City Skyline
Cities: Skylines is a 2015 city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a single-player open-ended city-building simulation. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zoning, road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. They also work to manage various elements of the city, including its budget, health, employment, traffic, and pollution levels. It is also possible to maintain a city in a sandbox mode, which provides more creative freedom for the player.
City Skyline
Cities: Skylines is a progression of development from Colossal Order's previous Cities in Motion titles, which focused on designing effective transportation systems. While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title. The developer's goal was to create a game engine capable of simulating the daily routines of nearly a million unique citizens, while presenting this to the player in a simple way, allowing the player to easily understand various problems in their city's design. This includes realistic traffic congestion, and the effects of congestion on city services and districts. Since the game's release, various expansions and other DLC have been released for the game. The game also has built-in support for user-generated content.
As the city grows beyond certain population tiers, the player unlocks new city improvements, including schools, fire stations, police stations, health care facilities and waste management systems, tax and government edicts, mass transit systems, and other features for managing the city. One such feature enables the player to designate parts of their city as districts. Each district can be configured by the player to restrict the types of developments permitted or to enforce specific regulations within the district's bounds, such as only allowing for industrial sectors devoted to agriculture, offering free public transportation for the district to reduce traffic, raising or reducing taxes for the various classes of development, or, with the Green Cities DLC, discouraging fossil-fuel vehicles from entering a district while not discouraging electric vehicles, reducing noise pollution caused by traffic.[2]
Buildings in the city have various development levels that are met by improving the local area, with higher levels providing more benefits to the city. For example, a commercial store will increase in level if nearby residents are more educated, which in turn will allow it to hire more employees and increase tax revenue for the city. When the player has accumulated enough residents and money, they can purchase neighbouring plots of land, each equivalent in size to the starting land area, allowing them to build up eight additional parcels out of 25 within a 10-by-10-kilometre (6.2 mi 6.2 mi) area.[1] The parcel limitation is to allow the game to run across the widest range of personal computers, but players can use Steam Workshop modifications to open not only all of the game's standard 25-tile building area, but the entire map (81 tiles, 324 square kilometres or 125 square miles).[3][4]
The game also features a robust transportation system based on Colossal Order's previous Cities in Motion, allowing the player to plan out effective public transportation for the city in order to reduce traffic congestion and generate transit revenue.[1] Roads can be built straight or free-form, and the grid used for zoning adapts to the shape of the adjacent roads; cities need not follow a square grid plan. Roads of varying widths (up to major freeways) accommodate different traffic volumes, and variant road types (for example, avenues lined with trees or highways with sound barriers) offer reduced noise pollution or increased property values in the surrounding area at an increased cost to the player.[5] The road system can be augmented with various forms of public transportation such as buses, taxis, trams, trains, ferries, and metro systems.
Finnish developer Colossal Order, a thirteen-person studio at the time Cities: Skylines was released,[7] had established its reputation with the Cities in Motion series, which primarily dealt with constructing transportation systems in pre-defined cities. They wanted to move from this into a larger city simulation like the SimCity franchise, and in preparation, developed Cities in Motion 2 using the Unity game engine to assure they had the capability to develop this larger effort.[8] They pitched their ideas to their publisher, Paradox Interactive, but these initial pitches were focused on a political angle of managing a city rather than planning of it; the player would have been mayor of the city and set edicts and regulations to help their city grow. Paradox felt that these ideas did not present a strong enough case as to go up against the well-established SimCity, and had Colossal Order revise their approach.[8]
The situation changed when the 2013 version of SimCity was released, and was critically panned due to several issues. Having gone back and forth with Colossal Order on the city simulation idea, Paradox used the market opportunity to greenlight the development of Cities: Skylines.[9][8]
One goal of the game was to successfully simulate a city with up to a million residents.[7] To help achieve this goal, the creators decided to simulate citizens navigating the city's roads and transit systems, to make the effects of road design and transit congestion a factor in city design.[7] In this, they found that the growth and success of a city was fundamentally tied to how well the road system was laid out.[10] Colossal Order had already been aware of the importance of road systems from Cities in Motion, and felt that the visual indication of traffic and traffic congestion was an easy-to-comprehend sign of larger problems in a city's design.[10]
