Discussion about City Tile Size

[carson775 10]

I'm sad. I guess I just expected much more, being a simtropolis fan since 2003, modding is a great aspect of sc4 that I still play it. When I tried the beta out, I had this sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe I just imagined and dreamed about a sprawling metropolis and huge map and land that I could build anywhere nearly without limits. But I guess people wanna see the inside of a building instead of traffic management, large city sizes with a huge region. I still love recreating huge metro's like Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, etc, but I feel this game forgot about players like myself, who are interested in realism instead of graphics. I mean it's 2013, I expected the graphics, but to dumb down the city size, maybe they should've taken out interior view, because if I wanted to look inside a home I can play the Sims.

This game is starting to trend toward the crowd that will easily pay the multiple $20 expansion packs. I know i'm not the only one. But I use to love making highways, with beautiful coastal cities with all the harbor packs and huge highways and roads with the NAM system. I guess all we have now boys is Simcity 4 and Cities XL.

I'm also afraid this won't even have a modding aspect to the game! Prepare your wallet!

[EXVAS3221 5]

There'll be regions like before, and you can run the region yourself.

how do you now this? give use the info? websites?

[EXVAS3221 5]

I'm sad. I guess I just expected much more, being a simtropolis fan since 2003, modding is a great aspect of sc4 that I still play it. When I tried the beta out, I had this sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe I just imagined and dreamed about a sprawling metropolis and huge map and land that I could build anywhere nearly without limits. But I guess people wanna see the inside of a building instead of traffic management, large city sizes with a huge region. I still love recreating huge metro's like Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, etc, but I feel this game forgot about players like myself, who are interested in realism instead of graphics. I mean it's 2013, I expected the graphics, but to dumb down the city size, maybe they should've taken out interior view, because if I wanted to look inside a home I can play the Sims.

This game is starting to trend toward the crowd that will easily pay the multiple $20 expansion packs. I know i'm not the only one. But I use to love making highways, with beautiful coastal cities with all the harbor packs and huge highways and roads with the NAM system. I guess all we have now boys is Simcity 4 and Cities XL.

I'm also afraid this won't even have a modding aspect to the game! Prepare your wallet!

i frist was playing Simcity in the 90s and been a fan every sense. but this one its too bad, and Its down right sad...

[K-os 30]

I got beta access but I really couldn't be arsed to check it out because I know it's a simplified neighborhood builder. 75% of the fun for me was working to create an efficient transportation system AND do a realistic layout. But reading from impressions around the web the whole game is set up to be a leaderboard challenge fest. Zone it all up in 1 hour and demolish buildings to replace with others to max out that pop. You can try to be creative like our talented CJ's here but why bother with a tiny tile and super gaps between every building enough to host block parties on.

Let's see what they got in 2020 when their engine is improved and expansion packs are all released.

[Cob92 360]

I hope Maxis realizes that this isn't just some frivolous complaint from the fringe. The cities as portrayed in the beta are so small as to hinder gameplay significantly.

[Nique 291]

A small amount of people were able to program Proland.. A full, realtime planet renderer, and even without the new features of openGL 4.2 and DirectX11 with their tessellation support; Look what is possible these days in full 3d graphic rendering. Now why then make a agent based simulator that can not handle large environment. Why not stay at the statistical simulator and wait untill the right time (and good consumer computers that are able to handle more than 10 million agents at once).

http://proland.inrialpes.fr

[DmainEvent 195]

A small amount of people were able to program Proland.. A full, realtime planet renderer, and even without the new features of openGL 4.2 and DirectX11 with their tessellation support; Look what is possible these days in full 3d graphic rendering. Now why then make a agent based simulator that can not handle large environment. Why not stay at the statistical simulator and wait untill the right time (and good consumer computers that are able to handle more than 10 million agents at once).

http://proland.inrialpes.fr

Excellent post. This new simcity had a design flaw from the very beginning. If they were going to make an agent based simulation, then they damn sure should have made it scalable. IE all agents wouldn't be simulated until you are at the lowest focus level. Those agents influence other agents and so on and so on, till you have a large functioning metropolis.

