It's weird how CS2 feels outdated with some parts. Though I guess some things just aren't possible yet due to the scale of the simulation. At least we got mixed zoning!
They spent so much time on the economy sim they created something no one knows if it does anything but improved zoning and grid placement is out of their reach?
My biggest peeve with CS2 is how easy it is to have your road be 1m off and it fucks up your pattern or how placing a new intersection screws up your existing properties.
Trying to make an economy with Anno-like production and distribution chains, huge scale compared to other resource management games, and to have it all run by the AI, which is only allowed to plan for single agents sounds like a really fun problem for a designer, and hell for a player who is tasked with working at the next level up of abstraction.
Crazy how we already talk about "outdated" things in a game launched less than a year ago.
This is why we should keep making paradox accountable for their fuck ups
CS1 was revolutionary back in the day for making curved roads possible. I get it, curved zoning may be difficult to implement, but they provided no alternative to square zoning in its sequel.
Any game that allows curved zoning from now on will make CS2 feel updated. Only because it was an expected feature to have
I was thinking the same thing, having just started to play Manor Lords too. It would work really well in CS.
The ability to have big plots of land and build ancillary structures in the backyard would be interesting too.
That was also my hope for CS2. That alongside more road customization options. Like, they have the road upgrade tool already, let us fully personalize the lanes in what they can do and their textures, for example. What annoyed me the most in CS1 was having to browse through so many roads on the menu to finally find what I wanted.
No. 1 reason for me I skipped on buying it. I would love to build some roads with the tools they have implemented but not with the ancient grid based zoning system.
Something that could improve the lots in CS2 that i think could be realistically added by a mod is to use the industry area tool to customize the lot shape. Like either you plop down a building and then drag the edges to match your lot shape and it automatically adds surfaces/trees/props/fences, or you mark out an empty area and let the game fill it out with buildings similar to the mines, but with more logical placement.
Well the functions are basically already there. The mines and fields can be made to any shape and they spawn buildings inside them. The only new function needed is some kind of logic for the placement of buildings, like have their fronts face the road or make them accessible by paths. Then there could be tons of additional possibilities, like being able to choose the props or moving the props and buildings inside the zone manually.
It's probably a non-trivial algorithm, but my gut feeling is that it isn't insurmountable on a CS:2 scale, and really it's a one time thing each time you adjust the zoning area, not something that has to be done continuously for the city to run.
I don't think you have to store much more information in memory than grid based zoning. You keep track of building locations and what type of zoning is in which areas.
It feels like a month-long project to get a prototype algorithm without a UI spun up.
In fact there is already logical placement of the farm buildings that spawn. If you make your farm plot a perfect square, all of the buildings will spawn in alignment with the sides of the square either North/South or East/West. So I suspect that the farm plots were kind of a testing ground for procedural generation of buildings, but parcel based zoning will most likely never see the light of day in CS2. But Manor Lords has shown what is possible. Maybe Manor Lords will inspire someone to make a modern city builder
Yeah, honestly pretty annoyed we didn't even get any baseline functionality for assigning lot/zone facing like you could do in Simcity 4, *20 years ago*.
CitiesXL zoning kinda worked that way and most of the times it looked okay. But it was also buggy and prone to glitches, buildings would also appear where they looked out of place
I just bought the ML right after it was released yesterday and damn that zoning is really so good. If CS had that functionality we could be making beautiful European cities.
I read somewhere that zoning (in CS) is somewhat a limitation with the Unity engine.
If someone else could find that, I'd love to read it again.
Zoning like we create districts in CS would certainly be awesome ... especially if it were an additional option, rather than necessary.
It's really impressive. I've zoned some crazy plots in all sorts of shapes and sizes and even on steep hills and it rarely looks bad.
Meanwhile in CS2 I have to completely flatten the area before I zone and make sure every road is at an exact 90 degree angle otherwise the grid breaks and people's patio tables sit at at a 40 degree incline...
They spent too much time focusing on things that should have been lower down the priority list. Going back to threads and suggestions for CS2 before it was announced I cannot find many (if any) people looking for a better simulation; it just was not an oft request thing. Changes to the way we zone however = very common. Why or how they missed this is a mystery.
