What is Reddit's opinion of
SimCity?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
67 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I don't know, the game itself looks fun, but I still have issues with it. Mainly that it has EA's grubby hands all over it.
I mean, I for one like to play my city-building games alone, not where I have to constantly interact with other cities etc. The fact that it's online-only and on Origins just makes it worse.
Plus the fact that the game itself seems a lot simpler (no terraforming, no pipes and no power-lines for example) and that there is Day-1 DLC and that you need to buy 80$ for the full game at launch. And it's digital only.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/modding-and-simcity
Interesting stuff with that modding policy.
> Distribution of your Mod in any form constitutes a grant by you to EA of an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free, sub-licensable right to use, copy, modify and distribute that Mod (and derivatives of that Mod), and use your name if we choose to, for any purpose and through any means, and without obligation to pay you anything, obtain your approval, or give you credit. You also agree to promptly execute assignments confirming this license upon request from EA.
Seems like they're reserving the right to add things from mods to the game without credit or payment. On the other hand...
> 3. Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files.
so I don't think people will be rewriting their AI for them, unless it's possible to do that by editing other file types.
To be honest, Simcity did get a bunch of paid great reviews that threw a lot of people off.
Like Eurogamer Sweden gave Simcity the highest rating they can possibly give, Vandal Online gave it 86/100, etc etc.
There also the emblems on the Simcity website where it was touting itself as the second coming of jesus (http://www.simcity.com/en_US/news has nearly 8 pages of review sites giving them accolades)
This is the blog entry from January by the lead engineer on making offline play a reality.
Here's the blog entry from October where they announced they were looking into offline play and larger maps. Unfortunately it doesn't look like larger maps are going to be in the card short term if ever.
Edit: offline maps to larger maps, HT to u/bicameral_mind
I quote:
> We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space. > > After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/state-of-simcity
Does that amount of effort sound like a couple of guys were doing it during their lunch hour or was that a sizeable effort to try it?
After 9 months I literally have no faith in this project. If they accomplish a proper offline mode fantastic but I am not holding my breath.
There are a number of issues to overcome and one of the biggest elephants in the room is DLC (make it only work online and make it pointless to buy for offline players, possibly causing issues for those who have already bought it, or make it work offline and then have it trivial to pirate like TS3 store content).
This doesn't even begin to go into the regional aspects and either showing up the original declarations as... weak... or disabling regional play offline exacerbating the small city size issues.
Well we'll see at some point and maybe I'll finally be surprised and impressed for once...
I just noticed that there is actually a free trial now.
It's fine. But that sort of review is a wild departure from previous SimCity titles. I'd recommend checking out that trial. But I'd strongly recommend you play the vastly superior SimCity 4; it's aged very well.
Yup! That was mentioned here:
"Some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on bigger cities will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance." -PB
That was the multiplayer aspect of the game, of course that was going to done on a server. But prior to the game's release fans were pleading for a single-player mode that didn't require any of that inter-region stuff, and Maxis responded by claiming that the agent-based simulation was so complex that significant portions of it had to be computed in the cloud.
>GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.
That was a bare-faced lie, as evidenced by the fact that they released a single-player mode a year later.
I stopped taking anything coming out of polygon seriously when this was posted by their review editor Arthur Gies
https://twitter.com/aegies/status/310282795564015616
>if you don't work at maxis and insist simcity could be updated to be offline, you literally don't know what you're talking about.
It looks like they had a spelling error in the original URL (which worked at the time). It's been corrected but the old URL doesn't work and they didn't update the links on the blog.
The original URL had "SimiCity" whereas it's now "SimCity"
It's not about an aversion to new things, I want Sim City to be full of new things. I like the idea of a 3D city that I can explore and even streamlining stuff like water isn't a terrible idea. But the removal of features and the apparently smaller scope and complexity of the game has me worried. A sequel should move gameplay forward and be a deeper experience than the previous iteration.