[croxis 150]

EA, for better or worse, didn't want players on lower systems to have unfair disadvantage due to the cooperative/competative connected nature of the game. Now that I am thinking about it I am not sure how to scale an agent based system using LOD simulation without risk of exploits along the literal edge cases. X3 does this and the results are often amusing or frusturating. It is very easy for LOD simulation to go wrong.

Personally I blame Apple and the iPhone. They've created the expectation for consumers of always having a smooth user expeirence even at the cost of modern features (such as how long it took iOS to get true multitasking)

Nique, graphic planet renderes are easy. Heck even I wrote one (don't get me started on atmospheric scattering shaders....) Running a simulation at that scale is much, much harder.

[Zukunftstraume 220]

Those videos look like I'm playing Flight Simulator... they look great!

Personally I blame Apple and the iPhone. They've created the expectation for consumers of always having a smooth user expeirence even at the cost of modern features (such as how long it took iOS to get true multitasking)

Also Facebook... They've dumbed down the concept of social-networking so much. I remember MySpace and it's predecessors actually had a complex profile layout design possibilities. It doesn't help that Apple suddenly grabbed the world by the fazooms and did the same to a much greater degree.

[prassel 9]

There'll be regions like before, and you can run the region yourself.

how do you now this? give use the info? websites?

The beta and all dev videos, but the huge issue is the big empty spaces between the city tiles that you cant do anything about.

So basically you cant re-create any big city realistically.

[SirChick 184]

There'll be regions like before, and you can run the region yourself.

how do you now this? give use the info? websites?

The beta and all dev videos, but the huge issue is the big empty spaces between the city tiles that you cant do anything about.

So basically you cant re-create any big city realistically.

Thats why we have SimCity 4 yayy

[djsokal 6]

I played the beta for 21 hours over the weekend. I was also skeptical and disappointed about the 2x2 km tile size. I'm from San Diego,CA and i love creating suburban sprawled cities with crazy freeway systems in simcity 4. I like to build very dense single family master planned residential communities. After playing the beta i was hooked. The graphics were great. I Love the tilt shift affect. I played with it on to the max and with it off. I prefer the tilt shift to the fullest. It really didn't feel as small as it looks. Being able to zoom into street level and looking at the city 360 degrees like your standing on a rooftop of a building is awesome The night lighting was great. The rain was cool. The Road tools are awesome. Instead of having to build another power plant being able to add on to the existing buildings is cool. I know there's still bugs and other issues they need to iron out but I was totally impressed and satisfied with the game. It was only one tile we were able to play. Imagine playing 16 all interconnected? I hate the fact that there's gaps between each city and the highway and rail networks are already pre laid out but I think there's a whole lot of other things that make up for that. Its only going to get better over time and I feel this is a great foundation for whats to come. It took years for simcity 4 to become what it is now. I feel this is going to be another great simcity and I love the direction that maxis is going with it. Just give it a chance, its only the beginning.

[StoNe220022 159]

Being able to zoom into street level and looking at the city 360 degrees like your standing on a rooftop of a building is awesome The night lighting was great. The rain was cool. The Road tools are awesome. Instead of having to build another power plant being able to add on to the existing buildings is cool. I know there's still bugs and other issues they need to iron out but I was totally impressed and satisfied with the game. It was only one tile we were able to play. Imagine playing 16 all interconnected? I hate the fact that there's gaps between each city and the highway and rail networks are already pre laid out but I think there's a whole lot of other things that make up for that. Its only going to get better over time and I feel this is a great foundation for whats to come.

Don't get me wrong, modular buildings was a nice value add and a good step forward in my opinion; but I believe the issue you mentioned about cities spaced out and the feeling that the 16 cities will not feel interconnected is a bigger gripe for some than others.

It took years for simcity 4 to become what it is now. I feel this is going to be another great simcity and I love the direction that maxis is going with it. Just give it a chance, its only the beginning.

Yes but you could also look at it the other way; SC2013 isn't really the beginning is it? There are over 20 years of genre development

When I first played The Sims, I loved seeing the detail in animation when a sim would randomly do something. You'd look at them and go, "oh cool they're doing that" and "Oh wow, he dropped it on the floor...man the detail is there". So in SC2013 garage doors opening, children skipping, fire trucks spraying...all these little detail elements as cool as they are will not actually be the draw card to play the game in 3 months time. Because the truth is once you've seen them, they no loner surprise you or excite you like it did once before.