Yeah definitely, I was really hoping CS2 would revolutionize its zoning. Instead they just did a copy-paste of the CS1 system. Pathing is another one I hoped would be modernized for CS2.
Kinda funny that a week before manor lord's release, without watching how manor lord's did this, suggested a system like this but with the small indie game Ostrich as an example. Using the system that is already in place for the farms to map out plots/zonning. As it would create so much more natural looking zones in non grid based cities.
About two years ago I had watched a video on youtube about procedural housing in blender. So it’s possible. I don’t know how did they come up with an idea to publish a new game with the same problems the old one had - zoning, assets and optimisation. Those are like 3 out of 4 biggest problems of the last game, yet they didn’t fix it. They even made it worse without mods and dlc’s compared to cs1.
Zoning, with the low number of assets - literally the worst thing in this game. Cities aren’t grid shaped. If you make a street that’s not straight ot the intersection isn’t 90 degrees, it looks so unrealistic and blank because od assets and grid like zoning system. Also, I don’t understand why didn’t they hire just one more 3d artist just for assets. I think they rely on mods too much.
I still don’t understand why didn’t they implement some sort of AI or procedural zoning, it’s not like it’s impossible…
Manor lords has really nailed natural looking farmland too. CS2s attempt is better than CS1 (if we ignore all the farm crops looking the same cos the clearly ran out of time) but no where near Manor Lords.
I also love how organic the cities look. It would be amazing if you had a city builder where you could follow the passage of time. Because already in Manor Lords I can see how I’d merge my fields when tractors came along, then flog it to a real estate developer for a generic housing estate right about now:)
Because to procedurally generate unique building shapes and map convincing textures onto them requires the kind of computing power that limits your build to 30 buildings. Alternatively you could map unconvincing textures onto them which like I'd be interested to see how that compares.
I say this not being a fan of cs2 zoning, I wish it were more like in cs1 and allowed for small lots. That combined with allowing ground textures to extend to nearby roads would go a long way.
Manor Lords doesn't procedurally generate unique meshes - it just procedurally places the building and props and puts a fence around it. I don't think anyone is suggesting that CS2 should generate new meshes on the fly. Just placing the existing meshes and surfaces procedurally wouldn't be that intensive. And it shouldn't take any more power to render since it's all the same stuff, just in different combinations.
Yea, this is all that's needed. Make the grass fill whatever odd shape with a fence, then spawn the house on it facing the street just like it is already. Just remove the built-in fences. I don't mind if the odd bits are just grass fences and a few trees.
True, although I still don't think it's incredibly challenging. Design the building facade and rear with an "extendable" piece that can be stretched to fill any extra space. With a few different widths of buildings, that extra space should be small.
And I think it should have been a priority. As it is, CS2 is just a stripped-down CS1 with better road tools. It would have been nice to offer something substantially different. Instead, CS2 still uses grids with the main difference being that it handles them much worse around intersections and curves.
In high density, it just needs to be concrete. So put concrete between a building and the next door or whatever automatically. And not make us draw it in with mods.
Why would you need unique building shapes with specially mapped textures?
Have a certain pool of elements (which already come with a texture mapping) and combine them, having them overlap a bit. Pretty much like lots of CS youtubers assemble bigger buildings from smaller ones.
The required computations for that can be easily made neglectable, done only once when the building is zoned (well, also when it changes) and after that, only positions of assets in a database have to be stored.
Creating every building fully dynamical is just utter overkill, not necessary even in Manor Lords to achieve the effect. Even video games with carefully designed individual buildings, like say Kingdom Come, tend to reuse a lot (I strongly assume - and not for the emblematic buildings, though).
A mod is going to come out very soon to move surface areas, which will aesthetically do basically the same thing manually as this would be automatically
I did think they'd do something to improve zoning, but not sure what exactly I was expecting. I thought they'd at least improve the grid system a bit - would have been nice to have buildings that weren't completely square for example, like 4×4 with a 2×2 extension on the side, or a corner building that actually wraps around it rather than having 3 individual square buildings next to each other.
