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Comment by leononame | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit underwhelmed. There are tons of QoL changes, but afaict there is little innovation. I would've expected at least a not grid-based zoning so that buildings on curves look more natural. All these empty pieces of land in between buildings look really bad and kind of force us to make grid cities. And that is not even an innovation, it was already present in the SimCity series. But some procedurally generated buildings for smooth corners and connecting buildings would be nice.

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Its hard to make assets that would work with every curve. When you see screenshots of nice cities like this, people are using mods to hand place assets with them clipping into each other to make a unified wall of buildings along the curve or corner.

The houses themselves don't have to be curved - but if the zoning around a curve (or non 90 degree angle) could be filled in completely, that'd be nice. Triangular buildings or similar shapes could help. For detached housing, it still might look OK (although a bit weird), but for buildings that are supposed to connect with each other (which is something you see a lot at least in European cities), placing these on a curve and having empty spaces between them just looks bad. The building itself could still have straight walls - with angles other than 90 degrees and then a little bit of auto-filling plaza this could work.

I know it's a hard problem to solve. Personally, this is what makes C:S 1 unable to create natural looking cities. Cities aren't all grids or detached housing.

Jus commenting that this was, by far, my top wish for the sequel. Proper European cities are just not possible with the CS1 zoning squares.

There are triangular buildings in the Steam Workshop that help a little bit, but it's tricky to place them right and they get repetitive quite fast as there aren't that many. Plus that solves just a small part of the problem anyway.

Agreed. I made this as a personal experiment and it was not all that hard to make form-fitting buildings for straight road networks:

https://andrewq.myportfolio.com/procedural-city-generator

Curved roads are a bit more difficult, but definitely possible.

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