So ask yourself, what will inspire you to load up your city in 3 months time? Could the developers have focused effort on other things that were a given that the genre needed to improve upon, or will following garbage trucks around your city save the day?

[DmainEvent 195]

Thank you. You have succinctly expressed one of my main objections with the way this game has been going.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

One thing I dislike more than the small city tile sizes is the empty regional space. I think it would be wonderful if we could get 4x4km Great Works or 2x2 and 4x4 km Regional Minor Works to fill up the otherwise blatantly empty space. These would be less simulation intensive than full blown cities and if certain players can claim individual Regional Minor Works and work upgrades on them, they would not be too much of a burden on the servers as well (since they will be a burden on the player's computer).

Who's with me?

--Ocram

[macvirt 361]

I get the idea that would take quite a bit of work for scalability mechanics for the different modelling and transaction systems (for example the agents), in order to address the SimZipcode syndrome.

But the empty dividers yeah, that really breaks the experience too often. You know, with modding I am sure someone would figure out a way around that problem But landmarks, or other artificial filler constructs? Probably for 20 bucks a pop, yeah. I can see some neat commercial options there.

Sure, let's give them more ideas on DLC

[Lakenstaken 34]

Only thing that might save simcity for me is a region editor, as it seems highways and airports are connected to the region and not your city, so i could like forexample put all the 16 2x2km city squares next to eachother and actually set the highway system myself in the region editor.

At this point it seems like my only realistic way to actually enjoy this game.

[CaptCity 4,893]

Off topic comments removed.

[DazzaDazza 29]

It’s got to do with the global economy thing, the more citys people have the better there global economy looks in the game, have smaller citys but more of them give a illusion of more players or big ciys but less of them , this stops people monopolizing the leader board with maga citys that span 20 to 30 city’s tiles, and stoping people bored with the hole multiplayer thing becauses they could never make citys , think about how long you used to spent on one city in SC4 weeks, month, maybe even a year, this wouldn’t work

it’s a trade off,

For me I don’t care about leader boards I wont to make grate looking city’s and that’s it.

[Zimmah 0]

2km x 2km certainly wouldn't be large enough for a real world sized major airport.

Actually, most modern airfields have runways that have a length of 3,360 meter (3,4 kilometer)

A big airplane like a 757 needs a landing strip of 1,8 kilometer to land safely. (minimum requirement under normal weather conditions by an experienced pilot)

An A380 is said to need about 2,4 kilometers to land safely.

note that these figures are for NORMAL conditions and for safety reasons they are usually much longer. As a rule of thumb a take-off and landing strip needs to be long enough so that an airplane would theoretically be able to lose all engines except one and still be able to take off or abort the flight. So usally they're more than 3 kilometers even if under normal circumstances no plane actually needs all that space, it's for the abnormal situations to make them safer.

Point is, even if you'd make a runway all across the whole region it would still not be long enough for a big plane to land, and than you don't even have things like passengers terminals and taxi-lanes.

[pagenotfound 53]

Nique, that program looks AMAZING. If only sc13 had that engine...I'd love it. Not sure how resourse intensive that would make the game tho.

[infoman96 27]

Over this past weekend I watched a few beta videos of the new simcity and it impressed me overall, it can command the $80 Maxis/EA are asking for. I was actually surprised the other day how many people actually know about this game and are pre-ordering it; while in GameStop for about 30 minutes about four people pre-ordered it. So obviously with that said Maxis has a lot on the line.

Replying to the regional play, it's quite simple as to why the cities have a gap between them. Imagine if player A. decided to put their CBS/skyline on the edge of the block, Player B may be as some of you are, meaning he wants to build a suburban town. So if player A skyline is directly beside Player B suburban area it won't look right. Imagine if Manhattan was split between two different countries, one capitalists and the other socialist; the skyline would be drastically different between the two and it just wouldn't look right. So that's pretty much my guess as to why Maxis decided to space the cities out.

[simcity4deluxe 95]

Well, you asked for a new simcity, you got what you asked for a new simcity, no complained before they first announced that there was going to be a new simcity about the city size, no one asked for it.

