Cities: Skylines - Paradox Interactive Makes A SimCity

[Omega124]

On the topic of overegineered bridges.

Whenever people complain about overengineered bridges, I always just think of the overengineered bridge that is less than five minutes away from me.

That's the Dunn Memorial Bridge, right outside of Albany (And yes, in the top left that is an unfinished ramp. There is no plans whatsoever to finish it) That image doesn't even show the full craziness of it.

My goal when I get this game is to make a heighmap of Albany and create a replica of my hometown. Getting an accurate Dunn would be one of the challenges

 

[Maniacal]

I don't think there is anything even close to being that complex in my entire province. There are some large highway on off ramps and interchanges in the Vancouver area, but even then the largest of them are mostly just large, a bit spaced out, and they look really nice for the most part. Well, from a satellite's PoV.

 

[W|M]

On the topic of overengineered bridges.

Whenever people complain about overengineered bridges, I always just think of the overengineered bridge that is less than five minutes away from me.

Spoiler :

That's the Dunn Memorial Bridge, right outside of Albany (And yes, in the top left that is an unfinished ramp. There is no plans whatsoever to finish it) That image doesn't even show the full craziness of it.

Spoiler :

My goal when I get this game is to make a heighmap of Albany and create a replica of my hometown. Getting an accurate Dunn would be one of the challenges

Better an overengineered bridge than an overengineered roundabout:

 

[warpus]

That's not even a proper roundabout - a roundabout is supposed to have free-flowing traffic in the circle - the cars don't stop there at all. In the above image the cars stop - so that isn't a roundabout - but those little ones are. But I might be misinterpreting those confusing lines.

 

[Maniacal]

That seems unnecessarily complicated.

Also found this post from an actual traffic engineer: http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkyli...youre_having_traffic_problems_i_feel_bad_for/

 

[W|M]

It's theoretically five roundabouts which happen to be very close together:

 

[Maniacal]

Worst. Tourist Attraction. Ever.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Which would make it a sort of decent tourist attraction.

 

[BirraImperial]

I can't believe that monstrosity actually exists...

 

[warpus]

Here's how I've been designing my on/off ramps... I've removed the weird/silly/not-to-my-liking on/off ramps that turn into one way streets, and replaced them with this:

Works very well for me so far in a city of 55,000.

My city is designed to be very pedestrian friendly. There is a network of connected hiking trails running all throughout (except for in industrial parts of town)

Here you can see several hiking paths converging - one running south, two north, two east, and one west. The idea is that you can walk to any part of the city through a nice trail that has a lot of greenery on at least one side, but sometimes both.

Initially I put a ring road type hiking trail around my entire town. When I noticed how much use it was getting - I expanded the project, and now the trails run everywhere. Whenever I expand my city - I always expand this pedestrian system as well.

 

[Evie]

Dammit. I found what looked like a great map of Ottawa on the workshop. Then it turned out to have some critical mistakes (squishing parts of town a lot) so I couldn't get it to work right.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Guys, guys, I think I'm getting addicted to finding and downloading CS mods on steam. Someone please help me, it's only been a week since the game was released and there's just so much, I'm even downloading maps I know I'll never play on but look cool. I'm feeling déjà vu about the time when I first discovered SC4 mods. T_T

 

[trader/warrior]

Here's how I've been designing my on/off ramps... I've removed the weird/silly/not-to-my-liking on/off ramps that turn into one way streets, and replaced them with this:

Works very well for me so far in a city of 55,000.

I definitely vastly prefer just having a highway go through my city rather than the initial weird setup. I wonder why they made most of the starting positions like that, it seems to make a lot of people just build their cities off a single badly constructed highway connection like it was SC5 they were playing. Latest example being the Nerdcubed video posted here earlier, just look at those gridlocks! Maybe you have to pay maintainance on highways in your area and they didn't want players to start in the deep red, only good reason I can think of.

Spoiler :

Looks good as well. Still only at a bit over 20k population so maybe I haven't reached properly challenging levels of traffic but so far I have had zero issues.

