Seems to be going nicely so far. One thing I can suggest is to make sure not to expand too quickly. It’s tempting but can lead to serious issues down the line (just in general, not that you’re doing so).

Other than that, keep an eye on your public transport and change/improve as necessary - doing so will save you a lot of rebuilding. Traffic wise, a large central road with smaller streets branching out to various districts is usually the way to go. Also put your commercial and office zones near the bigger streets, housing on the smaller ones (can’t really see how it works in your map so this is just a general suggestion).

Oh! I haven’t played in a while and don’t remember if this is a thing but see if there’s an option to hide district policies before taking screenshots - all those icons add a lot of noise and make it harder to see the layout of certain spots.

Make sure to post again once that happens, either here or on one of the communities linked in this post. It’d be fun to see how it turned out.

This guide on transit is a really comprehensive resource about anything traffic related. It contains info about everything from basics to all types of public transport and pathways. Also lots of screenshots and diagrams to make things easily digestible.

I’m not gonna critique it based on efficiency and min-maxing as that’s something I couldn’t care less about. Design wise however, I like it. It’s has some more organic and interesting shapes than a basic “American city” that’s so easy to default to. Split between suburbs and the more urban centre is a nice touch (tough I would try to add some transition in the empty space between the two to make it look more natural).

You have a clear separation between residential and industrial areas which will prevent issues with health and happiness (as long as you keep it in check). You also remembered to dump the sewers downriver which is good.

I’m sure some CS pro could give you a bunch of pointers but it looks like a good start to me. Are you planning to share your progress in the future? I’d actually like to see what you’ll do with it.

I understand what you’re saying but we’re talking about a multi billion dollar company. At this point there is no excuse you can give for not fixing simple and easily identifiable issues with user experience - especially since all of this has been criticised for years. As much as I appreciate some of the recent additions, fixing this mess should be priority number one.

Ah, I see. I thought it was specifically related to TC2. Thanks for clarifying.

I haven’t played or owned TC but game preservation is an important topic for me so I also signed and tried to popularise it as much as possible. I don’t expect much but every attempt is important.

To be fair, the update itself was announced last year (here is a random IGN article about the announcement) after people started complaining about upcoming shutdown of the first game (which in turn spawned the Stop Killing Games initiative).

Not that this makes the filing irrelevant but it’s not some knee-jerk reaction thrown together on the spot. Besides, game built with online components in mind calling servers once a minute isn’t really that crazy (whether that should be a thing for a single player mode is a different matter).

It improved quite a bit since early days, it’s just the flat structure they used to run with led to a messy development and disjointed feature set.

Valve did make some changes in terms of organisation a few years ago so hopefully all the recent improvements will lead to a serious UI overhaul to tidy things up.

Yes please! Browsing Steam is such a stupid experience, it’s staggering they still can’t be bothered to fix it.

Soundtrack App

Bruh…

I actually thought about including this case in my original post but I have tendency to waffle way too much and in the end decided against it to keep things shorter. It is a useful example to mention so thanks for that.

Did they even shut them down back then? I might be thinking about a different situation but I remember one of the other remake mods (was it New Vegas on Fallout 4 engine?) where they simply told the team they can’t use the original audio. The cancellation of that mod happened months later and didn’t even have anything to with that issue, I believe.

Either way, this kind of scenario is something I skipped over in my initial question since banning reuse of assets in different engines is a legal thing. I mostly meant them blocking/killing projects for no “serious” reason.

Still, it was a good idea to mention these kind of issues as well.

Can it change? Sure. There’s just no reason to expect that based on Bethesda’s approach to modding until now. I’d rather base my expectations on their past actions rather than assume the worst just in case.

Exactly, which is why I don’t expect them to do anything hostile towards this project - both remakes have their own goals and approaches after all.

At the end of the day Virtuos are just a contractor - Bethesda are the ones with final say in the matter. Despite all their flaws they never really showed to be hostile towards these kind of projects (or at least I haven’t seen them act that way) so there’s no reason to automatically expect the worst. That’s just my opinion though.

If I recall correctly the team behind Skyblivion was (or still is) in contact with Bethesda throughout the development and had no problems with the latter in regards their work. Heck, Bethesda itself posted about the mod on their site in 2023.

They’ve been aware of Skyblivion for years and there’s no indication they’re interested in killing it.

I heard about the latter but never really thought about Steam Input like this, goes to show how easy it is to completely miss such stuff when you don’t need it. Also, in case someone’s confused BCI stands for Brain-Computer Interfaces.

I don’t think news about a single tool for developers is some kind of ploy to improve their PR - most people won’t even hear about it. It’s just a neat piece of news since Ubisoft has been pretty good about accessibility in their games for years now.

Giving props when deserved doesn’t mean you have to forgive and forget all the bad surrounding the company.

Right, forgot about that since I focused purely on software side of things. Good reminder!

As problematic as AAA publishers can be, their steps towards spreading accessibility within the industry as a whole are always nice to see and worth sharing, I think. Did anyone besides Ubi and EA did something like that?