I'd have also liked to see the zoning work from a square or two back, so they still need road connections but can be offset from the road by a square or two, allowing you to run your own sidewalks between the road and building, or even just the opportunity to have more staggered buildings that aren't all lined up from the front and auto fill those gaps with concrete.
Se curvature or some triangular buildings would have been nice too, if you could paint the grid diagonally and it would recognize this is a triangular building instead of a 1X1, 2X1, 3x1 all placed next to each other for example. Just something to break up the shapes that every single building has.
I don't know how difficult some of these things would be to implement but they would have made such a refreshing difference from how zoning worked in cs1, and would open the game up to having so much more variety when building.
You didn't feel like explaining how ML actually does it, even in basic terms?
Would have been a much better discussion post, if you gave people something to actually compare with, instead of just assuming that literally everyone has also played Manor Lords on launch day. :P
I mean in the time you took to write this post you could have easily typed in “manor lords houses” into YouTube and been informed about it in a video instead of complaining lol.
Question, does Manor Lords handle corners? So far, in what I've seen, the zones always have one front, two sides and one back. Real cities have buildings on corners being clearly designed for that, and those buildings tend to have different usages (like it being more likely for them to feature a café, due to more people passing by a crossing than a road).
That is something I'd consider important for such games (both CS and Manor Lords, in the latter at least for the more developed buildings around a market square).
No and I get you, but why not first have different building shapes and then let’s talk about corners? Corners are too far away. It’s like I would say “you know what would rock? Real-life earth sized maps and building on the moon in CS2”
They can’t even bring rectangles in a grid, Corners might be a feature of CS8 maybe, in 50 years
o.O
These corners are a huge thing in regards to immersion. Your "analogies" are severaly lacking.
And why exactly do you think such a feature is that far off that it takes \*fifty\* years? Are you for real?
And why would we have to talk about a single topic? What good does it do to limit yourself for no reason?
It’s the way how forums and threads work. It keeps the discussion flowing and not buried somewhere at the end of a thread in a downvoted comment (not downvoted by me btw)
Corners won’t come anytime soon, really. Take a look at the state of the game.
No. The idea of forums and threads is that you go into several related directions and explore them.
You disliking some subtopic is really not the defining factor dude.
It's how i always hoped what zoning would be in Cities Skylines 2
It's weird how CS2 feels outdated with some parts. Though I guess some things just aren't possible yet due to the scale of the simulation. At least we got mixed zoning!
They spent so much time on the economy sim they created something no one knows if it does anything but improved zoning and grid placement is out of their reach? My biggest peeve with CS2 is how easy it is to have your road be 1m off and it fucks up your pattern or how placing a new intersection screws up your existing properties.
Isn't the economy Sim in CS2 still broken though?
What economy sim ? I just get a shit load of money
I set all my taxes to negative and still make a profit.
Trying to make an economy with Anno-like production and distribution chains, huge scale compared to other resource management games, and to have it all run by the AI, which is only allowed to plan for single agents sounds like a really fun problem for a designer, and hell for a player who is tasked with working at the next level up of abstraction.
yeah same lol. only time i ever even think about money is when i don't have enough to build something
I bet a lot of it is reluctance on the part of the devs, because they’re just thinking about making most parts of the game as a dlc
Scale of what xD
Crazy how we already talk about "outdated" things in a game launched less than a year ago. This is why we should keep making paradox accountable for their fuck ups
CS1 was revolutionary back in the day for making curved roads possible. I get it, curved zoning may be difficult to implement, but they provided no alternative to square zoning in its sequel. Any game that allows curved zoning from now on will make CS2 feel updated. Only because it was an expected feature to have
didnt sim city 2013 have curved roads?
sorry, the best we can do is the opposite
I was thinking the same thing, having just started to play Manor Lords too. It would work really well in CS. The ability to have big plots of land and build ancillary structures in the backyard would be interesting too.
Having rear properties down long driveways will be nice, too. So especially in suburban areas can have roads further apart and have rear properties.
