Cities: Skylines was already a pretty big game, and now it is simply huge thanks to a big free patch and the first expansion.
Launch trailer:
You can see the full notes of what’s free, and what’s left in for the expansion right here. I think their commitment to the game is fantastic, and the free updates will hopefully continue too.
Some thoughts
I’ve played quite a few hours in the game, and I simply love it. This expansion makes me love it even more.
The addition of a day/night cycle makes for some interesting looking cities, as they beautifully light up at night and put you in awe of your own creations. It does however give solar energy a bit of a drawback, so don’t go relying on it like our Samsai did.
I didn’t quite understand when it would become night time at first, but on the lower left corner the world icon now has the sun moving around on it to indicate the time of day. It’s done in a weird way, but I understand why they did it. Instead of there being a true day/night cycle it goes through days at a time being in the light, and then days of it being night. Otherwise day and night would come and go in the blink of an eye and it wouldn’t be great.
I think my favourite part about the night cycle is seeing Wind Turbines lit up with spotlights from the bottom, it looks so awesome and it’s such a simple thing.
The new dynamic lighting system is great too, as you see your city slowly creep into the shadows and lights flicker on. I find myself quickly zooming in and out on all sections of my city, simply to stare at all the detail at night time.
As for new buildings and services: amongst other things you now need prisons! As those dastardly criminals love to come out at night. I did wonder what the police did with people before, it seems they weren’t trained very well and just sent them on their way with a pat on their back—no more!
It expands on almost everything! It’s not going to drastically change the way you play the game, but it adds lots of extra kit to keep you coming back to play it even more.
I think it’s fantastic, and I still have a very firm belief that I should not be allowed to run a city, ever. I’m constantly out of money, I think residents should be fine lighting candles to cook their dinner with no electricity, and why is running water such a necessity?
One thing they do need to tweak now are the messages from your citizens, as I had someone tweet “good morning, what a beautiful sunrise” in the middle of the night. Amusing, and a very minor issue, but something that would be nice to see ironed out eventually. I can’t imagine that being hard to fix though.
Considering the amount of possible city variations you can do, especially now with the new buildings I think the price is very reasonable too.
Check out Cities: Skylines on Steam here, and After Dark right here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Launch trailer:
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Direct Link
Direct Link
You can see the full notes of what’s free, and what’s left in for the expansion right here. I think their commitment to the game is fantastic, and the free updates will hopefully continue too.
Some thoughts
I’ve played quite a few hours in the game, and I simply love it. This expansion makes me love it even more.
The addition of a day/night cycle makes for some interesting looking cities, as they beautifully light up at night and put you in awe of your own creations. It does however give solar energy a bit of a drawback, so don’t go relying on it like our Samsai did.
I didn’t quite understand when it would become night time at first, but on the lower left corner the world icon now has the sun moving around on it to indicate the time of day. It’s done in a weird way, but I understand why they did it. Instead of there being a true day/night cycle it goes through days at a time being in the light, and then days of it being night. Otherwise day and night would come and go in the blink of an eye and it wouldn’t be great.
I think my favourite part about the night cycle is seeing Wind Turbines lit up with spotlights from the bottom, it looks so awesome and it’s such a simple thing.
The new dynamic lighting system is great too, as you see your city slowly creep into the shadows and lights flicker on. I find myself quickly zooming in and out on all sections of my city, simply to stare at all the detail at night time.
As for new buildings and services: amongst other things you now need prisons! As those dastardly criminals love to come out at night. I did wonder what the police did with people before, it seems they weren’t trained very well and just sent them on their way with a pat on their back—no more!
It expands on almost everything! It’s not going to drastically change the way you play the game, but it adds lots of extra kit to keep you coming back to play it even more.
I think it’s fantastic, and I still have a very firm belief that I should not be allowed to run a city, ever. I’m constantly out of money, I think residents should be fine lighting candles to cook their dinner with no electricity, and why is running water such a necessity?
One thing they do need to tweak now are the messages from your citizens, as I had someone tweet “good morning, what a beautiful sunrise” in the middle of the night. Amusing, and a very minor issue, but something that would be nice to see ironed out eventually. I can’t imagine that being hard to fix though.
Considering the amount of possible city variations you can do, especially now with the new buildings I think the price is very reasonable too.
Check out Cities: Skylines on Steam here, and After Dark right here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Kimyrielle Sep 26, 2015
I super-rarely buy any full-price DLC and prefer to wait until they are on sale instead. This time I did. I guess that tells enough how much I love this game. :)
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Quoting: GuestQuoting: melkemindI've not seen it go below 30 fps, but I also have a GTX 970. The issue with Unity seems to be some specific aspect of it. I don't know if it's shadows, lighting or what, but it can get very high FPS depending on the scene, but then dip low in others. It's not consistently low. It's definitely Linux (or OpenGL) specific. Windows performs much better.
It's Unity's poor OpenGL. Games can be faster in OpenGL on Linux than on Windows if done correctly, because Linux is more efficient than Windows. The main problem is some devs not putting in optimisation effort into their OpenGL code.
The problem is devs using Direct3D/DirectX, instead of OGL or Vulkan. Everyone will hopefully start programming in Vulkan instead once it is released, and only focus on that one API.
DirectX12 will continue to be a thing because that is what gamers "want" right now. We know that most of its benefits can also be achieved with Vulkan, but that is going to be even less common than OpenGL engines as long as OS X has no intention of supporting it in favor of Metal.
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Quoting: kurrosWe know that most of its benefits can also be achieved with Vulkan, but that is going to be even less common than OpenGL engines as long as OS X has no intention of supporting it in favor of Metal.We know all of it's benefits can be achieved with Vulkan. There's no technical reason to prefer DX12. And I don't see how Apple's support of neither of these APIs if somehow a point in Microsoft's favour.
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Quoting: tuubiQuoting: kurrosWe know that most of its benefits can also be achieved with Vulkan, but that is going to be even less common than OpenGL engines as long as OS X has no intention of supporting it in favor of Metal.We know all of it's benefits can be achieved with Vulkan. There's no technical reason to prefer DX12. And I don't see how Apple's support of neither of these APIs if somehow a point in Microsoft's favour.
Yeah, moreover, it looks like nitendo (and possibly sony?) might support the vulkan api on their consoles.
One more thing : since vulkan and dx12 seem so closely related, wouldn't it be relatively easy to implement the dx12 API on the top of an open source vulkan driver ?
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