I was hoping this game would allow for cities like this but instead we get cities like this. It seems that the game is being simplified and scaled back.
if you watch the inside look for the trailer, they state that the high tech city is one player and the industrial city is another. The water pollution from the industrial city takes out the power plant, which causes sims to protest in both cities and converge on the bridge. The players then from BOTH cities come together to build the nuclear powerplant in the middle. Looks like the multiplayer is going to be DOPE
inside look: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/media/video/SimCity_Trailer_Insiders_Look
Unless someone from EA does post here, we will never know what they updated. SimCity Facebook, SimCity Twitter and Official SimCity Site don't have any updates concerning this update. There used to be a SimCity Forum section on EA website, but that has been taken down for some reason.
The only thing I can think is it was an old update that decided to update now. Even in the game window, the last update shown is back in December 2014.
There's something about SC4 that just makes the cities feel so much fuller and "proper". The 3D free-building design of C:S can end up leaving a lot of space between the square assets, and it falls a little short to me (unless you spend hours manually placing assets to liven up the terrain). Given the vast amount of content for SC4, you can build hugely varying cities and everything will fit together because of the grid. The restrictive nature of SC4 is what makes it look more appealing to me.
Meanwhile, you can have as many different assets as you want in C:S but they're all square blocks that won't fit together properly if you don't have a grid city. I think this SC13 concept art demonstrates what's lacking, everything just looks "organic" and better IMO. Ofc we're not going to go back to restrictive grids, but I think we have a ways to go before we get proper looking cities that adapt to all road types. IIRC, the guy coding /r/citybound is making procedural buildings a goal, they will align to roads much better.
Also, mod support. According to their Modding Policy:
> Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files.
So, what can do a modder with this restriction?
I would be happy only by having bigger cities.
Some more detailed technical information about the issues you encountered during development and how you solved them, the thinking behind some decisions etc. would be really interesting to me at least. Doesn't just have to be about new/planned stuff. The SimCity team were actually great at that during development: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog?page=34 Of course once the game was released they hid in nuclear bunkers and didn't dare to come out for 2 years, but that's another story.
>One particular topic that was brought up during the chat was our decision to require an online connection to play the game ...GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.
source Is the reason they gave for why there couldn't be a offline mode. Which was found by players to be bullshit, only trivial amounts of the simulation was offloaded to EA's cloud and that seemed only to be a DRM measure to keep people from being able to copy the game perfectly.
>...except Maxis sold the game as a one-to-one simulation.
I never got that impression, and this blog post from December, 2012 makes it pretty clear that not every citizen is tracked:
>GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city.
"There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer."
"We think this is the best SimCity ever and it wouldn’t be possible without the ~~technology~~ [live service] that powers our game."
It seems to me that they were trying to suggest that the game would only be possible with online only mode or the game would lose out on a significant amount of the regional simulation.
Source: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service
If you're asking whether or not they added offline mode, they did in March this year.
I haven't played since a few months after release, but at that time it had some horrendous AI issues that they kept claiming to have fixed with every patch, but never seemed to really be better. I like it, but it's definitely flawed.
That's not really true: EA has marketed SimCity as an educational tool.
"In the classroom, SimCity will be more than a game - it will be a way for the next generation of leaders to hone their skills through urban planning..."
Traffic was fixed in update 7 with regards to weighted roads and counteracts exactly what you're proposing. The prior model was widely viewed as a failure of traffic simulation... in theory, the old method we had was that the sims would always take whatever the shortest route was without regards to traffic. Since the update, they have started to take in to account the weights of the road based on congestion...
Now, I know what you're trying to do with what you've described, but I personally believe a mod like that would potentially affect more than you're bargaining for.
Also the speeds of the roads are already tuned as well, but for more info check out:
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-traffic-tuning
When I said this:
>So they'd have to make serious changes to the engine.
I meant that they'd pretty much have to remake the engine from the ground up. Because it's fundamentally flawed. Although they didn't say this directly, it can be inferred from this blog post:
>We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space.
>After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities
And the kicker:
>We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine.
It would seem that the underlying issue is that engine can't scale. So, I think it's safe to assume a redesign would be needed.
This is my reply to the part that you edited in to your post > "It is 100% absoutely impossible for SC13 to be played offline, we would have to reprogram the entire game from scratch to allow this" - Maxis
That is partially true. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn’t be possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”
...which is being done right now.
More info on this here: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/engineering-offline-play-for-simcity
OFFLINE mode has been CONFIRMED and will be released in update 10. Although there is no ETA yet on the update, offline is coming.
