I wouldn’t mind if time passed more slowly.
Make 1 career take 6 months.
There are so many games that take so little time to explore everything then you get bored with them.
I see this game keeping people involved.
There are also so few games out there I’m looking to spend my money on.
The longer the game time. The longer I don’t have to look around for another game to spend my money on 30 minutes of game play.
Then again. Sometimes I just want a quick game. Say a quick game over the weekend.
What if you give the player the option to change it at startup of a career.
Have a suggested time frame already in.
When the player starts a new career or sandbox.
They can slow it down to 1 game minute to 3 seconds or 1 game day to 3 seconds.
In regards to seasons, if the seasons will be simulated like in real life, then seasons will pass really slow, so how about making the seasons pass in shorter time, for example 1 season = 1 month.
That will make it so 1 season = 1 month = 4 weeks = 28 days = 33.6 hours of gameplay.
Or maybe even shorter: 1 season = 2 weeks = 14 days = 16.8 hours.
I think time should play a big role in the game in terms of operation and people movement. It would be nice to see a day/night cycle in the game(which I think there is as seen during pictures and then video game plays).
The problem I have with a game like Cities Skylines is that while the city building simulation part of the game is great, the time feels so weird. It takes a day for a civ to go from one block to the next block in the road. It doesn’t properly feature a day/night cycle, where Simcity does(yes I still play Simcity). In sim city it was great to have the people wake up in the morning and see them have daily tasks like go to work in the morning, then after work they go shopping and other tasks then go home during the night. It was great to see some structure in the Simms day. Not so in the case of cities skylines. There’s no flow to the sims. While it’s nice to have traffic problems and figure out how to improve it - the time doesn’t feel right. Sometimes it’ll take weeks for traffic to get from one place to another.
Now, with a game like Airport CEO, maybe it could be a good thing to have a fast moving time sim so that we can quickly build up our airport and get new and better contracts. I really hope that that doesn’t happen. I would like it to be a slow paced, day-by-day career where there’s some structure in the sim’s day to go from the bus, to the gate, and it takes an hourish or two, not days to get to the gate. It just doesn’t feel right. It’d be much better to have to focus on the tasks for the day and for construction to take weeks/months, not in a matter of seconds.
May I suggest the rush hour mod for Cities Skylines.
I agree, I think managing demand through the day would be an interesting and challenging issue. People have suggested events like Christmas and Easter holidays that increase the demand level significantly, it would be nice to have to deal with the daytime fluctuations too.
However it would be nice for it to start off quite easy as every time you start off you’re more than likely to be going through the same rough steps which would get very old very quickly. Take a game like Factorio, I love the late game, playing with trains and robots and rockets. However the early game has become so tedious that I can’t even start a new game and stay long enough to get to the end game.
On that subject, if you have world settings like time progression and difficulty it would be very nice if you could change that as the game progresses such that you can get the tedious bits out the way and get on with the fun challenges.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of 1 season taking only a month for example. I would like it if a day would take the already discussed 72 Minutes playing time but if still a month would have 30 or 31 of these days and that a year (and with that all seasons) would take 12 months and not only four weeks for example. This would just feel too fast for me and I think and hope that one would still have enough to do every day.
In order to make everybody happy I guess one would have to be able to decide how fast seasons go by for example.
The problem I have with a game like Cities Skylines is that while the
city building simulation part of the game is great, the time feels so
weird. It takes a day for a civ to go from one block to the next block
in the road. It doesn't properly feature a day/night cycle, where
Simcity does(yes I still play Simcity). In sim city it was great to
have the people wake up in the morning and see them have daily tasks
like go to work in the morning, then after work they go shopping and
other tasks then go home during the night.
A daily flow doesn’t really work for larger map simulations / distances unless you slow it down to a painful crawl. The developers of Cities Skylines actually tried that in the game they released before CS ( Cities in Motion 2 ), and it was a failure because for a citizen to get from one end to the map to the other to commute it would take 5 hours even with the fastest of connections causing the rush hour commute to break down and become spread out over all hours of the day anyways eventually.
Yes it works for smaller map simulators like Sim City, and could probably work for a geographically limited game like an airport simulator too, but there simply isn’t any way to make it work on large map simulators unless you want the single day to take hours of realtime to play through.