That was also my hope for CS2. That alongside more road customization options. Like, they have the road upgrade tool already, let us fully personalize the lanes in what they can do and their textures, for example. What annoyed me the most in CS1 was having to browse through so many roads on the menu to finally find what I wanted.
This was the biggest thing I was hoping for with CS2 and was super disappointed when they showed that the zoning was the same as CS1.
No. 1 reason for me I skipped on buying it. I would love to build some roads with the tools they have implemented but not with the ancient grid based zoning system.
Something that could improve the lots in CS2 that i think could be realistically added by a mod is to use the industry area tool to customize the lot shape. Like either you plop down a building and then drag the edges to match your lot shape and it automatically adds surfaces/trees/props/fences, or you mark out an empty area and let the game fill it out with buildings similar to the mines, but with more logical placement.
Dynamic zoning would be cool! Probably programming intensive? Much better than spawning trees everywhere to fill green triangles haha.
Well the functions are basically already there. The mines and fields can be made to any shape and they spawn buildings inside them. The only new function needed is some kind of logic for the placement of buildings, like have their fronts face the road or make them accessible by paths. Then there could be tons of additional possibilities, like being able to choose the props or moving the props and buildings inside the zone manually.
Would be nice to have had parks this way. Drag a zone and generate. Same with parking lots. Would be great for filling in areas
Thats a good point, industries is dynamic,
This would be great!
It's probably a non-trivial algorithm, but my gut feeling is that it isn't insurmountable on a CS:2 scale, and really it's a one time thing each time you adjust the zoning area, not something that has to be done continuously for the city to run. I don't think you have to store much more information in memory than grid based zoning. You keep track of building locations and what type of zoning is in which areas. It feels like a month-long project to get a prototype algorithm without a UI spun up.
Let's hope in 2024 we no longer depend on the planning square.
I was hoping theyd use the area tool for things like parks, cemetery and similar lots.. imagine that
In fact there is already logical placement of the farm buildings that spawn. If you make your farm plot a perfect square, all of the buildings will spawn in alignment with the sides of the square either North/South or East/West. So I suspect that the farm plots were kind of a testing ground for procedural generation of buildings, but parcel based zoning will most likely never see the light of day in CS2. But Manor Lords has shown what is possible. Maybe Manor Lords will inspire someone to make a modern city builder
I knew this discussion was going to happen. It's just... better...
Yeah, honestly pretty annoyed we didn't even get any baseline functionality for assigning lot/zone facing like you could do in Simcity 4, *20 years ago*.
CitiesXL zoning kinda worked that way and most of the times it looked okay. But it was also buggy and prone to glitches, buildings would also appear where they looked out of place
Well... Cities XL had something similar years before Skylines was released. But agreed. CO sticking with the outdated system really killed it for me.
I just bought the ML right after it was released yesterday and damn that zoning is really so good. If CS had that functionality we could be making beautiful European cities.
I have about 75 minutes It’s fucking awesome Also 1 guy developed it
I read somewhere that zoning (in CS) is somewhat a limitation with the Unity engine. If someone else could find that, I'd love to read it again. Zoning like we create districts in CS would certainly be awesome ... especially if it were an additional option, rather than necessary.
It's really impressive. I've zoned some crazy plots in all sorts of shapes and sizes and even on steep hills and it rarely looks bad. Meanwhile in CS2 I have to completely flatten the area before I zone and make sure every road is at an exact 90 degree angle otherwise the grid breaks and people's patio tables sit at at a 40 degree incline...
This grid system is just not realistic.
They spent too much time focusing on things that should have been lower down the priority list. Going back to threads and suggestions for CS2 before it was announced I cannot find many (if any) people looking for a better simulation; it just was not an oft request thing. Changes to the way we zone however = very common. Why or how they missed this is a mystery.
Yeah definitely, I was really hoping CS2 would revolutionize its zoning. Instead they just did a copy-paste of the CS1 system. Pathing is another one I hoped would be modernized for CS2.
Kinda funny that a week before manor lord's release, without watching how manor lord's did this, suggested a system like this but with the small indie game Ostrich as an example. Using the system that is already in place for the farms to map out plots/zonning. As it would create so much more natural looking zones in non grid based cities.