Yes it does have flaws but it is a good game if you take it as a casual game and not something too seriously. They have fixed quite a lot of issues and added some nice new features along the way. At this price I'd pick it up. It's not horrible but it's now jaw dropping amazing and Cities of Tomorrow does look pretty darn good and adds some nice new buildings that make playing better. (If you decide to use those future looking facilities.)
This screenshot is old as the hills. Likely the number of building and prop variants has increased, as has the size of the demo cities. Probably even some significant game mechanics have been changed/added since this was first posted.
EDIT: Also, unbunch your panties and take a look at this one.
>Mkareha: Will there be terraforming in the sense of a "god mode" like there was in SimCity 4?
>Creative Director Ocean Quigley: No, all of the terraforming in this SimCity is going to be at the civil engineering scale, and will be the natural consequences of laying out roads, developing zones, and plopping buildings.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/Community-Interviews-Maxis-Part-2
lmgtfy etc.
Det är sant det du säger, det hade varit cool med "megatowers (som i Simcity) http://www.simcity.com/sites/default/files/megatower_3.gif
Där man klumpar ihop både kontor, jobb, bostäder, nöje, park i en och samma skyskrapa och dem skulle kunna vara självförsörjande. Dock tror jag att befolkningstätheten måste uppnå en viss nivå för att detta ska kunna förverkligas.
inline void MyClass::subfn(...) { ... }
Every modern compiler has amazing support for inlining. STL relies on it to not be terrible. If you're having worse perf with an inline function than manual inlining, your compiler is doing something very wrong.
Your advice is half a decade out of date.
As to "do I even perf", you can look at a sample of my work here and here.
If you are really writing some crazy cache-preloading inline-assembly block, I'd encourage you, first, to look at intrinsics, and second, if they really aren't doing the trick, you should probably be writing your whole loop in assembly.
(And of course we shouldn't be arguing, 3 indents is insanely few. But for 95% of code it's good enough and if you start to get deep it's a code smell that should make you at least want to think about refactoring even if you don't actually do so)
I is gonna stick up for EA, as they have good customer support, offer refunds have given away some of their PC games for free, has sales. EA even said this about modding simcity
"Can I sell my SimCity Mods? In short, no. ----- We’d like Mods to remain free of charge." source
But also doesn't the creator have to choose to sell it
IMO, the engine is the reason cities are so small, but it's not because the engine is so advanced, it's because it's so broken and flawed.
Look at the traffic problems and other issues we have even with the 2x2km size - it would be far worse with larger maps. Maxis said ( http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/state-of-simcity ): >We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space
>After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities.
If the issue was simply "system performance", why did they spend months working on the agent routing-systems? I think the "system" in this case refers to GlassBox rather than individual players' PC's.
Even though GlassBox is clearly unsuitable for simulating large cities, I'm having a lot of fun tinkering with the game. Right now I'm trying to figure out why I have a shop complaining they can't find workers, a house complaining they can't find work, and another house complaining they can't find shops, all in the same city block...
Do you mean the Sims 3? That is a completely different game from Sim City 3000. Different games, different series. Sim City is a city building game, the Sims is a life simulator.
Edit: I really think you're talking about the Sims 3 there is no difference between the Sims 3 and Sims 3 greatest hits.
Skyways connect Megatower to Megatower. Your sims can travel between buildings without hitting the roads.
Maglevs can be built anywhere so long as you've researched the MagLev ability in the Academy.
The hourly costs for maglev and skyways are minimal - but do require some Controlnet which is produced by the Academy.
Agriculture is nonexistent in this version of SimCity and I haven't seen any plans that would indicate otherwise. There are interesting "perks" that the Megatowers can utilize
Maglev's are in.
Skyways are in.
Some shots can be found here. I'm certain Google can provide search results you're looking for.
That is indeed the case! Just because a building is futurized does not mean its OmegaCo owned :) I actually wrote up an article about how buildings futurize:
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-cities-of-tomorrow-future-transformation
> You can play offline, now, but the mods would still effect multiplayer, if you turned it back on, and are therefore not allowed.
Uh, even the official announcement says the exact opposite.
