Mar 22, 2020

Cities: Skylines - Avanya

Greetings, fellow city-builders, and welcome to another Sunset Harbor Dev Diary!

As the previous diary was dedicated to Trolleybuses, we think it's a good idea to follow it with even more public transport services coming to you in Sunset Harbor.

Intercity Bus Service

Intercity Bus is a public transport service that opens up a new outside connection. In addition to transporting tourists, the Intercity Bus Service also makes traveling easier for your citizens and ultimately decreases traffic, as people leave their own vehicles at home.

There's something to it when you travel by night, with home waiting in the distance.

The Intercity Bus Service unlocks at Milestone 6, but you can already see intercity buses on the highways at the start of the game. The new intercity bus station and terminal are located in the same build menu tab as the local bus service. There is no need to create any stops or lines, just build an intercity bus station or terminal and you can notice intercity buses making frequent stops at your city. This new service also comes with a brand new intercity bus vehicle model and an updated Public Transport Infoview. Adjusting the old bus budget slider also encourages people to use intercity buses more.

An intercity bus station in the morning.

Passenger Helicopter

The next new public transport service takes citizens to new heights. Passenger helicopters circumvent traffic altogether and zip through the sky, connecting people in a whole new way. This service unlocks at Milestone 11, right before airports, and uses the same build menu tab as other Air transport services. The new assets that unlock with the service are the helicopter vehicle model, helicopter depot and helicopter stop. There is also an updated Public Transport Infoview and helicopters are added to the existing Air Transport budget slider. To start building your first passenger helicopter line, you first need to place a helicopter depot that sends out the helicopters. Then you build as many helicopter stops as you want and connect them with the new Helicopter pathway tool. Don't forget to connect the depot to one of the stops because helicopters can't move without pathways! Lastly, you can create helicopter lines by selecting joined Helicopter stops with the Helicopter Line tool. There are also two helicopter stops in one of the new transport hubs we are going to talk about next!

Connecting a Passenger Helicopter Depot to a Helicopter Stop using the Helicopter Pathway tool.

Transport Hubs

You read it right, we are adding new transport hubs to the game! There are five new hubs in total coming with Sunset Harbor. Transport hubs connect different transport networks together, making changing from one transport type to another easy and fast without the need to walk from one stop to another. All new hubs are added to a brand new build menu tab together with the older hubs. Transport hubs function the same way as public transport stops: If a transport hub has been built and is connected to a road, train track or metro track, it can be used as a stop when creating a public transport line.

Train-Metro hub, at your service!

Here are short introductions to the new assets:

Bus-Intercity Bus Hub utilizes the new intercity bus service introduced above and connects it to the good old local bus service. Bus lines can be created on the bus platforms and citizens can change between local and intercity buses with ease. At Milestone 6, this hub is the first of the five to unlock.
Metro-Intercity Bus Hub combines the intercity bus service with an underground metro network to get your travelers all around town! This hub unlocks at Milestone 7.
Bus-Metro Hub connects the local bus service and two metro networks together. You can see citizens taking the escalator to the metro and hurrying to the bus platforms as they change lines. Unlocks at Milestone 9.
Train-Metro Hub has two large stations connected together by a road and a bridge over the road that makes it easy for train passengers to change to a metro line. But hang on, is that an overground metro line? More about that in the Dev Diaries to come. This beauty unlocks at Milestone 8.
Metropolitan Airport brings with it the largest building to Cities: Skylines so far! This hub wraps together an international airport, two underground metro stations and two landing pads for the passenger helicopter. This colossal building unlocks at Milestone 13.

The Metropolitan Airport will bring citizens together from around the world.

With these hubs, we've tied together all the new public transport services. The next Dev Diary is going to focus on completely different city services. We hope you liked these new features and are looking forward to the next ones!

Until next time, city-builders!

Colossal Order dev team

PS. Don't forget to check out the video tutorial from Bsquiklehausen! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to not miss out on any of them - https://pdxint.at/Subscribe

Mar 21, 2020

Sunset Harbor Dev Diary #2a

Cities: Skylines - Avanya

Greetings fellow city-builders and welcome to another Sunset Harbor Dev Diary!

