In the last Word of the Week, I touched upon the frequency of the expected fixes for Cities: Skylines II. For the last few weeks, we’ve been focusing on performance improvements and bug fixes at a rapid pace. As we’re continuing to work on the improvements we’ll adjust the pace of the updates slightly so we won’t see a new patch every week going forward but will have a bit longer cadence between them. We have made it through the quicker fixes and we’re now digging into the ones that require a bit more work. The next patch is not yet scheduled as it has performance improvements pending that we absolutely want to include in it.
The priorities for the team at Colossal Order are the following:
1. Performance improvements
Specifically, we are working on the level of detail models for the assets. This includes both adding missing LODs and improving the existing ones to improve the GPU performance. It might take more than one patch to address all of them, but we’ll roll out the first fixes as soon as possible. Following the asset and LOD fixes, we’ll work on improvements to CPU performance. This means focusing on the CPU stutters and simulation performance to improve simulation speed and smooth experience while scaling up the size of your cities.
2. Bug fixing
We continue to go through your bug reports and have logged around 100 reproducible issues that have been moved to the team to look into. There are another 100 reports that we are still investigating that require more information and a bunch of duplicates, some of which add valuable information so we’ll go through all of them. We are also checking suggestions for improvement or new features, but these requests are currently at a lower priority.
While the forum is the best place to report issues, our community team also keeps an eye on discussions outside of the forum so we can gather relevant information for the development team. Fixing gameplay bugs and issues is a high priority for us, and these can be anything from bigger overhauls of systems that are not functioning as intended to the smallest of annoyances.
3. Editor/Modding support
The modding Beta group is testing the map editor and we’ll improve it based on their feedback before releasing it. Especially the placement of water on the map is under review since it’s currently too complicated. The UI will also receive a bit more love as it’s really difficult to find the available assets that can be placed on the map. I’ll keep you updated on the progress of the Editor and code modding and their release schedule, but the performance and bugs need to be sorted out first.
Where we are right now
Talking about sorting, let’s talk about the Mail Service. This is a good example of a bigger overhaul caused by a few critical bugs resulting in the entire system behaving undesirably. We identified that the mail sent to the residents of the city, whether it be a citizen, a company, or a city service, is not delivered as it should. One culprit is the Post Sorting Facility as the mail is sorted in an erratic way, which makes me wonder what they are actually doing there if it’s not to sort the mail. The other issue is the Post Office vans that only seem to be collecting the mail instead of ever delivering it. Let’s see if we can get the light-fingered mail personnel under control! All jokes aside, now that these bugs have been identified and are being fixed we’ll have to test the entire system to see if it requires a rebalance. Therefore fixing the bugs takes time as we need possibly multiple QA rounds to make sure it’s working as it is supposed to.
Another issue we’re investigating on the gameplay side is the pathfinding regarding the Citizens’ ability to reserve housing even with no connection to the city. It kind of makes sense that one makes a rental agreement before moving in, so personally I wasn’t too worried about the fact that a house is assigned to a citizen when it’s being built. However, the problem appears with the companies as the citizen that has a rental agreement may also accept a job even if they have never made it to the city to begin with. So a Citizen stuck at the border of the city with no access to their house or their workplace is basically reserving those until the Citizen is deemed a lost cause and deleted from existence. We’ll look to improve this behaviour in a way that is more understandable and there’s a clear cut between the citizens that have made it to the city and those that have not.
We’re also looking at reports about export and distribution of goods in the city. Like mail, these require a deep dive to determine what is working as it should and what is not. I don’t have any details to share yet as we’re still digging into the different reports, but I wanted to let you know we haven’t missed the concerns you have raised. More on those next time!
Once the PC version is where we want it to be, we will be focusing on the console release and DLC content. We are committed to bringing the marketed DLC content to you, but it will not be landing in the originally promoted schedule. The first Asset Pack, Beach Properties, has been worked on by our artists’ and our outsourcing partner, but we’ll only implement them after the asset fix and performance work are completed to our satisfaction. I apologize for the delay, but we must not rush new content out before the base is ready for it. This also stands for the Content Creator Packs and Radio stations. Stay tuned for more information on these later!
Last Thursday we released the last weekly hotfix and it included a bunch of fixes, all of which can be found in the patch notes, but I want to highlight a few of them. The patch included a fix for the stuck “Garbage Piling Up” notifications, which didn’t clear properly after the previous fixes to the garbage collection. Now citizens will finally recognize that their bins are empty. We also took another step towards solving the issue where texture resolution drops significantly so you should see it pop up less often, though the work is still ongoing as some cases still remain. Lastly, but definitely not least, we resolved an issue that caused saves to load to a black screen when playing offline, bringing up some bad memories for some of our players. Like its predecessor, Cities: Skylines II can be played offline, so thank you for bringing this issue to light.
That’s it for this week, I’ll keep you posted!
Sincerely,
Mariina