SimCity - Images and Videos

[hamsterTK 93]

I think there should be a distinction made between "cartoonish" and "stylized"

The art could colorful and exaggerated, but still represent "prototypical" things. For example, the bucket wheel excavator and operating container port in the concept video. While they were drawn in a cartoony style, they are also very authentic and true to the real thing. I would definitely accept this as an art style.

An example of the opposite aesthetic would be the nuclear power plant in Simcity 4. While on one hand it is crispy drawn and "realistic" in its proportions, it looks nothing like an actual nuclear plant. I don't want to insult the artist who made it, but this is the thing I don't really care for. I want to see a reactor building, generator hall, various bits of pipes(a nuclear plant is really just a steam engine with an atomic "boiler", its not mad science).

  Edited March 9, 2012 by hamsterTK  

[Cockatoo 2,257]

@Element: Ther would have been no need of custom content (or not so much custom content) in SC4 if ther had been a much wider variety of buildings, better texturing, better scaling, more styles... If SC5 is capable of doing what our best BATters can do, the need for custom content will decrease (but not disappear) as more needs will be satisfied.

Nope. Buildings just get boring after a while. Even if there had been twice as many buildings included with SC4, and they had all been made by someone like Jasoncw, we'd still need our CC to keep the game alive.

[TheRealDeadaim 38]

Wrongo! The game itself is only 1/3 of the way done (not counting planning)

Where'd you get that information from?

The picture pandemic posted has got to be concept art, the viewing angle just seems too high.

  Edited March 9, 2012 by TheRealDeadaim  

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The geometry in all the images and videos appear to be realistic even if the textures are simplified, cartoony, or stylized. One must remember that texturing is the last part of game design besides bug squashing. Simcity 4 was realistically colored and textured but the geometry was stylized and unrealistic though most people did not care enough to notice and complain.

Every single link with those pictures says it is 30% done. Here is the only one I could find that I did not see was already posted here: http://404systemerror.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1984-was-not-supposed-to-be-an-instruction-manual2.jpg

  Edited March 10, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[squeaky024 14]

Personally most of what I have seen I am fine with, but I want things that should be huge, to be huge. Airports, ports, railyards, suspension bridges (that thing looks squashed), powerplants (massive territory), refineries (again, huge real-estate hungry). skyscrapers (some land around them would be nice, not just the building itself, and some parking), and so on

I don't mind if the art style itself is simplified but I don't want the cartoony scale of things.

[Fornix 4]

This image is on the SimCity website, as a banner sort of thing, do you think this is what the final product will look like?

I'd imagine it end up looking somewhat like that, in particularly on that level of zoom. The stylized look, when zoomed out, quickly turns into something like that. Looks quite smooth, without using up too many system resources. The question though is, how is the stylized look achieved. Is it a matter of modeling and texturing? (in other words, if people want crispy and realistic, can they mod the game into it) or is it achieved through shaders? (whatever you through at it, the game will render it in such a stylized fashion).

I'm hoping it is at most as cartoony as the Sims 3. I want SimCity to look realistic.

The thing is, and I believe not that many people realize this but an extremely high amount of detail comes at cost to the custom content community. The higher the detail, the less people can create custom content because of its high level of difficulty and detailing to meet certain game standards.

Not only will creating custom content become less accessible, it'll also strike the risk of looking like crap much easier. Cities XL which tends to go for the more realistic look, greatly suffers from this for one. Sure, realistic looks are great (just check GTA 4 for example) in a city environment. However, with such detail being capable of rendering hundreds of buildings at once, is a whole other story. So instead the designers have to cut some edges, and usually this results into buildings becoming little more than very plain shapes with some photographs slapped onto them. This looks decent when zoomed out, however as you view from up close it's an eyesore.

A smooth stylized look can aid in that issue, for it being less obtrusive if such details are flatted out, simply because the details most probably will not be there in the first place.

  Edited March 10, 2012 by PsychoDude  

[croxis 150]

I posted this on another forum in response to a cartoony comment:

Tilt shift != cartoon.

This is a cartoon:

The technical term in computer graphics is cell shading. Borderlands is a recentish game that made use of it.

This is Tilt shift:

The objective of this is a toy or model (depending how old you are) appearance.

Realistic art direction is bad. The muted colors increase the difficulty for the player to differentiate different visual elements. Realistic art direction also causes the game to show its age much quicker than a stylized art direction. Part of the reason Sim City 4, World of Warcraft, and the CG from Babylon 5 held up for years is because of a non-realistic art direction.

Here is SimCity 4:

And a google map shot of Portland's downtown.

While there is a lot of diversity in the shapes and colors of cities (and even how you take the picture), note how this real life shot has a lot of muted colors and lack of contrast in the buildings compared to SC4. At least in my option. I suppose I could do a histogram of the color distribution.

  Edited March 10, 2012 by croxis  

[§haÅ--Ñ€ §hÅŽo 370]

I posted this on another forum in response to a cartoony comment:

Tilt shift != cartoon.

This is a cartoon:

The technical term in computer graphics is cell shading. Borderlands is a recentish game that made use of it.

This is Tilt shift:

The objective of this is a toy or model (depending how old you are) appearance.

Realistic art direction is bad. The muted colors increase the difficulty for the player to differentiate different visual elements. Realistic art direction also causes the game to show its age much quicker than a stylized art direction. Part of the reason Sim City 4, World of Warcraft, and the CG from Babylon 5 held up for years is because of a non-realistic art direction.

Here is SimCity 4:

And a google map shot of Portland's downtown.

While there is a lot of diversity in the shapes and colors of cities (and even how you take the picture), note how this real life shot has a lot of muted colors and lack of contrast in the buildings compared to SC4. At least in my option. I suppose I could do a histogram of the color distribution.

I really don't like the tilt-shift technique. I want my cities to look like they aren't little toys. Hopefully they make tilt shift optional.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I do not understand what Sirron meant. It is not that Tilt-shift makes them look like toys but rather that it makes them look like models (think of the complex model rail roads at museums, or models of developments used by architects). Obviously most cheap office buildings are bleak greyscale or 'fart brown' but most of the buildings in SimCity 4 are based off distinctive landmarks in real life. We have a ton of custom content on the STEX with realistic textures and colors that are bleak and minimalist (look up balkan, socialist, communist, modernist, etc) but the average casual gamer wants color. In the banner (which is supposed to look stylized, look at the literal cartoon background on the SimCity forums), the models look detailed and have normal maps that add detail (normal maps can make a low polygon count building look like it has a far higher polygon count, tessellation is more often used for faces) but the standard color textures are simplistic (possibly even 256-color rectangles). The type of shader used could also change how things look. For instance, the jump down from High quality visuals in Anno 2070 down to Medium quality was almost like photo (Ultra High is like a photo but the difference between Ultra High and High is difficult to distinguish at a low resolution or from a distance) to SimCity 4 quality graphics. So if you have a system with the minimum specifications (in the past, the "minimum requirements" were not really the true minimum and were more like the low-end recommended and worse systems could play the games with low quality but nowadays, if your computer does not meet the minimum requirements, it won't render things properly and might not even run the game at all), it might look like SimCity 4 (or worse, maybe even City Life on low graphics setting *shudder*) but if your computer exceeds recommended settings, you might have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy.