City Corner #11 - Autumn Breeze

Greetings, Mayors!

Our next update is on its way, and in this City Corner, we will take a closer look at some of the changes coming with the upcoming patch. We will go through a number of gameplay adjustments, including changes to citizen behaviour and how some of the systems in your cities work, as well as some visual improvements. There are also a few smaller tweaks to go through, so let’s dive in and talk about what’s coming in the next update!

In the upcoming patch, we have put a lot of focus on improving the behaviour and logic of the game. For example, we have worked on adjusting the Garbage Truck’s logic so that trucks now reserve enough capacity for the waste they are expected to collect at their intended destination. Previously, garbage trucks sometimes collected small amounts of garbage from buildings along their route, causing them to fill up before reaching their intended destinations. With the next update, the trucks now skip buildings with only small amounts of garbage on their route, allowing them to prioritize buildings that need collection more urgently. The change applies to all buildings, which means you should see less notifications about garbage piling up, especially if you have an efficient amount of garbage processing facilities! This also affects citizen happiness, with clean homes providing a greater happiness bonus.

The renting priorities of companies have also been adjusted. Companies will now be prioritized based on whether they produce the resources most needed by the city. The companies that produce less-needed resources will wait until higher-priority companies have found an available location before they have the opportunity to rent one. This means that when you are zoning areas, the zones are more likely to spawn companies whose resources are actually needed. In turn, this increases the variety of company types located near each other, and makes the demand bars reduce correctly. This change will also act as a foundation for future improvements on how the resource economy works. 

Some changes have also been made to the residential demand calculations. Previously, the residential demand didn’t take the size of the city into account correctly, which caused the demand to plummet in very large cities. This has now been fixed, and the calculation now also takes the number of empty residential properties into account, which in turn makes the demand more balanced.

When it comes to the citizens, we have adjusted their financial behaviour in a way that the citizens’ happiness, shopping, and leisure choices now use income rather than wealth. Previously, citizens based their shopping, leisure, and happiness decisions on their accumulated wealth. Because wealth naturally fluctuates as citizens earn and spend money, it was not always a reliable indicator of their financial situation. These decisions are now based on income instead, making the happiness indicator better reflect how well off citizens actually are.

In City Corner #8 - Transforming the Terrain, we mentioned that we would continue working on the maps within the game with the new, painted-on terrain texture details. We have now finished two more maps, Waterway Pass and Lakeland, that you can enjoy immediately when this newest patch goes live!

Waterway Pass

Lakeland

The LOD quality of trees has been improved. Previously, the tree LODs could make the trees look like they were missing branches, or make the leaves seem like they were floating in the air instead of being properly attached to the tree. In this patch, we have enhanced the quality of these LODs, making the trees look fuller and more lush, and with their branches and foliage sitting more naturally together. 

Tree LODs before.

Tree LODs after!

We have tweaked the surfaces and the way the terrain renders with the underlying terrain normals. A normal map is used by the game to calculate how light interacts with a surface. Previously, all surfaces used upward-facing normals, causing lighting to behave as if the ground were perfectly flat. This meant the shape of the terrain underneath wasn't reflected in the lighting, making it seem less interesting.

In this new update, surfaces now inherit the normals of the underlying terrain, allowing the light and shadows to follow the terrain's actual bumps, hills, and slopes, making its shape much more visible and three-dimensional. 

An example of the surface rendering before.  

Surface rendering after the upcoming patch!

We’ve also been working on improvements to the appearance and behaviour of building windows. While these updated windows are not currently used on any of the assets, we wanted to share the development. This includes adding support for frosted and opaque glass variations, allowing these window styles to be used on future assets,assets re-imported into the game and assets created by modders.

2 Left columns of windows are the new frosted windows, center column is standard windows, 2 right columns are the new Opaque windows.

In addition to the opaqueness of windows, assets configured with windows that should always remain lit or unlit will now correctly reflect that design intent, making them look more believable at any time of day.  As part of the work for these improvements, we expect to see some small performance gains when rendering large numbers of building windows at once.

With that, we thank you once again for reading! As always, our work continues as we keep bringing new updates, improvements, and additions to Cities: Skylines II. There’s plenty more in the works, and over the coming months, we will have more to share about upcoming updates, new content, and of course, the DLC! We are looking forward to showing you what we have in store for you and giving a closer look at what is still to come. Until then, keep your eyes peeled, and we will see you in the next City Corner! Ta ta!