Looks like the sequel is officually announced. There were rumors of the sequel to the wildly popular Cities:Skylines.
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Cities Skylines II
- Thread starter maflynn
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I was about to post about this. First one was great, hopefully this one will live up to it and even improve.
Here's the problem though. First was is available for the Mac, it looks like they dropped Mac support for part 2. PC, PS5 and xbox, but nothing about a Mac version.
Here's the problem though. First was is available for the Mac, it looks like they dropped Mac support for part 2. PC, PS5 and xbox, but nothing about a Mac version.
@Homy has an email from them saying they don't have a Mac dev to work on the macOS version (this is an oversimplification). Which is why the first game isn't AS Native and the 2nd game isn't going to be a thing on macOS right now (or every I guess).
Indeed, there's a few things that I struggle at (due to my own inadequacies) and a few items due to game mechanics. I'm curious to know what is considered vanilla and what will be DLCs, the first version was fairly bare and it was built up by a ton of DLCs, i.e., mass transit.
I've played the game on PC and my M1 MBP and the user experience on the Mac is markedly different, not horrible, just not has good. I think the Mac's inferior mouse handling had a lot to do with that. I've said this in various threads, but I think the mouse tracking, and scroll wheel is just not as good on the Mac as PC and that also impacts my enjoyment of this game.
yeah macOS mouse acceleration is way different to PC. If you had never used a PC before you would never know how much better it tends to be. Supposedly there is a way to turn off macOS mouse acceleration.
So after watching the presentation, I don't understand how Apple is not at these publishers doorstep with teams to assist with getting native macOS versions of these games off the ground... Nothing shown cannot run on AS Macs. And all of the genre's are in the average Mac gamers wheelhouse (mostly IMO).
So they gave up on Mac support. I mean, not having someone isn't an issue... hire a team. But that's only done when they make a nice profit, are able to finance Mac versions and make some money in addition. A non AS version is probably not that critical as long as Rosetta 2 is around. Guess they didn't want to put in the effort with their switch from Unity to UE5 in the end. Time will tell what happens.
Mass transit was brilliant. I don't mind if stuff comes with DLC, I'd really like to see open and well documented APIs though. We've used the first one for quite a bit of traffic simulation and if they open it up a little, it becomes a nice scientific tool. There's also a YouTube channel, "Civil Engineer something" who did a few impressive videos with it. Can't wait for more and get a bit more active again.
Who says they're not? I mean, there are always two parties needed. Apple will likely happily support prestige projects they can show off at events (RE). They probably have little interest in supporting small projects that are not financially feasible for them. There are plenty of projects that would be suitable for Apple, but the question is, do the developers on the other end commit to a port beyond it's initial costs and carry the cost down the road for many years. In addition other implications need to be considered. Capcom took all the blame for the control bug in RE and never considered it to be an issue. As a Japanese company with a "special" culture, they never expected to deal with it this way. They were not really happy.
In the case of Skylines 2, would Paradox/Colossal make the deal for a port and then carry it for the next 5-10 years, all issues and costs included? For a core team of less than 50 people, even supported by 500+ people at the publisher... that's a questionable choice. But we'll see what happens. This is a must have title for me though, so PC it is.
I saw speculation that C:S2 was going to use UE5, but then someone in the comments (IIRC it was a PCGamer article) claimed they (Paradox) have said it is still a Unity game.
Same, and actually I'm hoping that it has an improved engine for modding and DLCs. There's a fantastic community to add on to the core game, I'm really hoping that there is continue support
It was a post on their support forum. They released Victoria 3 as late as Oct 25 2022 for Intel Macs. A bit strange when there are more AS Macs on Steam than Intel Macs. Must have been an easy port.
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Generally speaking I think the answer is fairly simple.
Consider how long it takes games to be developed, so if the game was released in October of 2022, one can make an assumption that development started 2 or 3 years prior to that, possibly several years prior. At that point Apple Silicon was at best in its infancy or not even announced.
While you're right Apple Silicon DTK was also announced at WWDC 2020 so one would think that they've had almost 2.5 years to develop an arm64 version. Aspyr is porting their old Intel games to AS and they seem to need just a few months. They released a native AS port of SimCity 4 four months after RC Tycoon 3.
Interesting. All I heard was UE5, but Unity would certainly be quicker given they have the base established in it already. I couldn't quickly find a confirmation for it, so we'll have to wait a little bit longer. I don't think we've seen actual gameplay yet, only pre-rendered trailers/clips. From a performance point of view and guessing how the final game might look, there should be little to no difference between the two engines. This isn't an open world photo realistic game after all.
But why?
1. Intel version runs on the M1/M2
2. Excluding Intel will only reduce sales, i.e., having only the AS version for sale.
3. Developing dual Intel and Apple Silicon would mean much higher development costs, i.e., a team for intel and a team for AS, but a native apple silicon version in of itself would not increase the sales.
I think that's an unfair comparison. On side you have Paradox, a small publisher who has only a small team of developers, and on the other, a company who's sole purpose is to port PC games to Macs.
The game runs on M1/M2 and it didn't cost the company any more money for that ability, how would developing a native version makes business sense?
I didn't say anything about the points you're making. You were talking about the development of the game starting 2-3 years ago and Apple Silicon not being announced then and I simply pointed out the fact that Apple Silicon and the DTK was actually announced at the same time so IF they wanted/could they had the time to port the game so it's not about the time frame you first brought up.
It's not unfair. Aspyr was previously a Mac porting company but they stopped porting Mac games about 6 years ago. So their sole purpose for a long time has been anything but porting games to Mac. I think their last Mac game was Maffia 3 in 2017. That's 3 years before Apple Silicon. Now they just maintain and update their old Mac catalog. I'm not sure if Aspyr's Mac dev team is bigger than Paradox. I don't think so. If Aspyr can learn to port to AS and even update its age old games despite some time and effort it shouldn't be much of a problem for Paradox one might think. Especially when they still make the effort to port games like Victoria to Mac.
Aspyr hasn't port any new Mac game for six years but updates their games to AS, Paradox still ports new Mac games but won't update to AS. Strange situation, but I guess they have their reasons as they wrote.
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Here's the publisher's announcement
www.paradoxinteractive.com
No mention about when, though I suspect late 2023
Cities: Skylines II - Paradox Interactive
Cities: Skylines II | Now Available | Paradox Interactive Cities: Skylines | City Builder | Simulation
No mention about when, though I suspect late 2023
That tracks. Suspect they would have shown gameplay if they actually had something to show, lol.Here's the publisher's announcement
Cities: Skylines II - Paradox Interactive
Cities: Skylines II | Now Available | Paradox Interactive Cities: Skylines | City Builder | Simulation
No mention about when, though I suspect late 2023
I won't disagree with you, but some of the Cities:Skylines YTers have said they've played the game. I suspect an early beta or Alpha.
I've been active in the Cities:Skylines reddit and many people chatting over the course of last year have mentioned that the engine is a mess, as the publisher kept bolting on functionality that didn't really fit and caused problems/bugs.
The district feature is a good example, you can now have two districts overlay each other and its not very clean. That is a regular district on top of a pedestrian district. Its nearly impossible to access one or the other as the clickable titles overlay each other. The work around is to make one larger, so the centered title moves.
Some things I've learned
- CS 2 is not backwards compatible, so games and content for the CS 1 will not work
- No Mac version (as mentioned)
- CS 2 will be using the Unity engine, BUT the video shown, was produced using the Unreal Engine - this bothers me, because actual visuals and game play will be markedly different.
- More features for vanilla players, including consoles.
- Wishlist items people are hoping for: TMPE integrated into the game, more prebuilt intersections/interchanges. Mixed use districts, i.e., one building for both commercial and residential. Better traffic systems, the game basically turns into a traffic management simulation.
I really hope a Mac version is coming. CS1 had a massive userbase on Mac and Paradox's games usually get Mac versions. They'd be fools not to with how casual Mac "gamers" are.
Curious, how massive is that user base for CS1? They crossed 12M copies sold last year total. How many for the Mac?
Sir, you are on MacRumors, clearly 100% of the folks that matter play C:S do so on a Mac....
Odd comments and conclusions by the "reviewer". What did he expect from a base Mac mini? Why did he expect it would perform better in Rosetta with only 8 GPU cores than Radeon 5300M on the Intel Mac running the game natively? Of course "the experience will be much better on Windows, especially with a gaming PC" than a base M1 and Rosetta.
People in the video's comment section have other experiences:
"On my Mac Studio Max it plays as fast as my Gaming PC with an i9 and an RTX 3080 ti. Is your Mac mini a low-end model? It sucks on my 27" iMac i9 with top-end GPU."
"I play Cities on an M1 MacBook Pro 13inch with 16 GB of ram. I use quite some mods, all DLC's, not too many assets though . It runs pretty smooth, most settings on high even. I was a bit surprised that the M1 mini, which is basically the same ran a bit clunky. The only thing which is a bit annoying in my case is the mouse pointer. It's a bit off, I need to aim slightly higher to click. Once you get used to that it's fine."
It makes me wonder if he just tested the game directly after the first launch after Rosetta translation. When I first time started Shadow of the Tomb Raider it ran horrible with half the performance so I thought something was wrong with my M1 Pro but when I relaunched the game it ran fine.
Here you can see how fast the cursor and the game runs on a base MBP 14" 14c GPU compared to the Mac Mini.
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