Demo version released ~ For all those that can't wait

[morriswalters 16]

It is very easy to plan for future expansion and to have medians.  How ever this game does not think for you, it requires you to plan for roads.  That should be apparent from the demo.  For instance a quick measuring tool for expressway is a small house which is  40 meters square the same as the expressways width.  In the demo look at the tools you have available.  Look at everything.  Everything in the game has dimensions. Roads have snaps look at how they charge for larger roads,  Want to transfer a dimension from one side of the map to the other.  Then understand the right angle road tool.  It's available in the demo.  Understand the difference between the straight road tool and the right angle tool. The right angle tool for roads is always perpindicular the map edge, parallel to the map edge, or 45 degrees to the map edge.  The straight road tool is blue  when the road is straight with respect to itself and turns green when its not quite straight.  Play with everything.

Enough fun.  Think for yourself , I do.

This is my very humble opinion and not to be confused with truth or the  facts.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Sorry, I forgot to add that CitiesXL is node-based like City Life. Oh, and I think the reason they changed the name from Cities Unlimited is because they decided to add an MMO (and maybe also the 10kmx10km, which is 10x10 small city tiles, 5x5 medium city tiles, or 2 large city tiles plus 1 medium city tile squared) to make up for removed/not implemented content.

[USA_Pride 49]

Originally posted by: morriswalters

It is very easy to plan for future expansion and to have medians.  How ever this game does not think for you, it requires you to plan for roads.  That should be apparent from the demo.  For instance a quick measuring tool for expressway is a small house which is  40 meters square the same as the expressways width.  In the demo look at the tools you have available.  Look at everything.  Everything in the game has dimensions. Roads have snaps look at how they charge for larger roads,  Want to transfer a dimension from one side of the map to the other.  Then understand the right angle road tool.  It's available in the demo.  Understand the difference between the straight road tool and the right angle tool. The right angle tool for roads is always perpindicular the map edge, parallel to the map edge, or 45 degrees to the map edge.  The straight road tool is blue  when the road is straight with respect to itself and turns green when its not quite straight.  Play with everything.

Enough fun.  Think for yourself , I do.

This is my very humble opinion and not to be confused with truth or the  facts.quote>

Yes, I understand all that, but if you want to organically develop a city you don't leave one side of the road undeveloped.  Now, SC4 doesn't get it 100% right, but CXL gets it worse.  I love the curving roads, but because you can't do an in-place upgrade it means that all building on the curvy road have to be destroyed to upgrade it (because it's near impossible to reconstruct the road with its original building there).

The whole point of this game is to simulate a city.  For many of us, we like it to be as organic as possible.  I'm not saying that SC4 gets it perfectly, but SC4 is actually a lot more true to reality.

For another example, SC4 allows you to zone a lower density zone to a high density without demolishing the building, allowing it to naturally grow.  CXL doesn't allow this, you have to demolish every single zone.

SC4 is more true to reality, for example, Royal Oak, Michigan is a small bedroom community north of Detroit.  Over the past 10 years their government has decided to create a downtown area.  They have changed zoning ordinances and we now see about 3-4 mid-rise building pop up each year.  Right now some of them look a little out of place, but in some areas all the buildings are tall (especially on main street).  

In this regard SC4 is more true to life.

I did not expect CXL to be SimCity 5, but there seem to be more negatives then positives when you compare it to SC4.

CXL comparison to SC4:

The good:

- Curving roads

- More freedom to move the camera around

The bad:

- Can't easily upgrade roads

- All zones are the same size

- MC wants to block custom content and modding

- Pricing, the game will cost over $100 for the first year

- Your cities aren't yours, they're stored on a server and held hostage to monthly payments

- There's no pause button

- There's no save button

- There's no way to close the chat box, nor is there a good place to put it where it won't get in the way, I constantly have to move it

- The user interface is not very good at all (that's something SC4 got right from the start).

Yes, I know that a lot of this will be fixed with time.  However, the game in it's current state won't get me to open my wallet and credit card to monthly charges.  If I can't get a fully featured single player game I won't buy it either.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

You are talking about the Planet Offer. It is different in Solo Mode. The demo is exclusively online. Oh, and my cities are definitely stored locally because I cannot play the same city from different locations. It shows that my city is there and the trading token system but the city itself is not there. If you synchronize, you will loose all your trade agreements because you have no tokens to trade and are loosing money fast without any income. In the demo, you can RESIZE the darn chat box btw. The people at MC have confirmed that there will be pause/play buttons in Solo Mode as well as fast forward.

