Cities: Skylines
CityDrive for Cities: Skylines
Drive through the city you spent all that time building.
CityDrive started with wanting to get down onto the roads of my Las Rico save. Cities: Skylines already has a city worth exploring; giving it a car changes how you experience it.
View larger ↗The first versions exported the roads and scenery into a browser, then Godot. The image above is from that standalone version. The later driving mode runs inside Cities: Skylines itself.
Getting back into the real city
Moving into the game keeps the original terrain, buildings, lighting and traffic. It also makes the interesting problems much more concrete: a road can pass over another road, the camera can end up inside a bus, and a collision has to make sense to both the car and the city simulation.
Wheel contact, tunnels, camera clearance and traffic reactions became a lot of the work. Leaving the car also has to put the ordinary game controls back exactly where you expect them.
The handling is in the details
A useful change can be quite small: better grip after a collision, less sliding on the underside of the chassis, or traffic recovering without snapping back into place. The installed 0.9.13 build got noticeably better collision-grip feedback.
Performance counters now make the expensive parts of the controller visible. The next 0.9.14 build passed its focused checks; its live traffic and frame-rate playtest was still ahead of it at the last handoff.
Under the hood
A live-city exporter for roads, junctions and scene data, with browser and Godot prototypes.
An in-game mode that retains the original buildings, terrain, materials, lighting, roads and running traffic.
Vehicle handling, wheel contact, camera clearance, tunnel support and temporary impact bodies.
Native-traffic interaction, guarded recovery policies and CPU performance telemetry.
Version 0.9.13 reached the installed game and felt noticeably grippier in playtesting. The next candidate, 0.9.14, compiled cleanly and passed 365 focused checks plus nine passive-analysis tests; it was still awaiting installation in the saved record.