To represent traffic, Colossal Order developed a complex system that would determine the fastest route available for a simulated person going to and from work or other points of interest, taking into account available roads and public transit systems nearby. This simulated person would not swerve from their predetermined path unless the route was changed mid-transit, in which case they would be teleported back to their origin instead of calculating a new path from their current location.[7] If the journey required the person to drive, a system of seven rules regulated their behaviour in traffic and how this was shown to the user, such as skipping some rules in locations of the simulation that had little impact while the player was not looking at those locations.[10] This was done to avoid cascading traffic problems if the player adjusted the road system in real time.[7] The city's user-designed transportation system creates a node-based graph used to determine these fastest paths and identifies intersections for these nodes. The system then simulates the movement of individuals on the roads and transit systems, accounting for other traffic on the road and basic physics (such as speed along slopes and the need for vehicles to slow down on tight curves), in order to accurately model traffic jams created by the layout and geography of the system.[7] The developers found that their model accurately demonstrates the efficiency, or lack thereof, of some modern roadway intersections, such as the single-point urban interchange or the diverging diamond interchange.[10]
The city government of Stockholm, where Paradox's headquarters are located, used Cities: Skylines to plan a new transportation system.[69] The developer of Bus Simulator 18 planned out the roads and highways of the game's world map through Cities: Skylines before recreating it within their game to provide a seemingly realistic city and its facilities for the game.[70] A Polish YouTuber recreated an interchange which was due to be built near Kraków in the game, showcasing its issues such as causing congestions and multiple lane-switching. In response, Polish General Directorate for National Roads and Highways ordered additional analysis, which confirmed the issues and the interchange was redesigned.[71][72]
Our Premier King City Skyline Room comes with thoughtfully appointed amenities, complemented by floor-to-ceiling views of the Yarra River and Melbourne cityscape, to offer you a satisfying stay. Relax and unwind at Pan Pacific Melbourne, one of the best luxury hotels near Melbourne CBD.
Seiko's Melodies in Motion Clocks are enchanting and magical. This clock brings the nighttime city skyline design to life. On the hour, the dial opens to reveal a turning decorative wheel with Swarovski crystals and plays one of eighteen of the finest quality sound melodies. Metallic brown case, a demonstration button, and volume control. This clock is enclosed in glass, the rotating pendulum features Swarovski crystals, and an off/on switch. This clock will light up your house year-round.
The international building database Emporis attempts to quantify skylines by looking at the number and height of buildings in the world's major cities. The result is an ever-changing ranking of the world's most impressive cityscapes.
To rank skylines, Emporis looks at completed skyscrapers (40 floors or more) and high-rises (12 to 39 floors), and assigns each building a point value based on its floor count. Taller buildings receive significantly higher values (see Emporis' complete methodology here). TV towers, masts, bridges, and other structures are excluded.
In urban environments, green roofs provide a number of benefits, including decreased urban heat island effects and reduced energy costs for buildings. However, little research has been done on the non-plant biota associated with green roofs, which likely affect their functionality. For the current study, we evaluated whether or not green roofs planted with two native plant communities in New York City functioned as habitats for soil fungal communities, and compared fungal communities in green roof growing media to soil microbial composition in five city parks, including Central Park and the High Line. Ten replicate roofs were sampled one year after planting; three of these roofs were more intensively sampled and compared to nearby city parks. Using Illumina sequencing of the fungal ITS region we found that green roofs supported a diverse fungal community, with numerous taxa belonging to fungal groups capable of surviving in disturbed and polluted habitats. Across roofs, there was significant biogeographical clustering of fungal communities, indicating that community assembly of roof microbes across the greater New York City area is locally variable. Green roof fungal communities were compositionally distinct from city parks and only 54% of the green roof taxa were also found in the park soils. Phospholipid fatty acid analysis revealed that park soils had greater microbial biomass and higher bacterial to fungal ratios than green roof substrates. City park soils were also more enriched with heavy metals, had lower pH, and lower quantities of total bases (Ca, K, and Mg) compared to green roof substrates. While fungal communities were compositionally distinct across green roofs, they did not differentiate by plant community. Together, these results suggest that fungi living in the growing medium of green roofs may be an underestimated component of these biotic systems functioning to support some of the valued ecological services of green roofs. 041b061a72