Therefore, the game you want is exclusively Solo Mode, which is far cheaper (another plus for you). You will get buses after release and there is a great possibility that rail and ports will be available for solo mode. I am pretty sure that you trade with the AI in Solo Mode (hopefully it is better than OmniCorp).

[morriswalters 16]

Originally posted by: Tropod

...You don't see a house suddenly turn into a skyscraper, especially from a smaller lot....quote>

You don't see a vacant block of land suddenly turn into a house from nothing. No, it gets constructed, same with a skyscraper. But the backend stuff, like zoning, does take place such that it allows skyscrapers to be built where houses are currently situated. The Gold Coast is one such example. The zoning and building are 2 different aspects.

Personally, I say it is an issue. Because many players out there will find this aspect very frustrating to deal with, especially given that there is no density filter.

quote>

There are three different types of zoning being talked about here;

1  Real zoning.  In the real world zoning is a city planning tool consisting of codes and regulations about what can be built where and how.  It's purpose is to make cities safer and more comfortable to live in.  Developers determine what types of homes will be built and how expensive they will be with a goal of maximizing their return on investment.  Services such as schools, police, fire services, libraries, and almost any other function available in cities follow populations they never lead them.  Again wealth levels are determined by  the developer. Zoning is not building.

2 SC4 zoning.  In SC4 zoning is a density filter(I like that phrase) with an autobuild function.  The wealth of developement is determined by ammenities(I miss spell check).

3 CXL zoning.  In CXL zoning is by density and wealth.  No autobuild.

I like SC4's way of doing things more so then CXL's.  It has nothing to do with how real the zoning simulation is because CXL is more realistic.  However SC4 is more alive.  I love to watch things happen on the map, prompting changes by placing things on the map like churches and what have you.  And in the end we play games to have fun.

Now with that having been said. let us talk about CXL strengths and weaknesses.  Which are two sides of the same coin.  I'll start with a question about SC4.  Where could you go with it.  How would you improve it and add value enough to put out a new version which would fire up players and get them to cough up 50 dollars(or whatever).  The sim is already pretty complex.  You could add sewers but I don't see this getting peoples juices flowing.  Better graphics, maybe fully 3D.  Well....., maybe.  I'm not sure that I can see a path, but perhaps others can.  But this is a tough crowd we're talking about so be careful not to step on someones favorite feature.

Well we know what Monte Cristo came to believe.  We have it before us in the demo.  A fully realized 3D city builder with the Planet Offer.  The game is beautiful, it offers pretty vistas and allows us to walk or fly through our cities.  But wait this beautiful detail comes at a price.  Bring a good video card to the table, wimps need not apply.  And in my opinion here lies the core of the problem.  Monte Cristo posted a video about the continuous level of detail and to follow what I'm going to say you should understand what that means..  Every thing in the game must scale, It must fit in.  Everything has volume, height.  It has to look good when you stand on the ground and look at things.  Everything in the game is a 3D construct.

Our first ugly truth.  Avatars and city folk.  Like them or hate them they are a product of a truely 3D enviroment.  Each one is a 3D construct, a model.  You can't make them real enough to look good with the buildings so Monte Cristo decided to use cartoon characters.  It's not an elegant solution but I don't know that it can be done better. 

Rectangular lots.  What I'm going to say here may be right or it may be wildly wrong, I encourage people with more expertise in the field of 3D game geometry to correct me.  The lots appear to act like a rectangular solid that has been sculpted.  When it penetrates the surface texture it is always a rectangle. This appears to be true even of the roads.  So there appears to be a limitation on non rectangular plots.  I suspect that the limitation involves the increased complexity and number of polygons required to simulate a curve on the lot, not the map.  Roads are a special case as their consruction is much  simpler than the average residential lot.  In any case the utility of that kind of lot would be limited since what people want are lots that would fit almost any curve or angle and that would mean reconfiguring a lot on that fly, a daunting task if I say so myself.

Enough fun.  Think for yourself , I do.

This is my very humble opinion and not to be confused with truth or the  facts.

[USA_Pride 49]

Originally posted by: Ilikeseattle

I do not see the problem. You can make 1 ways and bridges can you not?quote>

There is a huge problem.  Organically you would want to go from a single lane road typically to a multi-lane road.  Very rarely is the solution to make the road one-way in real life.