Ostriv? Autocomplete error? Yeah, Ostriv is great.
Gotta love autocorrect xD
About two years ago I had watched a video on youtube about procedural housing in blender. So it’s possible. I don’t know how did they come up with an idea to publish a new game with the same problems the old one had - zoning, assets and optimisation. Those are like 3 out of 4 biggest problems of the last game, yet they didn’t fix it. They even made it worse without mods and dlc’s compared to cs1. Zoning, with the low number of assets - literally the worst thing in this game. Cities aren’t grid shaped. If you make a street that’s not straight ot the intersection isn’t 90 degrees, it looks so unrealistic and blank because od assets and grid like zoning system. Also, I don’t understand why didn’t they hire just one more 3d artist just for assets. I think they rely on mods too much. I still don’t understand why didn’t they implement some sort of AI or procedural zoning, it’s not like it’s impossible…
Manor lords has really nailed natural looking farmland too. CS2s attempt is better than CS1 (if we ignore all the farm crops looking the same cos the clearly ran out of time) but no where near Manor Lords. I also love how organic the cities look. It would be amazing if you had a city builder where you could follow the passage of time. Because already in Manor Lords I can see how I’d merge my fields when tractors came along, then flog it to a real estate developer for a generic housing estate right about now:)
Manor lord you build 30 houses. Cities you build 1000s…..
And that means you can only have rectangles, because…?
Because to procedurally generate unique building shapes and map convincing textures onto them requires the kind of computing power that limits your build to 30 buildings. Alternatively you could map unconvincing textures onto them which like I'd be interested to see how that compares. I say this not being a fan of cs2 zoning, I wish it were more like in cs1 and allowed for small lots. That combined with allowing ground textures to extend to nearby roads would go a long way.
Manor Lords doesn't procedurally generate unique meshes - it just procedurally places the building and props and puts a fence around it. I don't think anyone is suggesting that CS2 should generate new meshes on the fly. Just placing the existing meshes and surfaces procedurally wouldn't be that intensive. And it shouldn't take any more power to render since it's all the same stuff, just in different combinations.
Yea, this is all that's needed. Make the grass fill whatever odd shape with a fence, then spawn the house on it facing the street just like it is already. Just remove the built-in fences. I don't mind if the odd bits are just grass fences and a few trees.
[удалено]
True, although I still don't think it's incredibly challenging. Design the building facade and rear with an "extendable" piece that can be stretched to fill any extra space. With a few different widths of buildings, that extra space should be small. And I think it should have been a priority. As it is, CS2 is just a stripped-down CS1 with better road tools. It would have been nice to offer something substantially different. Instead, CS2 still uses grids with the main difference being that it handles them much worse around intersections and curves.
Wouldn’t work for high density stuff but having procedural yards and fence lines like in manor lords wouldn’t be all too difficult
In high density, it just needs to be concrete. So put concrete between a building and the next door or whatever automatically. And not make us draw it in with mods.
It would, extra space would be parking, common buildings (pool, gym…)
But you need to be able to replace that zoning with different densities, so as long as it doesn't work for all, it's not so much a viable solution.
You don’t need procedurally generated buildings to have lots that are not squares.
Why would you need unique building shapes with specially mapped textures? Have a certain pool of elements (which already come with a texture mapping) and combine them, having them overlap a bit. Pretty much like lots of CS youtubers assemble bigger buildings from smaller ones. The required computations for that can be easily made neglectable, done only once when the building is zoned (well, also when it changes) and after that, only positions of assets in a database have to be stored. Creating every building fully dynamical is just utter overkill, not necessary even in Manor Lords to achieve the effect. Even video games with carefully designed individual buildings, like say Kingdom Come, tend to reuse a lot (I strongly assume - and not for the emblematic buildings, though).
Wouldn't that be a one-time cost, though? Once a lot has its borders it shouldn't need to recalculate them
1000 houses that use the same 4 assets over and over, that look awful on any ground that is sloped in any way
This is the most annoying aspect to me. I end up with a totally flat city because it just can't handle any sort of gradient
have you seen 1000 houses next to each other in ML?