If you want to test a transport simulator game on the scale of Cities Skylines that do use daily commutes I can recommend you try out Cities in Motion 2.
I see what you are saying, but there will be a big problem with that, because then 1 year will be 438 hours of real time, and Im pretty sure most people will not play on one save for so long, and many people wont play the that long in total.
I have played cities skylines for almost two years now (its my favourite game), and I have played a total of ca. 450 hours, and that is on at least 10 different maps.
So even two years of playing on the same map will for many people get them through 1 year. So for me that would be be way too slow.
So I read the latest blog post and noticed that the game will going to this 12 day shit, wtf? You all had me hooked and couldn’t wait for the early access release but why oh why did the devs have to screw it up by making time go by so quickly? Okay so we don’t want to sit here for 365 days at a time, FINE, so why not make a fast forward element to the simulation? How are you going to keep all the awesome details you’ve worked so hard to put in by making time skip by at some crazy-ass pace? I am dying to know… and although will be watching closely how this progresses it has lost my interest for now. Not that anyone gives a crap what I think anyway!
Generally alpha is functional builds prior to the game being feature-complete, and beta is during debugging and UI adjustments of feature-complete builds.
Of course with games being continual works in progress these days and the rush to early access, those distinctions are a bit more blurry.
Thanks for the explanation. So it looks alpha then, not pre-alpha as the game certainly looks functional to me.
As for what “not even pre-alpha”, to me then the game wouldn’t really be functional, just a collection of sprites and code that doesnt yet function, if even that. Devs need to give themselves more credit, all 3 gameplay videos are alpha.
Let’s all calm down, you haven’t played the game yet, how can you judge? What’s even so negative or special about the 12 days? Why would it ruin your game experience? I’m sure that the devs know what they’re doing, and I think that they’re the only ones that are in the right position at the moment to decide whatever they want.
No seriously, I really don’t understand the issue. If you think about it, this is probably the only way to do this right. If you simulate 365 days, you have to let the days pass really slow. You probably have to make sure that each day is like 10-15 minutes of real-time gameplay, as you can’t have a plane landing on day 1, doing turn-around on day 2 and finally taking off again at day 3… All of this means that one year would just take forever and that you would play hours and hours in the same month. Let’s just all calm down and wait for the game to release!
Go go go devs, we trust you in making the best descission for this game!
I see the basic theme of responses is “Let’s calm down” - yes well said and agreed! But hey, it got your attention didn’t it?
But this saying “Let’s calm down” sounds to me as if all respondents agree with my point, it’s just too early to tell, So again, how in the heck would you simulate a realistic daily flight schedule in 12 days? How do you simulate all of the fine details that have been painstakingly put into this game compacted in to a tiny, unrealistic portion of time? That’s all I’m asking…
I get it about simulating 24 hours in real time would get monotonous but geez if you don’t want to sit through it, hit fast forward! And for those who wish to slow it down to real time for an hour can do that if they want… wouldn’t this actually be EASIER for the devs rather than trying to squish everything and recode the “rush”? Even allow fast forwarding even in some crazy ass unrealistic speed (like 1 day in 1 minute) but also allow for us to turn on or off notifications so if we need to slow it down to fix something we can.
This is a FANTASTIC rendition of how it could, and should be done. Want to see planets collide in real time? Great, SLOW IT DOWN to real time to watch it. But waiting for 100 years is also unrealistic so fine, allow users to speed it up.
Again, wouldn’t this solution be MUCH easier to program? Then put pop up notifications to alert the player of any major events that need tending to?
Surely you realise that Airport CEO is very very very different to Universe Sandbox? In no sane world do we want to be skipping days at a time, let alone centuries.
I think you misunderstand things a little bit. There will be 12 days in a “year” in the game, i.e. The seasons will cycle once every twelve days. So you have three days of Summer, then three days of Autumn and so on.
The days will be simulated at a minute every few seconds with an option to speed up. That’s perfectly adequate for this kind of game.
I think that we could have a longer year, but 365 days would be absurd and this is one of those areas where gameplay will come at the expense of realism.
