Discussion about City Tile Size

[Epilef 57]

I still see no reason to have only one size of the map.

If 2x2 is enough for some, there will be no problem if any other size options in the game.

I do not care when I choose a large map appears a giant warning on the screen talking about possible loss of performance, as long as I have a choice.

[Fornix 4]

I SEE this so often on this site. You guys need to forget about the CITY tile. The nomenclature is wrong. Technically, a REGION is a CITY and the 4x4 or 2x2 or 1x1 tiles are just sections of it. Of course you can't build Los Angeles on a medium tile or even a large tile. I would recommend all of you to find JerseyDevil's Edmonton recreation. His recreation of Edmonton covered an entire region map. Use real scales and play across tiles...don't confine your creations to one tile and try to get a million people in it. I have nearly a million across my entire region and that is realistic.

The problem is manageability. In SC4 I preferred widespread regions with a main city centre, suburbs spreading around it, grasslands and small towns with spread out farmland bordering that. And if my region became old enough a secondary city tended to eventually form somewhere. I tended to use quite big regions with several medium sized tiles, but mainly larged sized tiles for this. 30 large sized tiles, wouldn't be out of the question. 30 tiles is already a high number to manage and an annoyance when doing region wide work, but with 2x2 this'll change into a whopping 120 tiles already.

Now imagine wanting to create a new highway from tile 1 in the west to tile 12 in the east which flows along natural boundaries. You're going to be having to load in and back out out of around 16 tiles.

[Terribletown USA 18]

Somehow I bet we'll all manage to get through this

[XXProtoXX 6]

How about instead of permanent boundaries we have a peice of land to start with that can expanded by merging and/or annexing more land from an undivided region map!

[Ocram's Razr 964]

How about instead of permanent boundaries we have a peice of land to start with that can expanded by merging and/or annexing more land from an undivided region map!

Boomtown wants that but Glass Box cannot do that because glass box is all about boxes so each unit must be a rectangle (possibly square) though, if rendering can go beyond the immediate adjacent tiles, you might be able to have a continuous city chunky blob instead of natural blob.

[XXProtoXX 6]

Well the only other feasible option is to have multiple city block sizes to build on. However another point I would like to make is that we do not yet know how objects will be scaled in the game.

[squeaky024 14]

Well the only other feasible option is to have multiple city block sizes to build on. However another point I would like to make is that we do not yet know how objects will be scaled in the game.

Unfortunately, It is almost certain that things will be shrunk down to match the size limitations. This means tiny powerplants, airports, shipping ports, towers, houses, roads, etc. Maxis never considered making large things because they would not fit in a small city tile. Just look at the tiny airport.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The scale looks rather realistic. Now, if the playable area could transition easily between 2 tiles and a far rendering distance means that you can see 3 or 4 tiles deep (6-10 km rendered, the absolute highest setting in Cities XL allows you to see from one side of the map to the other, which is 10 km long), this would become a non-issue. Have you heard of SimCity 2000 network edition? Up to 3 people can share a map, buying land and making deals. That fizzled into obscurity but inspired The Sims online, which failed spectacularly.

[XXProtoXX 6]

I'm just hoping that my meager computer system can handle all the simulation,graphics and draw distances.

[Need4Camaro 50]

Honestly Im very much so against the 2x2KM city size map... Especially since Cities XL has a 10x10KM map and still sucked - there's no excuse.

[Tarkus 6,933]

Honestly Im very much so against the 2x2KM city size map... Especially since Cities XL has a 10x10KM map and still sucked - there's no excuse.

The 10km x 10km might have partially been why CXL failed. The map size exacerbated that game's general performance issues, which were already pretty serious between the lack of multi-core support, and the switch to full-3D before hardware could really support it.

-Tarkus

  Edited March 12, 2012 by Tarkus  

[Ocram's Razr 964]

That is the point, your sucky computer would need to load cities when making regional transit while a nice computer might be able to seemlessly build 4-6 km long routes (highway or rail). Your sucky computer might render the 4 adjacent cities as mere skylines or not at all if your render distance is less than 2 km (so if you get fog inside your city, why render farther?). You know how City Life and The Sims 3 have backgrounds beyond the viewable area? That is what I hope the last cities in your view render as. On the other extreme, if you have an expensive and high maintenance super liquid cooled (immersed in thermal grease or cooled by liquid nitrogen) gaming rig with hyper threaded hex co-core (which almost describes some starlets) CPU and a bleeding edge GPU, you might be able to look at the city (with fancy cars and either no pedestrians or bland and muted Sims 2 quality sims) and see your sprawling city through a dozen districts with the mountain you terraformed 20 km away visible on the horizon.

[Mark Waybill 242]

"Moreover, suburban sprawls as seen the USA will take very, very long to make. You would have to make dozens or even over 100 city tiles to re-create something like that..." - Mrtrln

There was mention of the possibility of there being a planning tool in this game. It would be theoretically possible to have regional planning tool features, so for instance regional as opposed to intracity infrastructure could be planned and laid out in a separate planning tool mode, like highways or terrain features etc. Thus the placement of large objects like airports if they needed to cross city boundaries could be planned in that way. As to whether that would work in practice I wouldn't know.

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

We do need to remember that first and foremost this is a game, not take a "Google Earth Map and make an exact pixel for pixel replica program"... although I am sure that there will be those that expect to be able to do that.

In terms of scale, there will always need to be compromises, especially in terms of airports that by their nature take up a huge amount of space. It does look like Maxis are taking the modular approach for some things, so no I don't think we will see a return of the pocket sized rectangular airports of SC4.

[Mark Waybill 242]

Hope this isn't too off topic but it'd be nice imo to see a return to airport/seaport zoning as opposed to block lots, so if this modular nature implies zoning I'm for it.

[packersfan 666]

I know 2x2 city tiles cannot fit a whole city, and neither do 4x4 city tiles. I'm used to that playing style; my region Schellingen-Stadt has about 2 real cities: one small city that fits on one large city tile and a very large city that's build on 10 large city tiles. So having your city spread across multiple city tiles is not the problem...

Now what really concerns me is that the number of tiles a city is made of quickly gets out of hand. Here's my post explaining my concern; I need to construct at 16 city tiles only to create a dutch 120K city. Imagine how much work it would take to make a metropolis: if I would re-build my large city Schellingen I created in SimCity 4, I would be talking about 30, 40 or more medium city tiles to recreate it. See where I'm going? That's why I would like to have an option of larger city tiles, mere for more practical arguments. 4x4 would be fine and 8x8 would be perfect, though I can imagine it would be a pain for your PC to handle it...

Best,

Maarten

i'm sorry but i fail to see your point that you keep refering to here. The population size has nothing to do with how many city tiles, surely it's to do with density. Hong Kong covering that area would have a higher population, therefore it probably wouldn't take that many more to make a metropolis. If your main concern is that you won't be able to recreate your home town on a few city tiles then i'm afraid you might be out of luck and I highly doubt Maxis would take it into conderation when planning the game

My point still stands that if you have a city with a moderate density (the city from my example has about 2000 inh./km2) you'll need an awfull lot of city tiles to re-create such a city. Not every city can't be Hong Kong or Monaco, you'll need less dense cities. Moreover, suburban sprawls as seen the USA will take very, very long to make. You would have to make dozens or even over 100 city tiles to re-create something like that...

Even if the city tile was 100 km x 100 km it would STILL take an incredibly long time to recreate a massive sprawling city. Whether it is one tile or a hundred does not matter, and I agree with someone earlier who said that many of us are still thinking in SC4 regionplay mode. Hopefully they have upgraded the "regionplay" and the 2x2 sections really don't act as completely separate cities, unless you want them to. The key to this whole thing will be load times and save times. If it takes long to load and save like it does in SC4 and then switch between tiles, yes, it will be a pain, JUST like SC4 despite SC4 having 4x4 tiles (because those usually took two times to eight times as long to load and save). I get the sense the these designers understand that some people want to build sprawling realistic cities and they have a plan to cater to that. I reserve my final judgement until I see the game in a closer to final state and actually play it. If it is a clone of SC4's regionplay, then 2x2km cities will be difficult to live with, since it is hard to get a big enough population on a 2x2 tile to get a decent high rise CBD.

[Cob92 360]

How about instead of permanent boundaries we have a peice of land to start with that can expanded by merging and/or annexing more land from an undivided region map!

Boomtown wants that but Glass Box cannot do that because glass box is all about boxes so each unit must be a rectangle (possibly square) though, if rendering can go beyond the immediate adjacent tiles, you might be able to have a continuous city chunky blob instead of natural blob.

I think what he means is being able to join multiple boxes together, like merging cells in MS Excel.

[RenneCR 2]

Sim City is a game.

It is not a real world simulation in any aspect.

It is a game.

Yet, the modding community in the early days took the automata car vehicle as a point of measure. The car was measured and the scale of how things should be was dictated by car size. By looking at the car sure 1x1 bus stop was rather big. But compare the car to airport, the airport is actually quite in scale. Yet the car distorted from seeing the game as whole, "the cars is this size" "the car is real" "this and that is of scale compared to the car" "because it's a car this and that is in wrong scale" "cry" "the car!!!"

I always played big city tiles, and sure, having over million population meant a lot of skycrapers, I never really thought the tile to represent some actual figure like 4kmx4km. After all it's game.

The scale in SC5 won't match real world proportions. Because it's a game.

One cannot make this and that to match IRL when the engine isn't simulating real world. So adding stuff because that's how it is real life could be ok, but what's the point of making a stupid mod when the rest of the game acts different?

Ditch realism, that's a wrong viewpoint. The right viewpoint is game wise realism

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Well, I thought of a bus stop plus a parking lot to be similar to a transit center and some people modified the bus stop into a 1x1, 1x2, or 2x2 park and ride. The transit center in one subburb is like 2 SimCity 4 bus stops in a row, surrounded by roads with a parking garage on one side. The scale is rather similar. With each bus stop being 2 bays. Road top bus stops are more realistically scaled.

  Edited March 12, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

My view of all this is that the "working city" may be limited to 2 x 2 Km but that the whole "working set" depends on how much virtual memory you have. Switching between city tiles should be simply a matter of switching a page or segment table pointer, which is only a couple of machine instructions. So switching back and forth to co-ordinate utilities and so forth should be a trivial event.

In a multi-player situation, each player could own a set of cities, and switch between them ad lib. I happen to have a 20GB partition for my swap space, so I really don't see my 4GB of RAM as an obstacle. One does need to have a fast swapping device, and things could be enhanced, perhaps, by an SSD, but it would not be really necessary. {This, by the way, is a good reason to use Linux. Your swap space can be as large as you like, and could actually be an entire 1TB disk drive or more since you can have multiple swap spaces.}

By the end of 2013 (the announced release year) who can really say what hardware will be available? I am aware of work being done in some labs on chips that work with photons and not electrons. The cooling problem is quite different. As for disk storage, IBM now has a very high density substrate in which only a handful of molecules of the substrate are needed to contain a bit which is much smaller than the thousands needed now. The technology is moving faster all the time, and you have to make like the Red Queen in order to keep up.

The concept of having the entire region active in VM is not only feasible, but with this game is probably needed. Multi-processing of the game is only a matter of how many processes the developers are willing to fork off. If they kept it down to eight processes, most quad-core systems would run at 100%, but there are hex-cores now and oct-cores not that far off. It then becomes a matter of the sophistication of the dispatcher (processor scheduler) code and the delay in critical section processing. In order to handle this properly the hardware will probably have to become multi-bus.

While the address bandwidth with 64-bit processors is very large, there are Power PCs that I have used that had 128-bit addressing and this was before I retired. I've been retired now since 2002, so that technology is probably getting to be rather old hat.