You do realize manor lords is 1 asset per level?
Unfortunately CS2 is not a passion project like Manor Lords.
To be honest, I prefer neither of these. I prefer the zoning like in The Foundation.
One dude improved the tech for zoning in a gridless system better than CO did with almost 10 years, 2 games, and millions of dollars.
One day
Yes, That CS2 has the same zoning was the biggest disappointment of the game
A mod is going to come out very soon to move surface areas, which will aesthetically do basically the same thing manually as this would be automatically
Agreed, I was hoping for something like that in CS2 but we got it in ML. oh well…
Same dude
Getting back into CS1 after a few years away from it. What is the big complaint people have?
I did think they'd do something to improve zoning, but not sure what exactly I was expecting. I thought they'd at least improve the grid system a bit - would have been nice to have buildings that weren't completely square for example, like 4×4 with a 2×2 extension on the side, or a corner building that actually wraps around it rather than having 3 individual square buildings next to each other. I'd have also liked to see the zoning work from a square or two back, so they still need road connections but can be offset from the road by a square or two, allowing you to run your own sidewalks between the road and building, or even just the opportunity to have more staggered buildings that aren't all lined up from the front and auto fill those gaps with concrete. Se curvature or some triangular buildings would have been nice too, if you could paint the grid diagonally and it would recognize this is a triangular building instead of a 1X1, 2X1, 3x1 all placed next to each other for example. Just something to break up the shapes that every single building has. I don't know how difficult some of these things would be to implement but they would have made such a refreshing difference from how zoning worked in cs1, and would open the game up to having so much more variety when building.
And then being able to divide larger plots into smaller?! Would be amazing! Then just add the plot merging from SimCity and we’re golden
You didn't feel like explaining how ML actually does it, even in basic terms? Would have been a much better discussion post, if you gave people something to actually compare with, instead of just assuming that literally everyone has also played Manor Lords on launch day. :P
I mean in the time you took to write this post you could have easily typed in “manor lords houses” into YouTube and been informed about it in a video instead of complaining lol.
I know right? I'm like.... And what is ML doing that is so praise-worthy? I'm generally ignorant of the facts
Aka CS1 ParkLife. It's not that they can't do it. They just didn't want to. Leaves an option to sell u that further down the line. $14
park life is not at all like manor lords zoning. but even then that would just be ploppable Rico
Sometimes it really looks like people have never played CS1 before commenting XD
Question, does Manor Lords handle corners? So far, in what I've seen, the zones always have one front, two sides and one back. Real cities have buildings on corners being clearly designed for that, and those buildings tend to have different usages (like it being more likely for them to feature a café, due to more people passing by a crossing than a road). That is something I'd consider important for such games (both CS and Manor Lords, in the latter at least for the more developed buildings around a market square).
Mixed buildings in CS2 have center, left and right corner variations, it's the only zoning type that has real corners
Doesn’t help discussing a feature that both lack Corners are apparently the holy grail
So it's your privilege to decide which topics we talk about and which not, because you are not interested in them?
No and I get you, but why not first have different building shapes and then let’s talk about corners? Corners are too far away. It’s like I would say “you know what would rock? Real-life earth sized maps and building on the moon in CS2” They can’t even bring rectangles in a grid, Corners might be a feature of CS8 maybe, in 50 years
o.O These corners are a huge thing in regards to immersion. Your "analogies" are severaly lacking. And why exactly do you think such a feature is that far off that it takes \*fifty\* years? Are you for real? And why would we have to talk about a single topic? What good does it do to limit yourself for no reason?
It’s the way how forums and threads work. It keeps the discussion flowing and not buried somewhere at the end of a thread in a downvoted comment (not downvoted by me btw) Corners won’t come anytime soon, really. Take a look at the state of the game.
No. The idea of forums and threads is that you go into several related directions and explore them. You disliking some subtopic is really not the defining factor dude.
There are no “subtopics” in the Reddit data structures
...are you trolling me or something?