February 8th, 2021 at 1:56 PM
Most of us who have had larger cities know the horrors of reaching the vehicle limit. It has to do with the internal workings of Cities Skylines, and it limits the internal number of CIMS physically simulated on the map at any given time. This limit is 65,536 (to be oddly precise). This includes all pedestrians, public transport vehicles, garbage trucks, busses, commuters, boats, trains, plains, or any other type of vehicle/cim on the map. Of this, 16,384 can be vehicles. This 64K agent limit is hard-coded into the game, and it is part of the reason that the base game limits gameplay to 9 tiles.
9-tile cities rarely push against this limit, but of course, most of us have increased that as well with the 25/81 tile mods. And on a sprawling, 20+ tile metropolis, the agent/vehicle needs are far higher, and tend to push the limits of the game. The end result is that traffic simply disappears. The game is less challenging and roads become empty. The game runs out of its internal 16K vehicle pool, and cims simply start teleporting. Not very realistic.
This is already inconvenient when it's commuters that are affected, but it's much more problematic when even utilities and essential services can't spawn their vehicles. It's actually a very real problem for 81 tile cities. The game was simply never designed for cities of this size, and will very gladly send garbage trucks, hearses, ambulances, fire trucks, or other essential services across the ENTIRE map if any local service is underallocated. Because of this, very large cities often run out of "spots" even for essential vehicles such as hearses or garbage trucks. This obviously results in massive gameplay problems, garbage pileups, unattended death waves, and all sorts of other mayhem that makes the game nearly unplayable.
There is a new mod that is helping to solve this problem. It (supposedly) provides a massive 4x increase to the internal vehicle limit. It's unclear at this point how this was accomplished, but I suspect that they re-allocated the internal limits to allow vehicles to (in theory) use all of the 64K limit. In practice, it probably simply means that more vehicles and fewer pedestrians will hit the streets (for very large cities), but it still fixes many of the issues that larger cities experienced with regards to these limits and makes these cities feel more lifelike.
(And it's worth noting that if these limits were indeed simply reallocated as we suspect, pedestrians will still count towards this 64K limit. The mod would simply combine the 48K and 16K pedestrian and vehicle pools to allow all agents to be allocated as needed. If this is indeed the case, mass transit will be an important thing to watch. Busy subway stations or bus stops can easily rack up thousands of waiting commuters underground, which take away from this limit pool and restrict the number of vehicles that can hit the roads above.)
This will probably benefit pretty much any large city above ~150K population, especially if more than 9 tiles are in use. I personally have several 20+ tile cities that use the real time mod, and I've seen a pretty welcome increase of traffic back to my roads. It's not quite to the level of a brand new game where the limits are nowhere near being reached, but it's a very noticeable change that makes my cities certainly feel more alive.
Anyone else used this mod before?
9-tile cities rarely push against this limit, but of course, most of us have increased that as well with the 25/81 tile mods. And on a sprawling, 20+ tile metropolis, the agent/vehicle needs are far higher, and tend to push the limits of the game. The end result is that traffic simply disappears. The game is less challenging and roads become empty. The game runs out of its internal 16K vehicle pool, and cims simply start teleporting. Not very realistic.
This is already inconvenient when it's commuters that are affected, but it's much more problematic when even utilities and essential services can't spawn their vehicles. It's actually a very real problem for 81 tile cities. The game was simply never designed for cities of this size, and will very gladly send garbage trucks, hearses, ambulances, fire trucks, or other essential services across the ENTIRE map if any local service is underallocated. Because of this, very large cities often run out of "spots" even for essential vehicles such as hearses or garbage trucks. This obviously results in massive gameplay problems, garbage pileups, unattended death waves, and all sorts of other mayhem that makes the game nearly unplayable.
There is a new mod that is helping to solve this problem. It (supposedly) provides a massive 4x increase to the internal vehicle limit. It's unclear at this point how this was accomplished, but I suspect that they re-allocated the internal limits to allow vehicles to (in theory) use all of the 64K limit. In practice, it probably simply means that more vehicles and fewer pedestrians will hit the streets (for very large cities), but it still fixes many of the issues that larger cities experienced with regards to these limits and makes these cities feel more lifelike.
(And it's worth noting that if these limits were indeed simply reallocated as we suspect, pedestrians will still count towards this 64K limit. The mod would simply combine the 48K and 16K pedestrian and vehicle pools to allow all agents to be allocated as needed. If this is indeed the case, mass transit will be an important thing to watch. Busy subway stations or bus stops can easily rack up thousands of waiting commuters underground, which take away from this limit pool and restrict the number of vehicles that can hit the roads above.)
This will probably benefit pretty much any large city above ~150K population, especially if more than 9 tiles are in use. I personally have several 20+ tile cities that use the real time mod, and I've seen a pretty welcome increase of traffic back to my roads. It's not quite to the level of a brand new game where the limits are nowhere near being reached, but it's a very noticeable change that makes my cities certainly feel more alive.
Anyone else used this mod before?