I am of the opinion that "you ain't seen nothin' yet."

[DmainEvent 195]

Ok guys, Here is my basic summation.

Glassbox will give us a deaper simulation, but apparently, it is a resource hog and it will limit our ability to expand into larger map sizes on weaker machines.

Some of us believe that we should not be limited to a small map size to appease those with limited computing power. Those of us make the argument that

map size should be a choice.

I will go a little bit farther. When installing the game, why can't it check your system stats and offer us a map that will run reasonably with your computer specs.

I personally plan on getting a 6 core i7 (3.3ghz-more with overclocking) with 32gb of Ram. I implore the supporters of the 2x2 maps to explain why someone

who has such a machine should be limited to such a small map? Even if the loading between regions is much quicker. Wouldn't it be much cooler to switch

between much larger maps as well?

To the large map supporters, is this really a game breaker for you (it is for me, but I am trying to be bi-partisan here)?

In the spirit of full discloser, I am on the side of those that fill that map size should be a choice, and that having maps of multiple size would be preferable. I personally,

would prefer maps of 16x16km... That will probably not happen, but I can dream right? And when I get my massive rig, maybe if the devs include this option, it will be so!

But yeah, Somebody should sticky this thread so Maxis and EA at least know it is an issue and they leave the map size as a mod-able option.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ if you read my previous post, you will see that I believe that city tile size is largely irrelevant. Too many people are hung up on the lengthy city-switching time of SC4. That technology is ten years out of date. Let us not leap out the window at a stick that may not even be there.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Somehow I bet we'll all manage to get through this.

I chuckled..

But yeah, seriously, can we all calm down? Most people here are stuck in the context of SimCity 4 region play, which requires lengthy saves followed by exiting back to your region and loading another city; which can all take a good amount of time.

Maxis haven't said how the region play will work in this respect however! For all we know, you could stay in one active city tile with the surrounding tiles being 'open' but inactive, and all you would need to do is move to the next tile instead of exiting back out into the region. It sounds like they want to make the game available to everyone, not just people who keep up with the latest hardware, which IMHO is rather generous (they're doing it for the money, obviously, but so what, it means more of us can play the game).

[RenneCR 2]

I agree that the map size mentioned by the devs is way too small, and with todays technologies they could add bigger map than the biggest in SC4. Maybe they will add bigger maps but make content smaller but by zooming it would still look like it have looked. First and foremost they (Maxis/EA) make it the average consumer in mid. Sure they are going after the money. And to pop up a surprise SC5 is no a charity project. The average run 32bit Win 7 or Win XP. Was it 2011 when Windows 7 surpassed XP on desktops. The average also has 2GB memory and low end or mid end graphics card. The system specs announced are surprisingly low. So there is also a big minority that can run the game a lot faster. The graphics card requirement announced are low end cards. The sys reqs are lower than in Cities XL. Still Cities XL run just fine with medium or low settings (if you don't count bugs in the engine) with it's minimum sys reqs. Cities XL has bigger maps 10x10km. So what is it then that the map size in SC5 is 2kmx2km. In City XL there isn't no neighbors but the regional play is more of continental. And those maps in CXL are more like regions as CXL is also a game and the scale doesn't portray IRL. Engine in SC5 is deeper than in CXL but it's quite deep there too. City XL is full 3D and there is animations happening all around the city. Sure some of what we've seen what Glassbox is alike they go deeper with not just simulation but animations too. In CXL the automata is eye-candy they don't go anywhere like in SC4. Do I need to know, as a mayor, where every peep in whatever crossroad is going? Not really, why add this big brotherism? Well in a way I do like. But 2kmx2km map sounds ridiculously small............ Perhaps they should ease the simulation-animation a bit. SC5 is likely to be multicore game. Cities XL has a lot of deepness and the game is just 1core, and it sounds like SC5 is getting a lot of the same, plus new of course. In SC5 do we need to actually see the product in factory as goes through the line? It's just a box after all. Seems like agents are system hogs and 10 000 is mentioned. Could some stuff be scrapped off? LIke water... It works somewhat good in SC4. In CXL there are no water pipes, electricity lines or telecommunications lines, but those resources run on roads too, apparently givin the impression that water and electricity cables run under roads and are layed down with the road. If there is water producing facility (of course with capacity) in the city and it is connected to road it should be getting the water without agent per every building hogging my system. Water is just one example. Sure there is some sort of agent thingy in CXL too. But mainly what's the real system hog in CXL is 3D graphics. The engine is pretty good for a city simulator/builder, but of course there is some serious bugs like memory leak, which isn't yet fixed since they made the multiplayer planet offer into a single player game. SC5 could do better and I don't mean bugs but map sizes, content, simulation, animation.... If the catch of low system requirements is the reason for 2kmx2km map....... It's a good thing they still have plenty of time to fix and tune. Sounds like they are too focused on how some individual animation is something actual like unit of resource. I hope they make it more lightweight. Shrinking from map size isn't really ideal keeping in mind that it's a city simulator not an assembly line animation. However despite all this... and else. As usual, they will also surprise us and the fact is that we know so little about region play. But the 2kmx2km map is just pure and simply ridiculous! If the map size is the only workaround they have for resource demanding engine they should shrink content and make map size bigger and fix zoom for it so that it looks all good. But I'm sure they will surprise us.

