46 replies to this topic

[Admiral FCS]

http://www.gamesrada...confirmed-2013/

Personally, I played 5 mins of Society and then quit. EA better get her right this time, but from the looks of it, plotting structure = no thank you.

Edited by TheDR, 07 March 2012 - 14:52.
Found a Youtube link to the trailer :)

[Sgt. Rho]

The new Sim City will be made by Maxis I think/hope. Society wasn't made by Maxis.

EDIT: Was that the Hydrogen powerplant from SC4 in HD? =D

Seems like the MP will actually be nice. As long as the game doesn't become yet another DLC fest, I'll probably get it.

Edited by Sgt. Rho, 07 March 2012 - 15:07.

[TheDR]

I've been looking at info surfacing from this and that trailer has me pumped! One of my favorite things about Sim City 4 was the music and that trailer had awesome music

Sim City 4's music, for people who have forgotten it!

[Ion Cannon!]

I recognise a fair amount of the SC4 content in that trailer, but its just a visualisation.

I remain cautiously optimistic for now, the news I have heard so far seems good.

I also learned that modding will be supported - which gives me hope this won't be to bastardised by EA.

This may be the real test for my Origin boycott.

[Slye_Fox]

Ion Cannon!, on 07 March 2012 - 23:44, said:

This may be the real test for my Origin boycott.

Wait, are you saying it's not coming to Steam?

[Sgt. Rho]

No EA game that's for Origin is coming on Steam, I think. It started with Crysis 2. Was taken off Steam a few days after release.

[Alias]

And there's some of us who'd rather it wouldn't be on either platform. The main redeeming feature of Steam is it's cheap. In most other areas it has as many flaws as Origin, minus the major issues with Origin privacy problems etc.

I'm hopeful (with reservations) for this, if they do the plotting system well it could end up pretty decent. I'm hoping it requires as much management as Simcity 4. The neighbour mechanism sounds nice but it's a slippery slope to requiring 'always online', although if it's on Origin I guess you're stuck with it anyway.

Also Doc, got to agree with the music. Simcity 4 has some of the best music ever in a game - along with Rise of Nations (and the original Red Alert ).

[TheDR]

Quote

SimCity: Inside the GlassBox engine

Tyler Wilde at 01:35am March 8 2012



At EA’s Game Changers event yesterday, Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw confirmed that SimCity is back, and showed off a very pretty, but very gameplay-less, trailer. Today at GDC, however, Maxis went into detail when it unveiled the game’s engine, GlassBox, which I also got a look at during a recent visit to the studio. Wow. Spore was certainly ambitious, and The Sims has reached incredible commercial success, but GlassBox may turn out to be Maxis’ most impressive achievement yet.

The previous SimCity games rely on relatively high-level statistics to tell us what’s going on–the pollution number goes up, so the happiness number goes down. GlassBox does the opposite. It simulates the little things–thousands of individual Sims–and lets the city mechanics emerge naturally. You won’t have to look at a spreadsheet or graph to identify a crisis, because you can watch it all happen in real-time. Pollution will taint the soil and thicken the atmosphere with smog, Sims will get sick and fill the hospitals, businesses will lose employees, and everyone will be really ticked off about the whole thing.

Fire stations no longer provide statistical coverage–a fire truck must drive from the station to the scene of a fire, and the longer it takes, the longer the building burns. Every car and every pedestrian (which are referred to as “agents”) is someone going somewhere to do something, and every traffic jam is the natural result of the patterns they create as they navigate your roads.

Creative Director Ocean Quigley demonstrated how agents operate by artificially populating a closed loop of road with vehicles and pedestrians.
“We’ve created all these people in here, and there’s no jobs for them, no houses for them, and no place to shop. They’re basically all miserable and would love to get out of here as fast as possible,” said Quigley, as hundreds of his sadsack residents drove and trudged in an endless circle.

“So let’s connect their little maze to the outside world, and these people are going to abandon the city as fast as they can. So, all the little agents, they have an agenda, a mood, something they want to do. They hate it here, they want to get out, and so that’s what they’re doing.”

Now consider that Maxis is striving to simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time, and that resources such as power, water, coal, and oil are also treated as individual units, as well as every house, business, and factory, and you can start to get an idea of the incredible number of emergent possibilities GlassBox introduces.