[RyanMorgan95 144]

Well, you asked for a new simcity, you got what you asked for a new simcity, no complained before they first announced that there was going to be a new simcity about the city size, no one asked for it.

 

No, we got SimTown.

[Sunfighter 186]

Simcity will be a great game. But a terrible city simulator.

 

Hence the rift in the community. The people that played simcity as more of creative and design tool to create works of art and/or realistic type cities..will be turned off almost immedately. The people that played simcity as a game will probably like it.

 

Warning: Personal opinion incoming : The more they treat Simcity as a game and less of a simulator the worse the series gets. The worse the series gets, the more EA will pressure Devs to make things more "fun" by adding elements that make it more like a "game"....... and down the death spiral simcity goes... 

[McMorky 1]

This has killed my motivation for the game completly. I am not buying this game because of 2x2 and this region system.

I want to build a city! not village county.

Back in SC4. I used to sit on google earth and re-create actual cities. Maxis lost yet another loyal fan. Touchê

 

 

 

...... seriouslky it looks so bad.

[djsokal 6]

1. Axton Shoagan ‏@boyjanoskiantor

   @oceanquigley Hey Ocean, I Was just wondering what would the largest city tile size be? The Large City size in SC4 would be perfect!

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4 FebOcean Quigley ‏@oceanquigley

@boyjanoskiantor For release, 2k x 2k. My long term vision is to have cities the size of an entire region, but that's going to take a while!

 

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5:04 PM - 4 Feb 13 · Details

1. 4 FebAxton Shoagan ‏@boyjanoskiantor

   @oceanquigley That would be awesome and thanks for all the hardwork you and the team have put in, The games looking great

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[djsokal 6]

f-8

@antoniopaiva1 @kythlyn I can't give you promises - but we know lots of people want bigger landscapes to build on.

— Ocean Quigley (@oceanquigley)

February 3, 2013

[DmainEvent 195]

f-8

 

@

antoniopaiva1

@

kythlyn

I can't give you promises - but we know lots of people want bigger landscapes to build on.

— Ocean Quigley (@oceanquigley)

February 3, 2013

 

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="ut "></script>

 

 

Hey they might be implementing my idea!!!  Excellente.  I will wait for that instead of buying this game.

[arcology 224]

Being able to zoom into street level and looking at the city 360 degrees like your standing on a rooftop of a building is awesome The night lighting was great. The rain was cool. The Road tools are awesome. Instead of having to build another power plant being able to add on to the existing buildings is cool. I know there's still bugs and other issues they need to iron out but I was totally impressed and satisfied with the game. It was only one tile we were able to play. Imagine playing 16 all interconnected? I hate the fact that there's gaps between each city and the highway and rail networks are already pre laid out but I think there's a whole lot of other things that make up for that. Its only going to get better over time and I feel this is a great foundation for whats to come.

Don't get me wrong, modular buildings was a nice value add and a good step forward in my opinion; but I believe the issue you mentioned about cities spaced out and the feeling that the 16 cities will not feel interconnected is a bigger gripe for some than others.

>It took years for simcity 4 to become what it is now. I feel this is going to be another great simcity and I love the direction that maxis is going with it. Just give it a chance, its only the beginning.

Yes but you could also look at it the other way; SC2013 isn't really the beginning is it? There are over 20 years of genre development

When I first played The Sims, I loved seeing the detail in animation when a sim would randomly do something. You'd look at them and go, "oh cool they're doing that" and "Oh wow, he dropped it on the floor...man the detail is there". So in SC2013 garage doors opening, children skipping, fire trucks spraying...all these little detail elements as cool as they are will not actually be the draw card to play the game in 3 months time. Because the truth is once you've seen them, they no loner surprise you or excite you like it did once before.

So ask yourself, what will inspire you to load up your city in 3 months time? Could the developers have focused effort on other things that were a given that the genre needed to improve upon, or will following garbage trucks around your city save the day?

 

 

 

Very much agree on this. 

 

Also, a huge concern is the fact that they will be expecting people to pay for DLC to "expand" the game.  There is nothing wrong with that, in small doses, but, I feel that that is why they are starting so "small" to begin with.