[nashville nelson 51]

Here you can see two arrows pointing to the right and downwards. This could be how we switch between cities.

[Jazzmaster 716]

@RenneCR: Could you please divide up that wall of text a bit? It's not to sound rude, it's just very cumbersome reading forum posts like that (I know I'm not the only one who thinks so). Thanks.

[Beren Erchamion 12]

Think of it like this, there are two Londons in the UK, both have their own mayor and everything. There is the City of London which houses about 5000 people, while Greater London, which as I can recall, can be split into 27 boroughs, and surrounding Greater London is the Home Counties, containing of many of the suburbs of London as well as other smaller towns and cities, people from the suburbs can commute into the city.

Even in SC4 they admit you cannot do a street by street recreation on one tile as London, New York and San Fransisco all cover a vast region (whereas in 3000 they were all in one quaint little tile). Think of tiles in this game as boroughs or wards.

The problem comes in access.

Let's say there's a UDI-type mode. Will I be able to transition seamlessly from one tile to the next? Because I can't do that in SC4, which is one of my frustrations.

Will service radii (assuming they keep that mechanism) of buildings spill over to the next city? Will a single lot be able to straddle the boundary? What about, say, a highway interchange?

Even if these specific mechanisms don't exist, the basic idea still remains the same--will they be tightly, seamlessly integrated, or will the tiles be more or less the standalone units that interact with one another only in a few special cases like in SC4?

[jacksunny 741]

Here you can see two arrows pointing to the right and downwards. This could be how we switch between cities.

Has this actually been confirmed? Without a confirmation, we know absolutely nothing about those arrows. They could mean anything, I'm thinking they are probably used to move around the city (remember that the version they used is not very far into development). They also seem to be in an odd location for switching cities.

[~Dee~ 215]

In Sim City 5 I like the fact that every Sim has a workplace and a home and cars don't drive around aimlessly. Everything has a destination, makes it much more fun to play.

While I wait for Sim City 5 to come out I'm playing Cities in Motion (what is a transportation game, not a city builder) and every ' Sim' goes to work or home or shopping and you can follow them around town.

I played the first Sim City when it came out 20 odd years ago and was immediately hooked, have been playing all the others as well, loved Sim City 2000 the most.

I'm looking forward to Sim City 5 and hope it's alot better than SC4.

  Edited March 13, 2012 by ~Dee~  

[gweed123 33]

At the very least, I would at least like to see what is on the other side of the boundary, so that I don't have to go back to the region view to make sure that what I have built lines up with what is on the other side. Even if it's just showing the first 10-15 tiles as greyed out, and then they gradually fade away to nothing.

And I also agree that fast switching between cities would be great!