Read more here.

Intresting, I really like the idea of traffic actually being traffic (rather than cars disappearing at the end of roads) and the fire fighting system sounds great. I love the idea of stealing your friends sims from their city by actually seeing them drive into town, lets hope the engine goes as detailed as that.

Also, the game is build to be modded. Which is great news.

[Alias]

Indeed - sounds better with every latest bit of news. Lets just hope EA abandons Origin cancer by 2013.

[Ion Cannon!]

Hmm, while that sounds good I also hope they do keep the graphs, overlays ect. I like to know numbers.

[Admiral FCS]

Very impressive and realistic... but that would put quite a bit of strain on low-end PC's, methinks...

[Sgt. Rho]

Even a mid-range PC isn't that expensive anymore tbh.

[TheDR]

A couple of videos showing off the game engine in it's alpha stages. Looks quite interesting and the fire looks really cool.

http://www.hardwarec...-not-final-1of4

http://www.hardwarec...-not-final-2of4

http://www.hardwarec...-not-final-3of4

http://www.hardwarec...-not-final-4of4

[Alias]

Simcity 4 was notoriously hard on hardware as well, so it's not entirely out of the ordinary for Maxis.

Thanks Doc, I saw some zoning in there (so no, it's not all entirely just plots). From the outset this is definitely looking and feeling great.

Edited by Alias, 09 March 2012 - 15:04.

[Ion Cannon!]

95% of the news I've heard is good so far, theres also been a maxis "ask me almost anything" Q&A for the public : See here for more info - http://www.simtropol...transcript-r232

The only worrying thing that came out of that is the size of the largest city tile, which is currently intended to be 2x2km, in SC4 its 4x4. This may limit somewhat what can be created, that said it's early in development so that could change.

By the looks of things it may well be possible for alot of SC4 custom content to be ported straight into SC5. The agents/units/finite resources is fine, but I think they should also implement a sandbox mode so certain players can build without limitations.

[Slye_Fox]

Wow, EA are such money grubbing arseholes.
There's only 2 versions avalable; and the cheepest is £45, with the deluxe being £65.

[CJ]

~ V ~, on 10 March 2012 - 05:21, said:

Wow, EA are such money grubbing arseholes.
There's only 2 versions avalable; and the cheepest is £45, with the deluxe being £65.

Errrrr? All games cost 60€ on their release nowadays, where do you come from? The 80's?

[Slye_Fox]

CJ, on 10 March 2012 - 20:37, said:

Errrrr? All games cost 60€ on their release nowadays, where do you come from? The 80's?

Allmost every new game I see is £30-£35 (~€35-€41), alittle more if it's a special edition.

And the 80's?
WTF are you talking about?

[CJ]

And these aren't even that new.

[Ion Cannon!]

The euro to £ conversion, or indeed euro to $ conversion screws over the euro badly. New PC games are from £27-£35 in the UK. Amazon usually stocks new games at £27 after they've been released for a few days.

[Alias]

To be fair though, even if it is expensive at least you're actually getting something for your money. This is a whole new game, built on a whole new engine with eventually entirely new assets. It's not like they're Activision asking you to pay $100 for every new reskin of the same game.

[Slye_Fox]

Alias, on 11 March 2012 - 14:54, said:

To be fair though, even if it is expensive at least you're actually getting something for your money. This is a whole new game, built on a whole new engine with eventually entirely new assets. It's not like they're Activision asking you to pay $100 for every new reskin of the same game.

True.
But still not getting it if it dosn't go steam (or if it has manditary origen install on the cd).

[Ion Cannon!]

If it has the lasting appeal of SC4 - IE - modding, I really don't mind paying extra for it, origin is a turn off though, but maybe by then it will have improved considerably.

[CJ]

Sooo, I just got a key for the closed beta, activated it on Origin, and it turns out the download is only 193MB... Because it uses a fucking MMO-style launcher-updater thingy.
What's the point in making me download the launcher on Origin? D:

And apparently, you're just stuck in the same city during the beta, dunno if you'll be able to create many in the finished game but right now it doesn't look like it. Forget about modding too.

[Slightly Wonky Robob]

Looks like I've go into the beta as well. Downloading now.