Hi Everyone! Let’s talk about the patching process and upcoming patch landing soon for Cities: Skylines II.
Generally speaking, patching the game is something we usually try to combine with upcoming releases, and only work on solely bug fixing patches if we don’t have a suitable release we can wait for. Or the fix is critical to release as fast as possible - a so-called hotfix patch. You may remember the free updates associated with the DLC releases in Cities: Skylines and in the long term that is the goal with the sequel as well. It’s a good way to sneak in some cool features and improvements to all the players, beefing up the base game, and making certain features part of it while the paid content expands on those new features allowing us to continue developing the game forward. One of the first examples of this approach was After Dark where the free update added the day and night cycle to all players and the DLC itself had specific content and features for the nightlife.
So we are working to improve the quality of Cities: Skylines II, just like we did with the first game, and this includes both improvements to the base as well as creating new content as paid DLC. We worked at a fast pace after the release last October to get as many fixes in as we could. Patching the game so often does take resources in itself so we opted out for a less frequent pace to focus on bigger additions and more impactful updates in the future. Therefore the upcoming patch 1.19.0 is the last “stand-alone” bug fixing patch for now. Next time the bug fixes will be joined by the first of the modding support for the game, albeit it will not be the final version but a public beta one as mentioned last week.
We’re working on a wide variety of fixes and improvements on top of the missing modding support and platforms. We have a list of reported issues from both you, QA, and the team here at Colossal Order. These issues are sorted based on the level of their severity and the time it takes to implement them so that we can churn out as many improvements to the game as possible with the time and resources we have available.
In practice, the patching process starts with the build version being locked so that no more changes are committed to it by the devs. The build goes through at least one QA round, where the listed issues are verified as either fixed or still occurring. Any new issues with the build are reported as well. Any outstanding issues are fixed and the new locked build version goes to QA. This step usually takes less than a week but can take longer depending on issues found and how quickly those are fixed. After the devs are happy with the build version it's sent to the publisher for their checks, including submissions to each platform and setting the patch ready to go live for the public. This can take a couple of days to a few weeks depending on the size and content of the patch. The release is always aimed so that it wouldn’t be right before the weekend, just to make sure that if any issues occur on the public release there is a team available to check it out. In the meantime, the devs are working on the game toward the next release whether it be fixes, improvements, or new content.
Patch 1.0.19 will include a collection of fixes for issues we’ve discovered internally or have been reported to us by you. Thank you again for all the reports, it’s much appreciated! Full patch notes will be available when the patch is released, but here’s a little summary of the things we’ve been working on.
Improvements to the gameplay are mainly focusing on the land value:
- Land value will be affected by ground pollution. The ground pollution will first slowly reduce the land value increasing, and when the pollution gets worse it will start to decrease the land value.
- Land value won't decrease to 0 even with heavily polluted land.
- Land value will increase according to industrial company's profitability value.
Land value is likely to receive more love in future updates, but more on that in the future.
On top of these, we’ve also improved the search for parking spaces. Anyone who is driving a car in a bigger city knows how tricky it can be!
Some balancing work went into the Incinerator Plant as building the Extra Incinerator Furnace upgrade would cause it to produce less electricity, the opposite of what the effect should be, and little tweaks were introduced to the resources to avoid traffic jams at the cargo stations. Then there was the appropriate care put into the youth as the teens and children required balancing for their spawn rates and now more teens are entering the High School to get educated. Think about the children, they say!
No patch without some focus on the performance. This time we’ve optimized shadow culling, pathfind scheduling (especially visible as faster and more stable simulation speed in very large cities), added cooldown to avoid too many queries on citizens seeking education when the city doesn’t have enough schools, and reordered some rendering related systems to reduce waiting in the main thread.
Last but not least, the patch fixes issues in the statistics panel, multiple cases of random crashes (crash to desktop when selecting "moving in" household, after modifying roads with citizen group at specific state, and when modifying road with pedestrian path connected in a specific way, to name a few) as well as added some missing text and translations.
The devs at Colossal Order are fully focusing on improving Cities: Skylines II further after patch 1.0.19 is out. Actions speak louder than words so we’ll pause these weekly posts and be back when we cover the content of the next patch/release for the game. Keep following our social channels for the latest updates and have a lovely week!
Sincerely,
Mariina
