Maxis has already unveiled what lies ahead in Update 7 and it's boasting 'smarter' traffic, with faster vehicles going about their day. Mayors will also get to create bridges, overpasses and tunnels.
The new tool will let you forcibly raise or lower a road's height on the map to force the construction of bridges, tunnels or handy overpasses; it can't alter existing roads.
Update 6, which is available now, also features a borderless windowed mode for those who enjoy using a second or third screen while they game. No more dodgy ALT-TABs that risk crashing the game or losing audio. Data layers have also been addressed with better information given to Mayors.
Granite Lake Region is a new 10 city lake landscape ripe for Sims to get stuck in traffic on. The key design idea behind Granite Lake was to have each city enjoy the vista created by their neighbouring cities. The best addition through Update 6 is the additions to RCI which causes commercial sectors to be reliant on industrial freight output.
The full Update 6 changelog is available here.
Update 7 is currently in testing:
• New: Brand new tool to create bridges, overpasses, and tunnels when you draw your roads.
When building your road, pressing the , key or . key will lower or raise the road accordingly creating overpasses, bridges and tunnels. Note: Existing road layouts cannot be raised or lowered
• New: Improvements for Traffic behavior to make it smarter. This should reduce the number of lines formed by all available vehicles converging on a single spot. This affects all vehicles including Police, Fire Trucks, Moving Trucks, Garbage Trucks, Recycling Trucks, Resource Trucks, Buses, Ambulances, and Civilian vehicles going home, to work, or shopping.
• New: Tree tools – Place individual trees around your city. These tools are located at the end of the Nature Parks palette.
• Terrain: Fixes an issue some player’s see where terrain covers sections of roads while the camera is zoomed out.
• Fixed an issue where the fire animation would sometimes continue when fire was extinguished.
• Parks: Sports parks are now accepting Sims 24 hours a day.
• Airship: The number of Airship passenger trips should now be correct over multiple days.
• Vehicles: Vehicles now accelerate and decelerate faster, allowing them to leave buildings and go through intersections more efficiently.
• Freight: Freight trucks now only leave factories if they have a valid delivery destination.
• Gifting: Money gifting should be more reliable.
