Multiplat Cities: Skylines II

[BallaratBulldog]

10/10 will follow dog around

 

[dwwaino]

YES! Families now have puppers too.

 

[frodos gardener]

Oh I’m so hyped for this. I’ve loved city builders since the first Sim City and CS1 was/is a ripper.

 

[Ry009]

Noice.

Will avoid building cafes and high rise apartments like the the plague. Can't have a hipster city.

Srs though, like the nice touch you can 'follow' your citizens on social media.

Really looking forward to this.

Tempted to get Starfield early access, just so I can maximize time with it before getting over to this.

 

[dwwaino]

There is so much stuff coming out over the next few months. I'll definitely prioritise some time for this but if it's anything like CS1 I'll still be playing years later while I have long forgotten about other games. CS is the game I play when I'm not playing other games.

 

[cats2rise]

Nice that some content creators will be posting stuff a month or so early.

The way the devs have hyped this game and released info each week has been fantastic. Huge credit to them.

 

[dwwaino]

I spam enough videos in this thread so I don't normally include these. On top of the weekly feature reveals they do a developer insight later in the week as a follow up to that topic. The sim lifepath feature is so deep and such a great addition compared to CS1 I thought this was worth checking out too. It is even deeper than I thought and I love how you can track specific sims. There is so much attention to detail in CS2 and I really can't wait.

 

[dwwaino]

So that's the gameplay reveals done. This week isn't as exciting with just some sound updates which is pretty standard affair. Next week they'll show off the cinematic and camera modes and then we twiddle our thumbs until release at the end of next month. It's either this week or next that content creators with beta access will start being able to release their own content so that will be good. Biffa will be the main one I follow.

 

[BallaratBulldog]

I may have got ultimate if it allowed early access even if its a bit after content creators.

 

[cats2rise]

Silly reason but I can't stand Biffas voice so I refuse to watch his videos.

CPP is calming, while overcharged egg has a lovely playing style.

 

[dwwaino]

Biffa is definitely ve'y Bri'ish. I like his organic play style. CPP is very good but I find his builds very rigid, where Egg's have lots of character. Egg helped me the most though when he once said we're building a city, not zoning a city. It's too easy to play it like a game, dump down your zones and roads and play reactionary to needs. Egg is the one that made me understand that in real cities everything has a story and it's there for a reason and that helped make my builds look more realistic and natural.

 

[Supersuns]

two dollars twenty will be my go too for CS2 gameplay, has carried me through all my years playing CS1.

 

[Smeg Head]

Really starting to look forward to this, been a good few years since ive done some solid city building.

Silly reason but I can't stand Biffas voice so I refuse to watch his videos.

CPP is calming, while overcharged egg has a lovely playing style.

Its not a silly reason at all though, voice of a content creator is one of the main attributes and if that doesn't gel with you then of course they wont be for you.

 

[gaskin]

We have some gameplay.

 

[Supersuns]

Look at those road tools

 

[dwwaino]

I will be playing the absolute shit out of this. I can't wait to build Gretaburg, an industrial powerhouse.

 

[BallaratBulldog]

It’s the type of thing I wanted Sim City to turn into one day

Instead got 2013 Sim City

 

[cats2rise]

Not that this is relevant but CPP really missed a trick with these videos. Has just jumped straight into a complex road layout whilst Biffa took time to zoom in and look at road types, menus etc and show us the features in greater detail.

That might just be me but I'd rather see that stuff now as opposed to jumping straight in like CPP.

 

[dwwaino]

I like Egg but I feel like he has been missing the mark for quite a while now. He is expecting CS1 + all DLC levels of content for day 1 of CS2. The game needs scope for DLC. If there is no regression in specialised industry as he puts it then there will be no room for specialised industry DLC for example. We're already getting loads of things that were either mods or DLC that weren't released until much later into CS1. I also get the impression he would rather just build a pretty city with no stress where as with CS2 Colossal Order are trying to release a game that's a little more stimulating. I guess Colossal Order also understand this and which is why despite having beta access now he wasn't included in the earlier releases of content like Biffa and Two twenty.