Ever since Cities: Skylines was released, we have received hundreds of requests for one specific feature: Trolleybuses! And to go along with every one of those requests, vivid debates took place within the community about whether or not trolleybuses are too hard to implement, if the feature is “too niche” or if “they” actually ever even read the suggestions posted on the forums.

Let us assure you that we are indeed constantly listening, and every single idea is considered when we are deciding what to do next! Also, we are just as enthusiastic about public transport as you are, and you would have to be very creative to suggest something that we would consider to be “too niche”

The reason trolleybuses have never been added is their technical complexity. Trolleybuses are basically “trackless trams”: electrical buses that draw their power from overhead wires. Unlike trams, they utilize two wires and two trolley poles to complete the electrical circuit. And like a normal bus, a trolleybus is able to change lanes and stop on the side of the road. As the bus is moving, its poles rotate and tilt to stay attached to the wires. In the game as well as in reality, the trolley poles are the most tricky part of the whole system.

We are glad to inform you that we have managed to overcome the technical challenges, so Trolleybuses will finally be available in Cities: Skylines – Sunset Harbor!

They are finally here!

The trolleybus system in Cities: Skylines – Sunset Harbor consists of four components:

Trolleybus Depot
Trolleybus Roads
Trolleybus Stops
Trolleybus Vehicle

To get started with trolleybuses, you first place a Trolleybus Depot. After that, you can place Trolleybus Roads and create Trolleybus Lines with roadside stops. Your depot will then send out trolleybuses to operate the lines. It is important to remember that the trolley poles must be attached to the wires at all times, so your Trolleybus Depot and your Trolleybus Lines must be connected by Trolleybus Roads as well!

Trolleybus Depot sending out new trolleybuses.

Taking passengers over the river.

That’s the easy part! In the second part of this Dev Diary, we would like to shed light on what we did to make the trolley poles behave realistically. Unlike other diary entries, this one will be slightly more technical. Even if you are not that math and geometry savvy, we still hope you enjoy this inside look!

The Wire

Let’s take a closer look at the roads! On every road segment, you will find three catenary masts: One at the start, one in the middle and one at the end. The electrical wires span the masts, and with some mathematical calculations we can find out the start and end coordinate of each wire section. Let’s call them

and

(using a small arrow to mark them as 3D vectors).

A mathematical formula to define the line of the wire would be

with

and

When the bus is on the road segment, we want its pole to connect to the overhead wire defined by the mathematical formula above.

is the coordinate where the pole is attached to the wire.

The Trolleybus

The game knows how the bus is positioned and rotated in the world, and from that it is possible to calculate the coordinate where the trolley pole is attached to the bus. Let’s call it

!

The trolley pole is made of sturdy metal, so it cannot stretch. That means the distance between the coordinate where the pole is attached to the bus (

) and the coordinate where the pole is attached to the wire (

) must always be equal to the length of the pole. Let’s call it and define this formula to
take that into account:

The Equation System

By inserting the first formula into the second one, we end up with a single equation with a single unknown variable c :

With a few tricks we can transform it into a quadratic equation:

Step 1:

with

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

We can use the quadratic formula to solve the equation.
We will get zero, one or two values for c :

Note that there will be no solutions if the part in the square root is negative (which happens if the wire is too far away from the bus). Note that the solutions for c calculated by this formula could also be out of range (

), so we have to check that as well.

Choosing the Right Position

By inserting

and

into our wire formula

, we can calculate two theoretical pole-wire-attachment coordinates

and

. One will be above the front part and the other above the back of the bus:

As the pole of a trolleybus is typically facing backwards, we need to find out which of the two positions is the correct one.

Haven’t had enough of vectors yet? Let’s define a few more:

- the direction vector of the bus (points into driving direction)
- direction the pole would face if it was attached at (points from to )
- direction the pole would face if it was attached at (points from to )

Using the dot product, we can easily find out if

and one of the pole vectors are facing into about the same direction (> 0) or the opposite direction (< 0).

We are specifically looking for the pole vector that faces in the opposite direction of

, so our conditions would look like this:

- If that condition is true, is the correct pole-wire-attachment coordinate.
- If that condition is true, is the correct pole-wire-attachment coordinate.