Guys, guys, I think I'm getting addicted to finding and downloading CS mods on steam. Someone please help me, it's only been a week since the game was released and there's just so much, I'm even downloading maps I know I'll never play on but look cool. I'm feeling déjà vu about the time when I first discovered SC4 mods. T_T

Tell me about it. Today I've told myself to just stick with the mods I have for now, but I just know I'll see something on the forums or reddit that will lead me to a new workshop binge. I never really managed to mod SC4 very heavily other than installing NAM, everytime I tried I ran into endless dependencies so I just gave up. With Cities Skylines installing new mods is just so damn convenient.


Show & tell:
New Oslo is coming along nicely, here an overview with real districts(simplified) laid out for ultimate geekiness. And yes, I do seem to have neglected police and education for a while here.

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

Maybe those on/off ramps are popular where the developers are from? Meaning on/off ramps that connect strictly onto one way streets.

Anyway.. This bug needs fixing big time:

 

[PhroX]

Unfortunately, the devs have confirmed that that's not a bug and is intentional (likely to reduce the number of calculations needed). They have said the do intend to try to improve things somewhat in the future, but for now, thats WAI....

 

[warpus]

I have thought about the reasoning behind implementing this in that fashion - because it didn't seem like it's something they would have missed - and I had a suspicion it was to limit the number of calculations involved. Well - my thinking was more like: "An algorithm to make that more efficient won't be that efficient.. I don't think". I couldn't figure out a good way in my head to put together an algorithm that prevents the above scenario from occurring without it being bulky - but was hoping that I just don't know enough about their code for my conclusions to have been in any way correct..

So.. that's crappy then..

Just half-arse it then - if there is a free lane, and you're not turning for a while, use the free lane. Then go from there. I have no doubt that they tried this approach.. I suppose the problem is probably that it adds too much overhead.

BTW I found a bug in the game and figured out a fix, if anyone's curious. It's possible to get a "phantom bus stop" that doesn't really exist - and people will line up there and wait for a bus that never comes. Read about it here - solution (that worked for me) included.

 

[trader/warrior]

In that comic, if he is turning left then he would have to cut traffic at the off turn or risk blocking additional lanes of traffic if he tries to go past the queue wouldn't he? Is the desired logic that cims should pass the blockage by and reroute? Or just more possible turning lanes maybe.

 

[Maniacal]

I found this beauty:
http://gfycat.com/LazyGranularCarpenterant

 

[warpus]

In that comic, if he is turning left then he would have to cut traffic at the off turn or risk blocking additional lanes of traffic if he tries to go past the queue wouldn't he? Is the desired logic that cims should pass the blockage by and reroute? Or just more possible turning lanes maybe.

Well, what happens in real life is people stick to open lanes until it's "close" to having to switch lanes... and if there is so much traffic that this becomes challenging - then there is generally enough traffic to slow everyone down anyway.

I think the problem is converting that sort of behaviour to in-game behaviour. In the case of humans driving cars, each human is making decisions as to which lane to stay in - I think this would be the overhead in any algorithm they come up with. As things stand now, each car doesn't really.. think. There might be a driver inside, but the route is sort of pre-planned from the get go - no "thinking" required by the occupant of the car - the route is already figured out ahead of time. Making them "figure out" which lane to go to would be the overhead - extra calculations, etc.

I could be wrong, but I think that is the challenge.

 

[trader/warrior]

Don't get me wrong, the traffic does act quite unnaturally due to the set routes and pathfinding, you regularly se stuff like this in-game:

Spoiler :

But the behavior referred to in the comic seems to me still to come from simply having too much traffic going through one place. There was a bug that was patched before final release that caused traffic to stick to their turning off lane even through many off-ramps and junctions, but now it seems to distribute quite evenly with just the occasional hiccup here and there.


In other news, I found out that placing and then later removing as little as two water pumps can cause quite the surge and formation of waves in a small river:

Edit: On the traffic stuff, I just saw this post by a dev on the Paradox forums:

Vehicles choose the right lane for their purpose fairly early. In the first message all the vehicles are going the same way from the next intersection, so they queue on the lane that allows them to go that way. During development we tried having cars use all lanes and just switch to the one they really want very late, but that created a HUGE mess, the turning cars blocked two lanes and didn't let cars behind them proceed. The one lane queue looks funny, but actually works quite well. Even if the cars would be on all lanes, they could not all fit to the street they are going, so the traffic jam still tells you of something being wrong with your road system