Preloading the mac version. Gonna jump in tomorrow and see how the game has improved since I stopped playing it 2 weeks after launch.
How big is the download? Preloading never occurred to me.
Gonna jump in after work tonight. I would love to hear impressions from those that are already playing.
Seems like nobody is playing :/
they release bigger cities yet? I remember the stuff with the survey EA had, did anything come out of that? I liked the game, especially playing together with a friend and laughing at the ridiculous stuff we dealt with as we built up our cities, but everything felt so damn cramped we both just dropped it.
What does the future hold, Mayors? Come back in two days to find out! #SimCity pic.twitter.com/xgMCkiB8vM
"Nobody specified if they wanted cities bigger in height or width."That's what people kept demanding right? Taller cities.
"Nobody specified if they wanted cities bigger in height or width."
I can only imagine what those behemoth buildings will do to traffic......oh god.
I wouldn't worry, they'll probably just fake the population boost.
Bigger Cities
City sizes have been a constant point of conversation among our players since we released the game. The games original design focused on the density of an intimate urban environment. It was about intercity connectivity and the challenge of managing a region of cities instead of one metropolis in isolation. However, we recognize that many players have expressed the desire to build up one big city rather than manage the interrelationship of multiple smaller cities.
Weve 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 wouldnt be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. Weve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldnt achieve it within the confines of the engine. Weve chosen to cease work on bigger city sizes and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore an offline mode. Some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on bigger cities will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance.
EAI would love to be a fly on the wall at Maxis HQ and learn what really went wrong with this game.
How crazy, that engine must really be awful.
How crazy, that engine must really be awful. At least from what I can see, Tropico 4 can handle a lot more than SimCity 2013. It tracks 1000+ agents, each with assigned jobs and homes, as well as their individual attribute-based needs and pathfinding. It also handles hundreds of buildings that intake and produce goods based on a high number of variables. SimCity fakes most of this stuff, and has to do it on a much smaller scale.
I would love to be a fly on the wall at Maxis HQ and learn what really went wrong with this game.
1000+ is not much. SimCity tracks more than 15k.
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@Mengy
Engine is multithreaded, it loaded all my 4 cores on i5 2500k. And they cant port it to mobile.
Inflating population and simple traffic AI was because they were targeting low spec machines too [low power dual cores].
The main sim + game loop is on a single thread, so extra cores don't help. We do make use of extra CPU for audio/rendering
A Securities and Exchange Commission filing reveals new detail about EA's corporate shakeup. In a report last week, we told you that newly appointed CEO Andrew Wilson had shaken up the roles of top EA leadership. In a memo that was leaked following that, we learned that Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw will now be reporting directly to Wilson. Today we know that the relationship change comes with a new title, as Lucy Bradshaw is now a senior vice president.
Per Dan Moskowitz, of Maxis:
https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/296355832998801408
This is the single reason why we can't have larger cities, confirmed many times by Maxis themselves.
And somehow the Maxis general manager just got promoted to senior vice president.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...-promoted-to-senior-vice-president-at-ea.aspx
I doubt that they havent rewritten that already when they were experimenting with bigger cities. It would be total tech development disaster if they havent.
I blame EA for shitty microtransactions. I blame the devs for a shitty game.
The devs get their fairshare for this glass box limitations, but I honestly think EA made them put it out the door before the next quarter.
That suggests the game can be fixed. The devs are specifically saying now that they tried to fix it (regarding city sizes) and it can't be done. Another quarter baking in the oven wouldn't have changed that.
And calling it a shitty game maybe isn't fair. It's not a terrible game. It's just not the game that many of us wanted. And it sure doesn't seem like 10 years of improvement over the last game.
OmegaCo is your very own futuristic mega-corporation. Your goal is to take the technological wonder that is Omega and make tons of Simoleons off of it by building OmegaCo factories in key strategic locations across your city. Each factory comes with a production facility that will produce and deliver Omega to nearby industrial buildings. At first, Omega is distributed for free, but after a certain amount of deliveries, those industries become Omegized into OmegaCo-owned franchises. At that point, theyll start paying you on the hour while producing quality Omega-infused goods! Sure, Omega pollutes, smells funny and puts odd, magenta-colored smoke vapors into the air, but your industrial businesses will learn to live with it.
There wasn't any improvement over the last game though and that is what makes it a terrible game. SimCity 4 is better than SimCity 2013.
Translation...I think now it's clear...
put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore an offline mode.
Yeah those hour long betas were nothing but advertising to drive the hype up. And it's exactly why you said, play the game for more than an hour and you see the limitations of the whole thing.Then I got into the hour long beta, and I realized that things were very off (why would they limit us to only an hour?), but I still had hope. Then, after launch, I realized why they limited us to that hour: because it was so insanely easy to run out of space in their tiny little cities that if they allowed testers to play for more than that hour then the shortcomings would become so obviously apparent.
I reluctantly agree. I want my SimCity to, you know, simulate a city. 'n stuff.That...looks quite horrible honestly. Did anyone really want tech trees and future cities and trading markets? How about just adding subways? Or highways? Or terraforming? Or farms???
I feel like starting work on my own indie city building game just to fill the huge void Maxis has created here. What a horrible direction for the franchise.