German Region Pack - Developer Diary

Guten Tag and welcome to the Dev Diary for the German Region Pack. Today, we want to dive into the creation process of this newest addition to Paradox Mods and the second of all the Region packs. The German Pack was made by Armesto, Feindbold, and Titan - all of which you surely know from the Cities: Skylines workshop. We are happy to be here for yet another round of content for our favorite city builder.

If you haven't already, you can download the pack now!

We want to show you what style we chose, why we selected the buildings, and what workaround, learning curves, and drawbacks we experienced in creating those models.

Concept and Inspiration

Before we started working on the pack, we had to agree on a style to use. As some of you who either are from or have visited Germany in the past might know - there is no such thing as a “German” style. The whole country is a patchwork of different landscapes, regions, dialects, and various local styles of architecture. You will see lots of brick being used in the north, while the south offers many of their typical half-timbered houses - though this is a general rule.

Various styles in German cities.

Of course, if you ask people from around the world, these half-timbered houses are most often associated with Germany. Still, these days, you will find them rarely in large cities - which is the goal in Cities: Skylines II, after all. To create bustling neighborhoods full of life, something more sturdy is needed here.

Meet “Gründerzeit,” an umbrella term that describes all the architecture from around the end of the 19th century - when towns and cities boomed and exploded far beyond their historic cores in the surge of industrialization. Suddenly, cities drew extensive grids of roads on empty land and looked for developers to inhabit them and fill them with life.

German Gründerzeit

It turns out that there is no single German style, but there is a prominent style that fits every region in Germany. In addition, while some other styles might be prominent in churches, some in palaces, and some in old cities along the cost - “Gründerzeit” fits every function and every purpose - because, of course, when cities exploded, every type of building was needed to provide the masses of new people with city services - a theme that is known to all of us so well in Cities: Skylines as well.

Visual Inspiration

Thus, the visual style was born, and we knew what the goal was. In the next step, we gathered an array of different examples for each of the buildings we knew we wanted to cover - from service buildings to signatures and zones.

Example of an early planning sheet.

This was years ago, of course, and some things have moved since then. Our team changed a bit through the years, and with that, the scope and plan of our pack. In the end, we covered the most important services and zones to deliver the essence of what’s necessary to make a city feel German. As a result, we picked buildings from Braunschweig, Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig to represent all of Germany. You be the judge of how successful we were, but you’ll see that they all blend together perfectly and create a cityscape that’s quintessentially German - or even Polish, Czech, or Austrian to some degree.

Creation of the Pack

Creation of the Pack: Planning stage and asset production

Despite the limited knowledge about how to prepare and create content for Cities: Skylines II back then, planning for the region packs essentially started back in early 2020. However, we were provided with very detailed early documentation and guidelines by Colossal Order, and based on these, we were able to develop our production workflows.

Based on the provided technical documentation, we had to adjust our workflow from the established Cities: Skylines workflows by quite a bit. Among the differences in the sequel were much higher limits in terms of model complexity as well as a switch to square 4096x4096 textures. There were also some changes that needed adjustments regarding our UV mapping techniques.

As we had no access to the actual game back then, we used different tools and engines to get a better grasp of how assets and materials look and behave in a PBR environment. One of these tools is Twinmotion, a UnrealEngine-based visualization software.

Various German Pack buildings in a PBR Environment.

Most of our team was already known for and used to very complex meshes, even for Cities: Skylines standards. The most significant change in terms of mesh fidelity for us was to adjust to the new parallax window system.

Examples of Cities: Skylines Workshop content of German Pack Team.

As the windows need to be separated meshes, every single window frame needs to be modeled out in detail to guarantee a seamless transition. As the amount of potential window frames scales up substantially with taller and more complex structures and the detail on these window frames can often take up a significant portion of the available budget, it was essential to prototype various techniques. For example, some of the buildings have up to 250 window frames, so saving a few triangles for each frame will reduce the overall complexity of the building by 1000s of triangles.

Three different types of window frames that can be re-used on various parts of buildings.

Creation of the Pack: Work in the Editor

Once we finally got access to the editor, it was time to import the assets and start propping. As most of our assets were already finished beforehand, we started with an initial quality control. So, all the assets were imported and checked, and potential issues were screenshotted for later fixing.

The work in the editor was streamlined to increase efficiency. As the German pack heavily relies on color maps for the main facades to achieve more variety, setting up these color variations and making sure they look great in-game was the first step. We saved finalized color variations as hex codes to copy-paste them to other assets quickly.

Example of various assets with their colormaps as hex codes.

The next step was propping all assets. For this, we once again placed between 10 and 20 assets and propped them all at the same time. The final step was then to duplicate L1 and L3 to L2 and L4, just like how it is done in the base game, to create a fully functional set.

A batch of German Pack buildings in the editor, L5, L3 and L1 are propped at the same time.

Pack Content

Zone Types

The German pack comes with two zones: a medium-density zone and a mixed-density zone. The medium density zone is based on the previously described dense “Gründerzeit” districts that can be found around the city centers of pretty much every German city.

The height of these buildings can usually be a good indicator of the size of the city they can be found in, or with bigger cities, they become an indicator of how far they are from the city center. Most smaller German towns have three-story tall buildings, while medium-sized cities are usually filled with four-story tall buildings, with buildings in the inner cities sometimes up to five floors tall. In contrast, in Berlin, you can find these five-story buildings that are up to 10 km from the center. To incorporate this, our buildings start with three floors at Level 1 and then gain floors at Level 3 and Level 5.

Dense blocks of the medium residential zone.

Dense blocks of the medium residential zone.

The mixed zone is based on slightly less detailed buildings from the early 1910s due to different technical limitations related to the mixed zone.

Dense blocks of the mixed zone.

Signatures

The German Pack contains 3 signature buildings, all of which are commercial.

A large 1920s German department store. Based on Karstadt am Hermannplatz.

A corner department store inspired by architecture from the early 1900s.

A department store inspired by architecture from the early 1900s.

Services

We put a focus on service buildings that both fit the “Gründerzeit” setting and offer basic services. Each of the service buildings comes with at least two interesting upgrades. The pack contains these service buildings:

Firehouse and Fire Station
Police Station and Police Headquarters
Elementary School, High School
Train Station

Firestation, Elementary School, and Police Headquarter, each with and without their upgrades.

A small German firehouse that houses a few fire engines.

A large German station that houses several fire engines. Based on a fire station in Leipzig.

The fully upgraded Elementary School and -

- the fully upgraded High School.

A large urban German police headquarters. Can be upgraded with an office extension and extended garages. Based on a police building in Braunschweig.

A small German local police station.

Closing Remarks

Planning for the Region Packs began in 2020, shortly after we got the confirmation that Cities: Skylines II was in development. We aimed to deliver custom content crafted by experienced community members for everyone to enjoy in Cities: Skylines II. We’re thrilled and glad that this work is finally accessible for players and fans to use.

We hope the entire Cities: Skylines community enjoys the outcome of this project. As the German team, we’re excited to continue creating more content for Cities: Skylines II!

Thank you for reading, and please share any feedback or questions in this thread or on the PDX forums. You can also find us on the Cities: Skylines Modding Discord and PDXMods.

Modding Discord - https://discord.gg/ExfdGrYvS4
Armesto PDXMods - https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/authors/AArmesto
Feindbold PDXMods - https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/authors/Feindbold
Titan PDXMods - https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/authors/_Titann_