The latest dev diary from Colossal Order talks about the simulation aspects for Cities: Skylines. They emphasise every citizen has a name, age and a place to call home and work, unless they’re a student.
Not everyone will have a car either, as some prefer to walk or will hop on some public transport. They also ”opted to cut down” the sheer numbers of people as it ”brought more to the game.”
Have huge numbers of citizens meandering about isn’t only a technical problem when cities balloon in size but the team argues it can also sterilise the experience of running the place. ”Because simulating individual citizens takes some processing power, we opted to cut down the number of citizens.”
”Some residential buildings have a quite low amount of people living in them compared to the size of the building. We felt choosing individual citizens over realistic numbers brought more to the game. So while your high-rise might have only 12 households, everyone has a name and a logical pattern of moving around the city,” lead designer Karoliina Korppoo explained in the dev diary.
They also discuss the industrial and commercial side of the city sim:
”Goods are produced in industrial areas and transported to commercial areas to be sold to citizens and tourists. This means that wherever there’s a commercial area, there will be trucks driving to and from it. To produce goods, industrial areas use raw materials.”
”If the city produces raw materials by specialized industry, the industry will automatically get them shipped from the specialized production facilities. Industry prefers materials from inside the city, but if none are available, they will order raw materials from outside locations. Materials arriving from outside locations come by truck if no train or cargo ship connections are available, which will put a stress on the road system.”
How does Colossal approach the traffic itself? They go on to explain that citizens prefer to avoid busy spots and like to ”choose lanes early to avoid switching lanes and blocking off two lanes in the process”, and there are of course handy traffic overlays to let Mayors know of trouble junctions.
”Everything is connected. If you build a Fire Station that sends out fire engines to put out fires, the service vehicles can only get to the fires if the roads are not crowded with other vehicles. But just having a Fire Station near by raises the happiness of residential houses. A raise in happiness means the residents are less likely to turn to crime, even if they are unemployed for some time.”
Cities: Skylines releases on PC in 2015. Check out the full developer diary for more.