Rendering the Trolley Poles

Uh, that was a lot of math! Now that we know where the pole is attached on the bus (

) and where the pole is attached to the wire (either

), it is possible to render the pole in the correct position and rotation.

As we learned, a trolleybus has two poles (otherwise the electrical circuit would be incomplete), so we will just repeat the same steps to draw the second pole.

And now you know what kind of stuff goes on behind the scenes to render the poles! Of course, in order to make trolleybuses realistic, this was just one small portion of the overall work that was needed!

The last shift of the evening.

Once again, we've reached the end of a Dev Diary. We hope that you liked this insight into the development of Cities: Skylines and that we didn’t scare you with all the formulas! Gotta say, the end result is really mesmerizing. We could just watch the buses circle around for hours! What do you guys think about the trolleybuses?

Until next time, city-builders!

Your Colossal Order dev team

Mar 20, 2020

Sunset Harbor Dev Diary #1

Cities: Skylines - Aiwyth

Greetings fellow city-builders! It's time to tune into another series of the beloved Cities: Skylines Dev Diaries!

As you already know, Sunset Harbor, the next expansion for Cities: Skylines, was announced on the 19th of March. In the upcoming days, we are going to take a more detailed look at all the cool features we have been working on. But first, let's start by going over what the Sunset Harbor expansion is all about and the types of new features it introduces. If you haven't already checked out the trailer, you can follow the link here or watch it below.

Cities: Skylines Sunset Harbor DLC is an expansion that, instead of improving only on a single aspect of the game, brings with it a multitude of features that address several different things. We start off these Dev Diaries here by introducing one of the key features of this expansion, the highly sought-after addition of Fishing Industry that will surely liven up the shorelines of your cities! In future Dev Diaries, we will be introducing the improved and extended mass transit options as well as the expanded Waste Transfer System, Inland Water Treatment and Healthcare city services. To top it off, we introduce a new and amazing Unique Building, cool new maps, policies and miscellaneous improvements, because we all know you can't have an expansion without them! This expansion is simply going to take your cities to the next level.

Our new maps are designed with the new Sunset Harbor features in mind. They offer challenges in the shape of sewage treatment management, provide good opportunities for fishing industry activities, and showcase memorable landscapes to build cities on. The paid part of this DLC allows you to expand on Waste Management with the Waste Transfer System, offer your citizens new mass transit options with Trolleybuses, Passenger Helicopters and Intercity Buses, and have them all utilize new Transport Hubs. The free part of this DLC, includes a majorly overhauled metro system. You can now adjust the height of metro tracks, which means tracks and stations can be underground, street level, or even above ground on elevated platforms! Included in the free content update are also the new Healthcare facilities. After building them, you may notice more children being born in the city and some citizens living slightly longer than others.

Now that the general introductions are out of the way, it's time we roll up our sleeves and dive right into the fish puns. Actually, let's try to keep those to the minimum.

What fish-tastic news!

Adding life and meaning to the vast shorelines, Fishing Industry is a new addition to the industry selection of Cities: Skylines. It is a type of industry separate from the Industries DLC and neither production chain requires the other in order to function. In Sunset Harbor, you take control of the fishing industry in the city and can manage it from simple fishing route planning all the way to final commercial production. You build fishing boat harbors, plan fishing routes for different types of boats and nurture fish farms on the shoreline (preferably away from polluted waters). The fish yield from these is then delivered to either Fish Markets in the city or to the Fish Factory, where the fish is turned into canned fish and delivered to grocery stores for increased profit.

You can locate the new Fishing Industry features under the same construction menu as Garbage, on it's own Fishing Industry tab. A Fishing Industry Info View was also added to the (already long) list of Info Views. It can be used to determine what types of fish live in the waters surrounding the city. The Info View shows fish types, water pollution, and existing fishing routes in different colors and also highlights the fishing industry buildings. The Outside Connections Info View now also highlights fish resources, but keep in mind that fish can only be exported!

The Fishing Industry Info View provides valuable information about water pollution, fish types, fishing routes and fishing buildings.

It's time to go fish!