Hope so too! By the way, I noticed today that on the Origin shop site of the digital deluxe edition, they talk about high-Speed rail there:
> More Ploppables—Move your Sims in style with new transportation. Double Decker buses from London, High-Speed Rail from Germany, and police and fire services from Paris.
there's also a new blog article on simcity.com by ocean quigley that kinda goes along with this video, talking about the new engine.
So instead of looking at a trailer and speculating about what the game may be like, shall we discuss the actual features?
Multiplayer/Co-op seems to be in this time around. Could be neat.
Buildings have some sort of customization mechanic. Upgrades perhaps?
Curvy roads are in. Splendid.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/info/cities-of-tomorrow
This one had you building mega-towers where each level of the tower was it's own building essentially.
MegaTower 1
Corporate Residential Entertainment Manufacturing Waste Disposal and Recycling Power Production Foundations
MegaTower 2
Manufacturing Manufacturing Manufacturing Manufacturing Waste Disposal and Recycling Power Production Foundations
MegaTower 3
Residential Entertainment Residential Waste Disposal and Recycling Waste Disposal and Recycling Power Production Foundations
Monorails
Tower 2 ------- Tower 3 -------- Tower 1
Hey, why not use Windows 10? It's better than Windows 8.1 and do you think SimCity 4 is worth to play for a long time. Yes, I was a fan of SimCity 4, but I think it's boring now and I am going to play an sandbox game - Albion Online, which will be released in July 17, of course, I am playing Open Beta now!
SimCity Classic, which was open-sourced in 2008 and renamed as Micropolis. You can download or play it online and it's pretty faithful to the original. Internet Archive has the original if the open-source fork isn't to your tastes.
It received an offline patch in 2014, but obviously the offline mode does limit some features.
I'm actually enjoying BuildIt more TBH.
I have hundreds of hours in KF. If you have friends to play it with, it is amazing. So much fun. It will likely drop to $5 during the Christmas Sale though. But it's worth it even at full price. 10/10 in my book.
Simcity 4 is great. If you played the older Simcity games (like 2000), this is the game for you. Simcity 2013 is all right if you're new to the series, but for nostalgia purpose/comfier enviroment go for Simcity 4. (if you want to try out the new Simcity, you can do a free trial of it through Origin here: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/free-trial) I would recommend you get Cities:Skylines over Simcity 4 or 2013 though, it is the spiritual successor to the Simcity series and frankly had more love put into it than either of those games (not that Sc4 wasn't loved by its creators).
HL1 is a must-play, in my opinion. Not for its amazing gameplay by today's standards, but for the impact it's had on games and gaming history. It is still a fun game, and still presents a good challenge to players.
Jazzpunk is also a must-buy, if you enjoy laughing. You will be entertained, and you will have gotten your money's worth.
Yeah that was pretty bad. However it was masked somewhat when they introduced the ability for sims to lock on to a destination before they left a building: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-traffic-tuning
In the end the non-persistent nature of the sims didn't affect gameplay that much IMO. It's not like you spend all the time following individual citizens. The smaller city sizes and somewhat broken/chaotic simulation were bigger issues (people suddenly complaining about crime when there were 0 criminals in the city, or Sims that "miss going to school" when there's a school next door etc.).
Well, I think you'll want some modding. As you may realize, the vanilla game doesn't have one way roads. Take a look at Simtropolis, if you want to.
- Now, do realize, that except you're going to play with people you know and trust, leave the multiplayer alone. Cheats are disabled during multiplayer and people abandoning their city are extremely annoying. A better approach is to hop straight in singleplayer.
- When you start playing, pick a region (the cities are always clusters of max. 5 cities, you'll notice that in the motorway and railroad grids on your regional map) you like, pick a plot of land, and hop in.
- Extend the motorway entrance a bit with a road of your wish, make some junctions with other roads, and start zoning. Do not split residential, commercial and industrial over your regional cities. Splitting city services (such as police, healthcare etc.) is possible, but the game can't exacty work out that citizens can commute between cities, so provide a balanced amount of the entire RCI.
- When your city is up and running, making a profit, I recommend checking out the "specializations". Scan the ground for materials, build electronics, or have a small gambling town. Providing an extensive guide on all of them would be comment overkill, so I advice to just go in it yourself, or look through the manual.
