Discussion about City Tile Size

[Zelvik 0]

This is the main reason I think the game will be very limited in modding.

Will EA let the next Simcity have life as long as SC4?

I imagine that EA think that letting modders easily increase the game would be too dangerous for a possible and profitable series of SCs.

Considering how volatile the gaming business will be in the next few years, I hardly think that EA plans along such long term lines. Honestly, nobody realy knows what direction the gaming business will take in the next years. Even large companies like Sony and Microsoft shrug away from producing their next generation consoles because of a realistic fear that this kind of gaming might be past its lifespan.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I realy would hope for at least a 4x4 square. I liked my 4x4 cities best in SC4 but I wouldnt mind a 8x8 or 16x16 square. Actually a 16x16 square would be great as thats about the size many larger (1 Mio-2 Mio) cities in Europe take to properly represent.

Let us not get carried away. We don't know the actual city size yet. Furthermore, we don't know just how resource intensive this program will be, and Maxis doesn't know either because the game doesn't exist as code yet.

Having an octaprocessor running at current speeds won't necessarily give you larger cities. It depends on the number of tasks that get spawned by the game, and the speed of the interconnection for multi-player. Land grab may not be useful at all. All simulations eventually run into that exponential knee in the operational curve where for every little increment the processing need doubles. As tables grow and the number of objects increases, often not on a 1:1 basis, everything has to be managed. It might not matter if you had a hypercube system, when you have reached the limit, you have reached the limit, and if each tick doubles the requirement, you have run into an instance of Moore's Law. With a finite automaton a.k.a. computer program, no matter how distributed, you run into the law of diminishing returns eventually.

Oh, and increasing the number of CPU's also increases the gating delays in critical sections of the operating system. This technology using semaphores as gates or even machine instructions as gates, which I have seen, will eventually idle some of the processors in the race to get to a gate when it opens. Some processors make never be able to enter the critical section code to get a new task to start. For those of you who are not operating system programmers, this means that some of your processors could be idle all the time. I have participated in studies of this that showed with a quad processor, you only got about 20% out of the fourth processor. This was done by actual measurements over a couple of years on production sites.

  Edited March 23, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[Ocram's Razr 964]

2 kilometers by 2 kilometers will be plenty for me because the neighboring cities are loaded to a certain extent when playing (so you might be able to view 18x18 km under certain circumstances).

[Mark Waybill 242]

As long as regions are large enough to allow for sprawling metropolises with extensive suburban areas and long distance commuting.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Of course, the regions can be as large as you want them. I don't know what the default size will be but the absolute minimum size allowed is 4x4 region with 16 cities (8x8 km).

[jacksunny 741]

I voted yes in the poll, but only providing the idea to have multiple cities share the same budget and easy city switching is implemented.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I voted yes in the poll, but only providing the idea to have multiple cities share the same budget and easy city switching is implemented.

What if, at the outset, a player may claim a cluster of city tiles?

[bluespottedhorse 49]

2x2 km is really small but I haven't heard of an official announcement on the size of a map yet anyway. In addition, most runway airport have to be around 2 miles in length to accomodate jets and in that instance most airports would have to span more than one map to be realistic and functional. My biggest gripe with simcity 4 was the size of the cities was way too small, largest being 4x4. The other issue with regions was that annoying reconciling of maps issue.

Having said that, I could live with a work area of 2x2 km but not a map area of 2x2. If the work area was able to float around an unlimited sized region with towns, villages, cities, etc, etc that would be fine.

[z1 566]

For those people who would like to ask Maxis why they aren't allowing 4km x 4km cities, you can vote for this post in the Your Questions for Maxis (for March-April 2011) thread.

When looking at the reason that Maxis isn't planning to include 4 x 4 cities, the most likely reason I came up with is (surprise!) the traffic simulator. The traffic simulator is the reason that there can't be any 8 x 8 cities in SC4. Unlike any other major part of the simulation, the traffic simulator's growth in consumption of CPU resources is truly exponential when tracked against population growth. It's the reason behind those annoying "game lags" in big cities.

But if SC4 can support 4 x 4 cities, why can't the new SC? We have heard from Maxis that Sims may go to a different job every morning and return to a different residence every evening. That means that the traffic simulator has to run every day. In SC4, the traffic simulator runs, on average, once every 120 days. Multiply the length of those game lags by 120 each and... Well, you don't want to think about it.

But with the traffic simulator running 120 times more frequently, how do they get even 2 x 2 cities to work? Well, fortunately they chose a great pathfinding algorithm for the new SC. D* Lite is about an order of magnitude faster than the A* algorithm used in SC4.

So that means that the traffic simulator in the new SC is going to take only 12 times as much CPU resources to work as the one in SC4. That's still way too much to be playable for large cities, but it's moving in the right direction. Now consider the fact that the minimum specs to run the new SC include a dual-core machine, and that pathfinding lends itself very nicely to multithreading. So this means the new traffic simulator will take only six times as long to run as the one in SC4. That's still way too much, although it's tantalizingly close to being feasible.