 

[gaskin]

There was a live stream of gameplay on the YouTube channel last night (starts at 15:52).

 

[dwwaino]

Console release delayed until next year. PC min/rec specs updated (increased). Those recommended specs are for FHD which is 1080p.

They're really, really hefty recommended specs for 1080p in what shouldn't be a very graphically demanding game. I get the 5800x as the game will be CPU heavy regardless of resolution but mentioning the 3080 is nuts, especially at only 1080p. Sounds like they're suffering serious optimisation issues hence the bonkers PC requirements (granted the minimum are super low, who even has a 970 anymore?) and the lengthy console delay.

Cities: Skylines 2 on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S Suffers Big Delay, Refunds Offered - IGN

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S version of Cities: Skylines 2 has suffered a big delay, from the planned October launch to some point during spring 2024.

www.ign.com

 

[gaskin]

More gameplay from Biffa.

 

[Smeg Head]

Console release delayed until next year. PC min/rec specs updated (increased). Those recommended specs are for FHD which is 1080p.

They're really, really hefty recommended specs for 1080p in what shouldn't be a very graphically demanding game. I get the 5800x as the game will be CPU heavy regardless of resolution but mentioning the 3080 is nuts, especially at only 1080p. Sounds like they're suffering serious optimisation issues hence the bonkers PC requirements (granted the minimum are super low, who even has a 970 anymore?) and the lengthy console delay.

Cities: Skylines 2 on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S Suffers Big Delay, Refunds Offered - IGN

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S version of Cities: Skylines 2 has suffered a big delay, from the planned October launch to some point during spring 2024.

www.ign.com

Trying to push more load onto the GPU so the CPU has more headway to do al the calculations required for having citizens live whole lives essentially?

 

[dwwaino]

Trying to push more load onto the GPU so the CPU has more headway to do al the calculations required for having citizens live whole lives essentially?

There's not really a lot you can send to the GPU and a modern AAA shooter doesn't even recommend a 3080 for 1080p (not that I've seen, maybe there's one or two). 5800x makes absolute sense that regardless of resolution you're going to have all those sim calculations on top of the sheer density and size of the cities in CS2. This would be a case where everything from CPU clock speed to core/thread count and cache size will matter. Consoles will benefit slightly from being on an SoC and not suffering from the same IO bottlenecks as a PC.

Recommending a 3080 at 1080p screens of having optimisation issues with LODs, lighting, shadows etc. A game with dynamic lighting can't bake light/shadow maps so everything is real time and you need to start being clever with optimisation like off screen culling, LODs, draw distances etc. It's quite possible they just left these things until late and realised it was a bigger task than they originally planned.

Lighting and shadows are such a massive hit on a GPU even if you're using low res textures and models. I have a bunch of these videos saved that I use for reference and this one is a great example of real time lighting vs baked lighting performance. It's more to do with things like Lumen and Raytracing but it's still a similar concept for non-static lighting. Baked lighting and shadows means they're baked into scene. If for example you have a box, declare the box is static and the lighting that causes the box to cast a shadow as static, you can "bake" the shadow. That shadow is baked into the level like a texture. If you move the box then the shadow will remain. However if it's realtime then that light and shadow is being calculated every single frame. A game with dynamic lightning, like for day and night cycles, can't have any baked lighting or shadows. Then a game like a city builder is going to have a ton of shadows to calculate. The higher the resolution the more taxing these calculations get on the GPU which is why recommending a 3080 for a city builder at 1080p is absolutely insane.

(first part is a real time demo, about 20 fps. Then you can skip a lot of the Unreal Engine related stuff to about 10:45 to see baked lighting at 120fps which is the engine's editor cap)

 

[Smeg Head]

I thought there was a lot more you could do with some of the cores on a 30 series and above gpu.