This game is terrible at road expansion.  When I want to expand a road I have had to bulldoze everything, the road and the businesses.  This is because it's impossible to rebuild the road.

Planning can't help this, because naturally a road is going to have a lot of stuff on it, otherwise it typically doesn't need to be upgraded (with a few exceptions).

So unless you plan to build your city in a very unnatural way, you're going to have to do A LOT of bulldozing just to go from a single lane road to a larger road or avenue.  The game is brutal and tedious in this aspect.

SC4 wasn't perfect, but it's much better than CXL when it comes to roads with the exception that CXL has roads with curves.

[morriswalters 16]

Perhaps I missed something while I was playing SC4.  Would somebody tell me how to use these great upgradeable roads everybody talks about. The only roads I know about are either 1 tile roads or 2 tile roads.  And you can't upgrade 1 tile roads to 2 tile roads without leaving room or demolishing something.  A street upgraded to a road by making the sidewalks narrower.  They were still 1 tile roads.  Same thing for avenues.

This is the price of having  a 3D game that you can walk around in.  I will also tell you that it is possible to build over roads without demolishing them and then going back to delete the old road.  If there is room.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

You can draw a road over a street and a one-way over a road. Because SimCity 4 used zones, the buildings along one side of a road upgraded to an avenue will be demolished but buildings with smaller footprints would replace them. City Life was different. All of its roads were the same width. There was a small street with a huge sidewalk (gave a small environmental boost) with the lowest capacity, a one-lane each direction wooded (trees down the middle) avenue with a slightly higher capacity and a faster speed limit, a 2 lane highway with twice the capacity of the street and a 3 lane highway with 3 times the capacity of the street. I would love to see the return of the wide-sidewalked residential street and the small wooded avenue (if they look exactly like the nuetral zoned City Life versions, complete with newspapers, dumpsters, phone booths and beautiful/elegant globe streetlights.

[Omniassiah 3]

Originally posted by: morriswalters

]

There are three different types of zoning being talked about here;

1  Real zoning.  In the real world zoning is a city planning tool consisting of codes and regulations about what can be built where and how.  It's purpose is to make cities safer and more comfortable to live in.  Developers determine what types of homes will be built and how expensive they will be with a goal of maximizing their return on investment.  Services such as schools, police, fire services, libraries, and almost any other function available in cities follow populations they never lead them.  Again wealth levels are determined by  the developer. Zoning is not building.

quote>

I don't think you got how zoning works in real life compared to costs, etc...

Yes, the developer determines what homes will be built... But its the enviroment/area that he is building them in that will determine what buildings he is going to build and as such how much they will end up costing. The Neighborhood will lead the developer decisions if he wants to make any money.

End result is that its far more like SC4 then CXL. Cities are organic beings with Developers improving on areas or letting them fall to the wayside. Often the Mayor and City council just try and do thier best with what zoning tools they have. And if they even remotely tried the restrictive zoning capabilities in most places developers would just go elsewhere.

[Adnoxaei 0]

This issues in this thread have been brought up with MC. Rezoning, street widths, upgrades, one ways, odd zoning, etc are low on the list of things to do, but they are still listening.

[zwr100 2]

Originally posted by: ASheroo

Nope.

I'm fine with it. They don't do that in real life. You don't see a house suddenly turn into a skyscraper, especially from a smaller lot. As for roads, yeah in life, they do just add on to it, which takes away the sizes of the lots on the sides, though computer coding restricts that for MC's engine. But roads they do not have any lot beside them, yeah, you should have the option to add more onto it (maybe the Multiple Lanes feature might allow that once it's released).quote>

Actually, I think they do...

In real life an area with houses can be zoned for higher density housing.  The zoning comittee or whatever doesn't bulldoze existing buildings to change the zoning.  Obviously someone has to bulldoze it at some time if they want to build bigger, but changing the zoning doesn't mean erasing the current buildings.  In fact, areas can be rezoned among R, C, and I in addition to density in real life too.

From the game-play perspective, I do like the fact that you have to be intelligent when you zone, or face excessize bulldozing and stunted growth.  The fact that you have roads at the edge of your map to get started anyway seems like a logical and ideal place for the lower density zones.

[Anderson Xeyed 23]

About this game only the graphics looked real great and I loved that. It was also great the ability to zoom in or out, to the point where you could walk around.