Unfortunately, there's one other factor that pushes things in the other direction, and that's that all agents in the new SC will use the traffic simulator. At this point, we don't know what the impact of that is going to be (even Maxis may not know right now), but it can only push the usage of the traffic simulator higher.

On the other hand, what about people who use Intel quad core machines with eight threads, or even octocore machines? If we ignore the issue of the other agents for now and simply divide our factor of 12 by eight, we find the traffic simulator running only 1.5 times slower than on SC4. Even adding in the effect of all the other agents, the continual increase in speed and number of CPUs per machine makes this quite feasible for many people, especially by the time this game finally comes out.

So in summary, the traffic simulator in the new SC would make running 4 x 4 cities on entry-level machines too painfully slow to bear. But such cities should be quite workable on higher-level machines. Why won't Maxis let us build such cities? Let's ask them.

  Edited March 27, 2012 by z1  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ IMHO they are on the wrong track. Labor pools don't work that way in RL, and you shouldn't have to find a new doss every day. With this idea you can't have Sim-families, nor can you have any kind of real career nor social advancement. This is far too simple, and if it is this way to fit into their GlassBox, I will not purchase this fiasco.

There is more to a city simulation than what they are proposing. Buggi has a better proposal with Boomtown.

I am afraid they are in love with their new toy and are not thinking about what they are doing. SC4 will be around for a long time after this is released if they don't pull up their socks.

If you have a Sim object, it should have attributes such as sex, job (including housewife), place of employment (after a job is found), etc. They are being careless.

  Edited March 27, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[Mark Waybill 242]

I agree. I would like a full integration with the Sims, so that there were Sims with individual gender, age, job, education etc that remained constant until realistically updated if conditions changed. As this is getting a bit off topic, possibly we should create a thread to discuss this issue in particular, as certainly I see it as being an important one.

[SimsCity5 1]

Im Hopeing it will be very very big because that will be very fun.

[jacksunny 741]

Im Hopeing it will be very very big because that will be very fun.

However, if they are too big, the game will run very slowly. That wouldn't be much fun would it

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The traffic simulator will be far superior to SimCity 4. First of all, if there is absolutely no change in infrastructure or agents, the traffic simulator will stay the same (but that means that the traffic simulator will have to update every time a Sim or business moves in or out). SimCity 4 had a very clunky system and the new SimCity will be a major step up.

[Cob92 360]

Im Hopeing it will be very very big because that will be very fun.

However, if they are too big, the game will run very slowly. That wouldn't be much fun would it

But small cities suck all the fun out of the game too. I enjoy a small town every now and then, but I don't want to be forced to make skyscrapers just so that I can get my population up.

I wish that Maxis would reverse the shift to small scale that they've been doing over the past 10 years. Apparently SC3000's large maps were supposed to be 100 square MILES, even larger than the maps in CXL (which are the biggest in any modern game). In SC4 we shrunk down to 16 square kilometers, with maps barely over 2 miles on each side. Now we have to get even smaller?

  Edited March 28, 2012 by Cobhris96  

[Mark Waybill 242]

TBH when I was drawing maps of cities back before I had heard of SC or had a computer back as a kid in the 90s I would draw sprawling cities with large suburban areas, heavily influenced by Sydney, where I lived. Also railway network maps, and Sydney's CityRail network is pretty spread out if not comprehensively covering the conurbation.

When I can download the data of Sydney in 1932 when the bridge was opened, and build the never constructed Manly Warringah railway, I'll finally be happy.

[Hiramas 4]

I could live with the 2x2 tile size but there have to be some things that need to be secure.

I have to be able to fast switch the city tiles without a long loading time. At best even without switching to a regional map every time.

The secont thing I really want is an image of the neighouring cities instead of just a black map boarder. Maybe, if you save a city, the game calculates a simple image of the area at the map boarder which gets loaded as a static image when entering the neigbourhing city. So I can at least fuse together the city tiles seamlessly.

A short note on the "daifly" sims: I have yet to be convinced that the way they build their system has any influence on the gameplay which would really be visible. Families or individual Sims were never visible in other titles. I really can't understand why this would be an issue at this point. Rembemer: If you do not change streets or buildings, the work and traffic agents will travel the same paths every day.

[Sandis_van_Great 346]

Im Hopeing it will be very very big because that will be very fun.

However, if they are too big, the game will run very slowly. That wouldn't be much fun would it

but the thing is if you lag in big tile than dont paly in big tile, easy as that. I personally enjoy playing in big tiles, i hate all this tile switching and connecting and stuff its far more betther to use big tile and build like 3 villages on it.

Just becouse sombodys old pc cant handle big tiles dosnt meen otthers have to suffer from it.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Sit tight, everyone. We don't know several things about this product that will affect whether or not your system can handle it in acceptable time. One of the big ones is running the simulation totally in a background task and perhaps in more than one core, communicating through a standard mechanism with the graphics and the end-user by standard, well-proven Interprocess Communicaton methods. As far as tuning goes, we don't know until we get the program on our hot little machines.