- Disable auto saving if you don't want to. Some people do a disaster and try to reload their city, only to find out EA enabled auto saving by default.
- Check out the colour filters in the settings if you're looking to take a screenshot. Some of them spice the colours up so much you'll wonder why you didn't try this before. Especially if you're colourblind, check out the filters, SimCity 2013 offers 3 filters for the visually impaired.
For more information, check out the manual.
Sim City said the same thing and look how that turned out.
I also think that a statement like that is evidence of poor software development since an offline mode was listed as a feature on the kickstarter page (look at "How will single player work?" under FAQs).
>However it will be possible to have a single player game without connecting to the galaxy server.
You don't just clusterfuck a feature into an online requirement if you plan on using it offline later (at least you shouldn't do that).
Remember, SimCity had big budgeting behind it, and raving reviews of how well the "Beta" (running on Servrs designed for it, and with nowehere as much demand as post-release, and limited to two hours) was, plus the added benefit of a great predecessor (Simcity 4 is still a nice game worth buying). So no wonder the game sold well initially. But that didn't take long to implode after it quickly turned out to be a disaster.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service
http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/13413/article/simcity-reviews-paint-a-grim-picture-of-the-future-s-meaningless-game-reviews/
Paradox doesn't need to rely on such deception to sell Cities:Skylines.
I am not sure if you know simcity 4 is not the newest one. Simcity 4 was released 2003. Simcity was released in 2013. Which technical would be 5. Which was fun I never played Skylines but I want to. Also i believe simcity (5) is only on origins I believe simcity 4 is on steam. Again not sure if you knew this stuff or not. LINKS: simcity : http://www.simcity.com/ sim city 4: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/
"Creating a connected experience has always been a goal for SimCity, and this design decision has driven our development process for the game. This is easily the most ambitious game in the franchise and we’ve taken great care to make sure that every line of code embodies the spirit of the series. To do this, we knew we had to make sure we put our heart and souls into the simulation and the team created the most powerful simulation engine in its history, the GlassBox Engine. GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer."
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service
And that's just a lie.
The game literally "fudges" the population (there's a function called GetFudgedPopulation in the source code). However it has no impact on the gameplay, only on the number at the bottom of the screen. They did this because they couldn't get the cities large enough due to limitations in the GlassBox engine, but trying to market a "city builder" with a max population of about 20,000 would have been impossible. So they simply inflate the number. Just ignore that number and look at the total in the population panel instead.
I've also found that you will always have more available jobs than workers. Each building has a minimum amount of workers required to function (before you get the "Closed, needs workers" message), and then a huge number of "extra" job slots on top of that. I think they did it due to limitations in GlassBox. Since the pathing and traffic is so bad, having a perfectly balanced city would result in workers complaining about no jobs, and workplaces complaining about no workers, while the sims spend hours in traffic jams.
There's also the invisible "worker request agents", that travel along the roads looking for workers. If enough of those weren't spawned, they wouldn't reach every building. As with water and electricity, there needs to be a surplus because of the pathing issues in GlassBox. If there weren't more "worker request agents" than actual workers, those agents wouldn't reach all the workers before they time out. http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/the-workers-of-simcity
Well judging by this the specs are pretty low. A gtx 275 and 5850 are both pretty old cards. I'd suggest look at the recommended specs of other games you're wanting to play and go by that or simply get the best Graphics card that fits in your budget.
It recommends an i5 on that page but I'm positive any i3 from the last 3 years would have absolutely no trouble maxing it out.
>It's not DRM, it's that the calculations for the game are done through their servers.
Where have I heard that before? I don't care what excuse they have for this, an AI should not be bound to a server. It does nothing but hurt the experience.
Skye Storme had a major problem when making one of his cities: the commercial kept abandoning because of a lack of shoppers of the appropriate wealth.
I thought commercial buildings cared about: *profit, which they get from *selling goods to shoppers, which they obtain through *requesting industrial freight orders to them; otherwise, *they can use tourists as supplemental income, or else *no ways of generating happiness, which results in *abandonment.
EDIT: The Update 6 article
Noob question.
How do you guys get the ramps/feeder roads attached to raised highways/overpasses? If that's what I'm seeing? Again, NOOB!, but I've figured out how to make a raised road (n/m keys) and connect it to other FLAT roads, but I can't then cause another road to be connected to any of the raised part, ramp-style. Does this require a mod?
