Does the price aspect of the pathfinding penalties mean that induced demand will be properly simulated now?
I thought for sure they’d leave all of my most requested features on the cutting room floor, but they’ve got exactly the right brand of nerdy shenanigans in place. They actually model people’s desire to travel by car based on parking availability! Perfect!
Yeah seriously, they’ve been doing an excellent job of showing us what we wanted to see (save for bike lanes, I’m sure we’ll get them eventually).
They did mention bike lanes in the last dev diary video as a customization option IIRC. So you have base roads and can dedicate lanes to bus/bike/tram if you want.
Perhaps it was in the video but not the blog post, because Dev Diary 1 doesn’t mention bike lanes:
Roads can be customized by adding bus lanes and tram tracks to them using the additional network building tools
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/features/road-tools
Oh boy, am I hyped. It looks promising
Yes! It’s the best thing from the Xbox show, and I can’t wait to play it. I’ll just wait for the reviews to see if it’s OK from technical side. The first game won’t get past 45 FPS after the city grows to 10k citizens, no matter the hardware.
Well, I had decent frames as long as the city stayed beyond 100,000 with all kinds of optimization mods. I think the engine didn’t change, so I kinda expect no huge performance gains from C:S2.
I also wait for the reviews, and maybe look if Paradox is gonna announce 4000 DLCs pre release.
Would be nice if assets could be ported easily, something I hope for, so I don’t have to make changes to my assets.
But I am happy for now.
I am super duper excited about it! With AI hopefully cims will properly populate all lanes if available!
(Also what I’m hoping for is to allow carrier fees, track fees or depot fees for goods transport, I love hauling goods around but it often ends up being a major uncompensated expense)
(Also what I’m hoping for is to allow carrier fees, track fees or depot fees for goods transport, I love hauling goods around but it often ends up being a major uncompensated expense)
Looks like the next one of these videos is going to be about “Public & Cargo Transportation”, so hopefully you’ll find your answer then. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/features
So cims choose a route based on multiple criteria, now. That’s how transportation network analysis is done IRL. AND they can turn around and reroute in the middle of a trip. Super cool.
Remember the time when every server space suddenly got called ‘cloud’? Or when every device needed to be ‘3D’? Or every household item got Bluetooth to make it a ‘smart’ item? Or you needed the word ‘crypto’ included your software products? Or when all the products had a lower case ‘i’ in front to make them look advanced?
In a few months we’ll look back at the time a the time, when everyone suddenly called their algorithms an ‘AI’. Paradox could just call it Smart iTraffic 3D to hit more buttons.
Judging from the 1st game, it’s probably mods and player ingenuity to solve the issues with the traffic. Which his honestly a part of the experience of playing Cities Skylines. Getting around all the problems with your own solutions. Sometimes I completely (had to) redesigned parts of the city to solve one junction.
They called it AI in the first game too. It’s been called AI in games for decades.
Example: https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/448825-cities-skylines-traffic-ai-better
AI has been game dev jargon for decades. Gamers are unlikely to confuse it with having any relation to machine learning models.
Afaik when it comes to games the way npcs think has always been called AI, so wouldn’t really say its something new or making it seem smarter in this context.
I get that it’s not ideal. My issue is just that a big part of Cities Skylines is to solve the traffic. Try to keep it flowing with a more and more complex city around it, changing main routes, changing infrastructure options. You cannot just make it Smart iTraffic 3D without removing the major challenge from the game. Fixing some bugs and not having traffic that dumb like in the 1st game would be appreciated though.
The term ‘AI’ just gets used way too loosely, only getting worse in the recent months. ‘Traffic’ and ‘AI’ in Cities Skylines just doesn’t fit together well.
You cannot just make it Smart iTraffic 3D without removing the major challenge from the game. Fixing some bugs and not having traffic that dumb like in the 1st game would be appreciated though.
AFAIK the way it worked in the first game, the pathfinding was a simple A* algorithm that used only the length & speed limit of each link in the network to determine the shortest path. The way this video makes it sound, travel time will be the most significant factor, which means traffic will make a difference in the pathfinding. Then they’re also introducing factors related to the individual cim’s need for parking, comfort, and risk-taking. It should be a lot more realistic and just as challenging, without the ridiculous situations where traffic would come to a complete standstill because everyone is taking the same route even though there are hundreds of alternative side streets to take.
As someone who’s done some advanced coursework in traffic engineering, I’m pumped.
Exactly! It should allow for even more control when designing your road network, without the random things you cannot do anything about.
I’m stoked too! Big improvement from the first game
What? AI was a term regularly used in gaming context since the 90s. It’s not self-learning neural network, it’s just the usual, specific problem-solving algorithm in the game. It’s not marketing term, which is riding on the newest popular buzzword.
This has always been called AI, and it’s a correct use of the term.
This type of AI has nothing to do with the recently more popular machine learning. Gaming has been using Artificial Intelligence as a term since forever, it is simply an algorithm that approaches realistic behavior. When you look back at games like Command and Conquer they also called the computer opponents AI
What are you on about? This sorta thing has been called AI in games forever. This has nothing to do with the Gen AI fad that’s going on.
I’m glad to hear about parking. Pocket cars were really lame in my opinion. Traffic accidents sound super sick too! I can’t wait for a traffic accident to block the only route out of a location and have a bunch of mad citizens, just like in real life.
I wonder if the accidents will be able to block sidewalks.
Finally, I can create a true American city filled with parking garages everywhere and a desolate downtown filled with office towers that sits vacant in the evening and weekends.
I hope we won’t get in too much trouble when an accident happens in a new town, haha! Amazing changes for the game, and it really makes it feel like a next generation of Cities Skylines.
Fingers crossed on them blocking sidewalks. They did mention cars being able to hit buildings though.
Parking is a game changer. I’m really excited to solve traffic forever!