Like all simulations, I expect that at least one core will be running around 100% a lot of the time as the population gets near the knee of the simulation curve. If they are able to split this across multiple cores, things won't be much better because the wait is for the update to the common communications area. We hope the semaphore method will be the same as the ones in the operating systems and they don't try to reinvent the wheel.

My system switches processors so quickly that you really can't follow the number of time slices going on without a hardware monitor.

[RyanMorgan95 144]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

  Edited April 12, 2012 by RyanMorgan95  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

In a really modern city, the airports are out of town. The only 'ports in-town are STOL ports like the Toronto Island Airport.

[jacksunny 741]

^Quite true. In Alberta, the 2 major airports at Calgary and Edmonton are both outside of the city. Calgary's airport isn't too far, but Edmonton's airport is about 15-20 min. away.

[nashville nelson 51]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

But these 10x10 maps were lifeless and dull, except a few ugly comic figures. In SC5 nearly everthing will be part of the simulation and will be animated. We also don´t know what scale they will use. In SC4 a street is 16m wide and a small R$ house could be 8x10m. This is far too big compared to RL. When they use RL dimensions a SC5 2x2 square will look bigger compared to a medium SC4 tile.

[MandelSoft 2,775]

I would say SimCity 4 was too big AND too small at the same time. Some of the larger buildings and the standard interchanges were dimensioned too small, while the road widths and some small buildings were dimensioned too big.

[Dewm 177]

2x2k never stopped me in SC4. Also, what you have to remember is this is going to be a fully 3D/ graphics intensive game. Can you imagine the average PC trying to handle something substantially larger...

This game could potentially be amazing, don't let the city size limit break the deal for you.

I do have a problem with people comparing this to SC4, We've got to remember that SC4 only uses 1 core... and doesn't even use it that well. I know that I built a $2800 comp almost 2 years ago (well a year and a half)

Its 3.2Ghz and its got 8 cores... not to mention that most PC's come with GPU's now, where-as when SC4 came out, it was not a common thing. Alot has changed in 9 years.

[Dewm 177]

I realy would hope for at least a 4x4 square. I liked my 4x4 cities best in SC4 but I wouldnt mind a 8x8 or 16x16 square. Actually a 16x16 square would be great as thats about the size many larger (1 Mio-2 Mio) cities in Europe take to properly represent.

Let us not get carried away. We don't know the actual city size yet. Furthermore, we don't know just how resource intensive this program will be, and Maxis doesn't know either because the game doesn't exist as code yet.

I'm not sure how much you know about game development, but if they are really releasing this in 2013, even if its in the holiday seasons the game is anywhere from 60-80% completed.

The engine has already been designed and implemented, they have a rough idea of the processing power needed, they have artist already designing buildings. they have 90% of the game on paper.

  Edited April 12, 2012 by Dewm  

[RyanMorgan95 144]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

In a really modern city, the airports are out of town. The only 'ports in-town are STOL ports like the Toronto Island Airport.

True, but you still need to put an airport somewhere; even if it's in a neighbouring city, that's half of a map gone (providing they use realistic proportions)

  Edited April 14, 2012 by RyanMorgan95  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

@dewm: Well, I am not a game developer. I am however an expert programmer/analyst/designer and there is really no difference between developing a game and any other application. I expect by E3 they will have the game in Beta. They've been working on it under wraps for quite a while before the hokey announcement.

FYI, I wrote my first application program in 1962, and spent my last ten years before I retired teaching computer science in a post-secondary institution.

There is nothing special or mysterious about game programming except that you sell it for a pittance and try to get back your investment before it goes out of fashion. I expect by this time the whole specification is locked down and it is only a matter of getting it tuned and running at an acceptable rate.

[Dewm 177]

@dewm: Well, I am not a game developer. I am however an expert programmer/analyst/designer and there is really no difference between developing a game and any other application. I expect by E3 they will have the game in Beta. They've been working on it under wraps for quite a while before the hokey announcement.

FYI, I wrote my first application program in 1962, and spent my last ten years before I retired teaching computer science in a post-secondary institution.

There is nothing special or mysterious about game programming except that you sell it for a pittance and try to get back your investment before it goes out of fashion. I expect by this time the whole specification is locked down and it is only a matter of getting it tuned and running at an acceptable rate.

Oh, well then you probably know worlds more then I do. I'm just a newb with enough HTML skill to get me into trouble. BUT I am a huge nerd, and I've watched enough videos, seen enough post production material to know... by this time they deff have 50%+ of the game done (if its a year or so until its launched).. Thats all I was saying.

[Cob92 360]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

But these 10x10 maps were lifeless and dull, except a few ugly comic figures. In SC5 nearly everthing will be part of the simulation and will be animated. We also don´t know what scale they will use. In SC4 a street is 16m wide and a small R$ house could be 8x10m. This is far too big compared to RL. When they use RL dimensions a SC5 2x2 square will look bigger compared to a medium SC4 tile.

If they use RL dimensions then 2x2 will be way to small to fit anything. No city is that small in RL except for podunk country villages.