Take pity on me. I've also searched for tutorials, but for example, my results here. At first glance it looks like a lot of relevant hits, but in reality a lot of them have to do with other building aspects or do not refer to SimCity 2013. This is the closest and still doesn't show how to get a raised road with a RAISED connecting road/ramp:
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-raise-and-lower-road-tool
Thanks in advance.
I just saw that. Didn't we even prove on here that this actually did not require anything. Why the hell are they doing this "read about the engineering work that enables Offline play."??
I really wouldn't be promoting the fact that mods are coming to SimCity.
Apparently the rights for modders is going to be extremely strict and very archaic. I would honestly be surprised if anyone with any real talent in modding even does anything for them. Rules are here
Just to make it clear what I mean; here's the words from the scumbag company's rules page:
"Distribution of your Mod in any form constitutes a grant by you to EA of an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free, sub-licensable right to use, copy, modify and distribute that Mod (and derivatives of that Mod), and use your name if we choose to, for any purpose and through any means, and without obligation to pay you anything, obtain your approval, or give you credit. You also agree to promptly execute assignments confirming this license upon request from EA."
I know that you feel passionately about this issue, but understand that the full quote from Lucy was that offline mode was not possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”. We've just posted a new blog that explains what went on a little more. Check that out here!
Thanks for being excited, and you're right... this is a whole new era for the game!
> i don't know if they claimed they were computing EVERYTHING on their side, but it seemed pretty clear that they were mainly using their servers for intra-city trading (and for saving the cities).
You could, fuck I dunno, look it up?
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service
> To do this, we knew we had to make sure we put our heart and souls into the simulation and the team created the most powerful simulation engine in its history, the GlassBox Engine. GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.
The implication is that "the cloud" was used for processing ("computing") as opposed to inter-client communication. If the only thing going on was inter-client communications all they'd need to do is release a dedicated server and/or matchmaking and peer to peer networking. Instead, they claimed "the cloud" was doing "a massive amount of computing".
> Maybe they lied,
Yes. Yes they did. EA is a bunch of big fat liars. Which is the point, really.
I sincerely hope they reconsider. This is my only real gripe with this game. I didn't even mind the always on DRM per se but I always ran into not having enough space for everything. What are your thoughts?
Note "each city" in that comment. Given a player is only in one city at a time why are they talking about tracking sims across all the cities in the region? The follow on gives you the answer
>Trades between cities, simulation effects that cause change across the region like pollution or crime, as well as depletion of resources, are all processed on the servers and then data is sent back to your city on your PC. Every city in the region is updated every three minutes, which keeps the overall region in sync
The only parts they talk about the server actually tracking is stuff you'd expect to be server side. If they are only keeping the region in sync every 3 minutes you really think they are handling parts of your cities live simulation? Really?
I suggest you read the full blog here http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service which actually comes across as less disingenuous than the PC game piece, still silly but more clear that the game is online because they want it to be not because for an individual city maxis is going to be doing some of that simulation "in the cloud".
This seems very unlikely. Given the recent always-on explanation that was given, it seems that the engine itself (GlassBox) requires an internet connection in order to run the simulation for the game. At best bet, you'll probably end up with something like the server emulator for Diablo 3 that has gotten hardly anywhere.
This seems half done to me, all the 'i's are capitalised, and the disclaimer says limited edition only, when this pack is also in the digital deluxe. Still, seems a good indicator of the intended price for future DLC?
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/buy/simcity
As someone from the UK, I have no idea what they're intending outside the US. The UK version has the same promotion and image, but no reference to 'value'.
Okay, I found this. LINK
So it was out of E3 that the awards came about. I see. But how far along is the game? Is it near completion? Were the awards based on the finished product?
Since I see that it's due to release in 2013, why is it receiving awards in 2012? It's just annoying seeing that something is apparently award worthy when all we (The general public) see is the limited trailers only showing the best aspects.
I am also, easily confused too. Thanks for your input.
part two of the article about great works is up, this one discusses the international airport.
I've been googling, but can't seem to find a working link. On the Sim City website they just have this, and the blogs I found about it contain dead links.