Welcome to Cities: Skyelines The Dev Diaries
These videos are based on the official Dev Diaries that can be found at the
Paradox Interactive forum and I'll include a link to them in the video
description
In these videos I'm going to introduce you to various aspects of the game
and chat about some of the more interesting and exciting elements
and trust me, there's plenty of those!
We're gonna start off in this episode looking at roads.
Roads are a fundamental part of any city builder and they need to be easy to use, flexible
and, most importantly, they need to simulate the real world
as closely as possible a topic that I will no doubt bang on about
many times during the course of these vids
So how have roads been implemented in Cities: Skylines?
Well let's take a look!
Cities: Skylines has been built using the 'Unity' engine
which is the same game engine that was used for Cities in Motion 2
and the developers are aiming for very similar functionality to CiM2 but with a few nice
additions.
I think the first thing to mention is that zoning
is built into the roads
When you start laying roads you'll immediately see
the zoning grid which appears on both sides of the road
which makes it very easy to optimize your spacing if you're going for a dense gridded
city design
Once the road has been placed you can then fill in
the zones with residential, commercial, industrial, etc
using a variety of tools
but we'll talk more about the details of zoning in the next episode
The road tool has 3 build modes for straight, curved and freeform roads
Which means that currently there is no mode for
drawing circles or ellipse
Now there are ways around that using the curve tool
but personally I would have liked to have seen an
ellipse tool added
The straight road tool also has a 90 degree snap feature
which should make life easier when building grids
The road building toolkit also features an Upgrade tool
which can used upgrade or downgrade roads and this tool seems to have no restrictions
allowing to upgrade from the smallest to the largest roads
including road types with added decorations
The game features a wide variety of road types
from small roads and medium roads to large roads and highways
Small roads are the basic road type for suburban areas
having lower speed limit and lower levels of noise pollution
and let me tell you I love the fact that they've added details
like variable speed limits and noise pollution to the game
These are genuine real world factors that were completely missing from other
so-called city simulators.
Medium roads and large roads carry a larger volume of traffic
but in turn generate more noise pollution.
and Highways are for connecting the different parts of your city together and to the outside
world where the effects of noise pollution are not an issue and they have the highest speed
limits
Noise pollution directly affects the happiness of your residents and land values
you can combat noise pollution produced by most of the road types by adding decorations
For example, you can add grass and trees to block the noise from the small suburban
roads or add sound barriers to your highways.
And another aspect of the roads that reflects the real world
is that they cost money, not just to build, but also to maintain
and the decorative elements increase the maintenance costs
wow, just like in the real world
One question that I know you guys will be asking is
"Does it have one way streets?"
And the answer is Oh hell yes it does
What about roundabouts? Yep, just create a circle with a
one way road and you've got a roundabout
The attention to detail on the roads is pretty awesome
several road types having parking spaces along the sides of the road
which I think makes the roads look so much more real
and when you place a bus stop the game automatically creates a bus bay
so your traffic isn't going to get held up just because a bus stops to pick up a few
passengers
OK now it's time for one of my favorite topics Bridges!
Cities: Skylines will automatically convert roads to bridges
when crossing rivers, etc
and each road type creates it's own unique style of bridge from very simple bridges
to huge suspension bridges which I'm sure will feature heavily in my
own cities
OK so the game will create bridges automatically but what about if we want to do things manually
The answer is of course another resounding hell yes
You can use the PGUP and PGDW keys to create elevated roads of varying heights
Just be careful about the supporting pillars because they do actually take up space
wow, just like in the real world
By the way, highways are actually one way roads
so you have to build each side of the highway separately
and when you combine that with the ability to
elevate the highways and add ramps with the highway ramp tool
we are gonna be able to build just about any interchange
you can imagine
Oh and if you like big interchanges but don't want
to have to fiddle around building them yourself There will be a set of pre-built roundabouts
and interchanges that you will be able to choose from
and just plop down wherever you like
and yes you can change them once you've plopped them
And if that wasn't enough Oh yeah, you can choose whether traffic drives
on the left hand side of the road like sensible British
traffic or on the right hand side like all the crazy
people
Now there are a couple of thing missing from the roads
as things stand at the moment and please bear in mind that the game has
only recently gone into beta and things may change
before the final release version
Currently there are no pedestrian only roads and no cycle lanes
but the devs do have both of these items on their list
for the future so lets keep our fingers crossed
So that's the roads in Cities: Skylines and I think that, based on what I've seen
so far, Paradox have done a pretty fantastic job
I can't wait to get my hands on it.
If you enjoyed this video hit the like button or better still, leave me a comment
and I'll see you for episode 2 where we'll be looking at zoning