Unfortunatelly only the tutorial part of the Demo worked for me, so after sometime, I didn't even wait for that given seven days trying or the 20000 inhabitants to try, I uninstalled it at the second trying day and deleted the demo file. So for now I gave up buying the game after a totally disapointed Demo Game, for if the demo is just a partial part of the game I won't buy it for now.

[beebs 129]

Originally posted by: USA_Pride

Yes, I understand all that, but if you want to organically develop a city you don't leave one side of the road undeveloped.  Now, SC4 doesn't get it 100% right, but CXL gets it worse.  I love the curving roads, but because you can't do an in-place upgrade it means that all building on the curvy road have to be destroyed to upgrade it (because it's near impossible to reconstruct the road with its original building there).

quote>

Actually, yes they do (in Real Life). I see it all the time, and I actually do it myself in my SC4 cities. If you look here, you can see a bunch of green space beside "Rabbit Hill Road". That's left for future expansion of the road.

I do agree with the rebuilding of curvy roads though. However, if you build the intersecting roads first and build your curved road from intersection to intersection, it should be a lot easier to get it right.

Originally posted by: USA_PrideThere is a huge problem.  Organically you would want to go from a single lane road typically to a multi-lane road.  Very rarely is the solution to make the road one-way in real life.

This game is terrible at road expansion.  When I want to expand a road I have had to bulldoze everything, the road and the businesses.  This is because it's impossible to rebuild the road.

Planning can't help this, because naturally a road is going to have a lot of stuff on it, otherwise it typically doesn't need to be upgraded (with a few exceptions).

So unless you plan to build your city in a very unnatural way, you're going to have to do A LOT of bulldozing just to go from a single lane road to a larger road or avenue.  The game is brutal and tedious in this aspect.

SC4 wasn't perfect, but it's much better than CXL when it comes to roads with the exception that CXL has roads with curves.

quote>

Well.. it's pretty close to real life. In suburbs, corridors are generally planned to allow for future expansion (as I showed above). Unless you have that space set aside, it's pretty much impossible to expand any road without destroying something. It'll just take a bit of forethought as to where you're going to have your sims commuting from/to in your cities. Kind of like a real city planner.

[deanej 2]

Originally posted by: DCMetro34

Well, from the first post, I see more negatives than positives. This is not a great sign, but we'll see.

About the demo, let's wait for the real game. Some of this is nothing a few mods and smackaroos can't fix, right?quote>

I do hope you realize that MC has stated that we won't be able to mod the game.  The most we will be able to do is give them models with suggestions on what they should do.  To have real mods we would have to illegally reverse engineer the game.

Fortuntely, I also believe the MC has stated that is the Planet Offer fails that they would convert the game to single player with mods allowed (the reason they don't allow mods is because they are too lazy to figure out how to suport them beyond having us overwrite origional files).

EDIT: Has anyone noticed that the camera controls are different when viewing a city?  I can zoom in and out as well as rotate the camera, but can't move forward/back or left/right at all.

[Asheroo 53]

Originally posted by: deanej

Originally posted by: DCMetro34

Well, from the first post, I see more negatives than positives. This is not a great sign, but we'll see.

About the demo, let's wait for the real game. Some of this is nothing a few mods and smackaroos can't fix, right?quote>

I do hope you realize that MC has stated that we won't be able to mod the game.  The most we will be able to do is give them models with suggestions on what they should do.  To have real mods we would have to illegally reverse engineer the game.quote>

They never have stated that. If so, where?

MC have stated that they fully support custom content. They support it all unless it's a cheat for the PO. If it's a mod that fixes things up or changes things or so, they will support it.

But, it is not sure of whether they will allow single player only mods or not. But, there will be such things, and it probably won't be stopped. So, it definitely will happen regardless.

MC are working on ways to stop cheating in the PO only.

[RandyDaytona 0]

I can't even get the demo to work......*sigh*

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

 

[Former User 1875 1]

I just saw some videos and images, and I think I'm really going to buy this.

It looks just so realistic.

Downin' the demo now.

[deanej 2]

Originally posted by: ASheroo

Originally posted by: deanej

Originally posted by: DCMetro34

Well, from the first post, I see more negatives than positives. This is not a great sign, but we'll see.

About the demo, let's wait for the real game. Some of this is nothing a few mods and smackaroos can't fix, right?quote>

I do hope you realize that MC has stated that we won't be able to mod the game.  The most we will be able to do is give them models with suggestions on what they should do.  To have real mods we would have to illegally reverse engineer the game.quote>

They never have stated that. If so, where?

