they left as soon as they can. Just, urgh. Is what it is, but most frustrating.

Will be sitting out future installments sadly.
 
What actually annoys me most, is how Passengers switch bus/tram/subway over and over again on each stop, if there is more then one line using the same way and stops.

Which is really fun, if you have a say line 1 and a line 2. First stop where they use together, you have all people going from Line 1 to Line 2.... Line 1 is thencompletly empty tiol the next stop... And on said next Stop everyone gets out of Line 2 to get them selfs in Line 1... and so on.
 
Jazzoid said:
Well, it looks we won't get even the last update I thought we'll get. It makes me really sad, because all the time I was apologizing your bugs in the game when any of my friends asked. But when I was still saying, that you will surely fix the rear of custom metro trains, fix the pathfinding so the traffic jams won't occur, fixing capacities (because 12m bus having the same capacity as 20m is just retarded), and so on... my friends stared to think I'm payed by you! But all we got was vehicles DLC. Sure, I've bought them all, but because I thought it will support and motivate you to make patches for us. But it didn't happen.

Despite the facts none of the main bugs was fixed, I still have 961 hours played at my Steam account (does anybody here have more?). But why? Because I had to replace your mistakes by my own (rewrite capacities by myself with vehicle editor by immi, name every single vehicle to recognize the type of vehicle, name every single stop manually) and thanks to eis_os' bundle patches and CiM2PatchPlus.

I've always thought you are the developer, who likes to get input from community. That's awesome, but could you PLEASE add new features to current game and not in the next game as you always did? CiM1 was great, but all vehicles stacked upon themselves after a while, which made the game kind of unplayable. You didn't actually fix anything there. The CiM1 trolleybuses were a joke (how is that possible, that the Russian community could made a million times better overhead wires?). And how did you fix that? You've released a brand new game! CiM2 was awesome in some ways too, but the thing you've released when the game got out was just beta. And I still feel like playing a beta of CiM2 and no "CiM2 1.0" will be ever coming, because you've decided to make Cities: Skylines. Hey, it's your choice, but I am expecting you to make a DLC called "Cities in Motion", where we'll get more transport options.

I know, you will say Paradox is making you do this. Why didn't you go to Kickstart Cities: Skylines to be free? A lot of people will fund you if you'll make the game good.

I am your fan since the open beta of Cities in Motion 1. I participated in the CiM2 alpha and beta. I've made a lot of my friends buy your games. But I will not buy Cities: Skylines. Not because I don't like the citybuilding genre. It's because I finally see how you make your games and I guess that Cities: Skylines will have the same life-cycle as both CiMs.
Click to expand...
Someone linked this on Reddit…wow does this sound like their next sequel 10 years later! Ouch!
 
  • 5Haha
  • 2Like
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back