After reaching milestone 3, Fishing Industry unlocks and you are able to cast your first nets! In the beginning, you can build a non-specialized Fishing Boat Harbor and define fishing routes for the boats it houses. The Fishing Harbor comes with a built-in road, similar to other harbor buildings, and it has two builtin fishing route nodes ready: one for outgoing boats and one for incoming boats. From these points, you can create the route with a special fishing route tool. Draw the route as you see fit, and connect the route to the other node on the same harbor to close it. The route shape and length is entirely up to you, and multiple fishing routes can overlap each other!

The world is my oyster.

With a completed fishing route and a functioning Fishing Harbor, fishing boats are sent out to catch fish automatically. The boats can catch any type of fish, but the catch rate is only moderate and the storage capacity is low (it keeps the fishing industry running but doesn't give much of a boost to the city's economy). A boat's speed is determined by its current action: when it is catching fish, it moves slower. When it is at full capacity and returning to harbor, it moves faster. Caught fish can either be exported or transported with Fish Trucks to a Fish Market and sold directly to consumers.

As the combined fish yield from all of the city's fishing boat harbors increases, further Fishing Harbor unlocks become available. With careful fishing route planning, this process can be significantly sped up. Fishing boat harbors unlocked later all come with their own fishing boats, each dedicated to a certain type of fish. The catch rate and capacity of these specialized boats is high, but they catch fish only when sailing in an area that contains the type of fish specific to them. If the fishing boat's route passes through areas that only contain the wrong type of fish, they won't catch anything. Fishing route efficiency can be seen by selecting the harbor and opening the building panel.

Fishing boats catching fresh fish for the morning markets in the sunset.

The first Fish Farm unlocks at city milestone 5, allowing you to grow and gather higher yields of fish. Further Fish Farm unlocks are tied to the overall fish yield of the city's fish farms, much like with Fishing Harbors. Fish Farms are an alternative way to gather fish and also make it possible to farm seaweed and algae. Fish Farms are a more efficient way to gain high yields of fish and sea plants, but their stationary nature makes them particularly vulnerable to water pollution. Fish Farms work well in small lakes however, where creating efficient fishing routes is not feasible. Fish Farms operate on growth cycles, which can be seen by selecting the farm. During the cycle, the meter fills up. Once it is full, the building is ready to send its yield to either a Fish Factory or Fish Market. If neither a factory nor a market exists, the fish is exported out of the city.

As mentioned, water pollution affects fish yields in the polluted area. With boats, the catch rate decreases as water pollution increases, until finally they stop catching fish entirely. You need to either remove the pollution from the water or plot new fishing routes that circumvent the polluted waters. With fish farms, cultivation stops immediately if any pollution is present.

Note to self: Fish Farms and Sewage Outlets don't mix well.

How much is the fish?

So, how do we know what types of fish thrive in which conditions? In short, fish type is determined by the depth and flow of water. Sunset Harbor features 4 types of fish, all of which prefer different conditions. Anchovies thrive in still, shallow waters, salmon prefer shallow water with a flow, shellfish require deep and still waters, and tuna need deep, flowing water. This means one single map might not always have the required conditions for all types of fish.

Fishing Boat Harbors and Fish Farms have a limited capacity for storing fish, so in order to gain profit, the fish needs to be transported by Fish Trucks to either a Fish Factory, where the raw food material is processed into goods, or to a Fish Market where the raw food material is sold directly to citizens. Direct monetary compensation from fishing is received from Fish Factories and Fish Markets when their products are sold to the end users or exported. But monetary compensation is not the only benefit these buildings offer: the Fish Market gives surrounding citizens a health benefit and entertainment. In the budget panel, you can inspect how the fishing industry is performing, how much running the industry costs, and how much profit it generates. Happy fishing!

Sunset Harbor will hit the stores on the 26th of March, and we are hooked on a feeling of excitement about this expansion! To help the wait, tune in for more Dev Diaries published here every day. We hope to see you on the next one, where we will show you the kinds of new public transportation options we have to offer!

Best regards, Your Colossal Order dev team

PS Also don't forget to check out our first video tutorial from bsquiklehausen! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to not miss out on them - https://pdxint.at/Subscribe