MC have stated that they fully support custom content. They support it all unless it's a cheat for the PO. If it's a mod that fixes things up or changes things or so, they will support it.

But, it is not sure of whether they will allow single player only mods or not. But, there will be such things, and it probably won't be stopped. So, it definitely will happen regardless.

MC are working on ways to stop cheating in the PO only.

quote>

Numerous times on the (now gone) official forums they have said that all custom content would have to go through them.  In one thread here they stated that custom content would be us giving them building models and they would do the rest (such as giving them stats, though we can suggest them).  Of course, they don't actually say that there will be no modding, but let's be realistic: their "custom content" is just the outsourcing of model development.

[mogmoogle 0]

 I tried out the game, I like the game, but in just the demo I found quite a few annoying things that keep me from pre-ordering the game,

1.) The game crashes every time i build a farm

2.) I cannot get any customer support what so-ever

3.) The game is not multi-core optimized, and I hate running something all on one core

4.) I have seen people talking about how you don't get full functionality out of the game single player

5.) The demo has a memory leak, so when I play the game it gets super laggy, then i restart the game again

     and it runs fine for an hour or so then again.

6.) I cannot find any details of what the full game has to offer aside from 25 maps single player 50 maps world mode.

[rtil 1]

1) I never experienced that.

2) why are you expecting customer support in a demo?

3) agreed

4) no mass-transit for offline players

5) hopefully fixed in retail

6) online players will get new content as time goes on, as far as offline mode you're just not seeing most of what the game has to offer in the first place, since it cuts you off @ 22k pop.

[eternal_sky 0]

I'm so dissapointed that I bought all the hype being broadcasted earlier this year.

CXL was supposed to be "the next simcity", instead we get a vanilla MMO in the guise of a City builder......

Who knows, in a year or two after MC has released a few expansion paks, maybe I'll be singing a different tune.....

[rtil 1]

I'm putting my hopes on the expansions/patches/custom content to come. There's an impressive engine underneath it all, I don't think they utilized it very well though.

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

   Thread Merged.

[Lancezh 0]

this is the ONLY forum to discuss reasonable about citiesxl since the official one is gone, and for all new players like me the demo is the thing that i want to talk about and all i see is you guys merging everything in here in 1 topic. No threadlist about stuff you might want to ask or know about the demo. Not everyone has been to the beta or wwants to use the search engine for a specific topic, maybe people just want to browse and see what others have for questions or impressions.
To merge all this into one topic, seems to be a very very bad idea. Just my 2 cents, maybe at least someone feels like i do unless the community bashes me now for hearing the same stuff all the time so they want to wipe it out into one topic.
The result is, just one Topic (which is a sticky, people tend to ignore stickies btw) and by the looks a very inactivesub forum about cities xl. To follow questions, answers on all the stuff emerged in this one topic is very enerving and tedious sorry.
 

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

Originally posted by: Lancezh

What he posted.   

 quote>

We do not need a new thread started everytime someone wants to give their opinion on the demo or a very similar subject.    This is why topics with very similar subjects are merged.

 

[Lancezh 0]

I kindly disagree sir. It creates the impression that there is no community on first sight (although this is not the case). And for an MMO it's important to see wether something is going on or not. Besides, wether its a demo or not, some questions are about the game in general, although they might have risen from the demo gameplay. On the other hand who can blame you guys, i'm actually grateful you all offer the possibility to discuss about the game. That they took off the official forum leaves a very weird impression.

But i see i'm the only one mourning so, it doesnt matter anyway.

[buzzyboy 0]

Originally posted by: Adnoxaei

This issues in this thread have been brought up with MC. Rezoning, street widths, upgrades, one ways, odd zoning, etc are low on the list of things to do, but they are still listening.quote>

You might be right but after reading my friends accounts during beta you are gearing up for a big disapointment.

[Former User 1875 1]

Awww....

My graphics card sucks, need a new one.

The demo didn't even work on Very Low...

;_;

[Brady Baker 1]

I don't know if anyone else has had this problem with the demo:

I downloaded and installed before registering at Cities XL site. I got the emails and everything, unfortunately, I can't even get the demo started. I am going to re-download it overnight and check in the morning.

I did a check in the control panel and it is registering that the demo is installed, just cannot find the file to launch it, even under the Monte Cristo folder (Only thing in there is City Life World Edition)

So I have 7 days to play and cannot even open it. No new desktop icon is created, even after a re-install. This will be great if the trial period runs out before I can even start that demo