Discussion about City Tile Size

[Ohadi195 30]

@mrtnrln

LOL and again LOL, I think that being addicted to SC4 is one thing and it's ok, but to slander a decent game such as CXL for no reason is really meen.

Dude, you don't even know what you are talking about so I'll do my best to help you.

Especially the game lacks inter-city mass transit

what is this then if not a light train?

it has metro and busses tough, but not something basic as trains

wrong again!

The standard highway system is very rigid and has illogical interchange designs

is so?

like odd traffic behaviour, the lack of good statistics (I didn't know what the hell I was producing resource-wise at a given time), memory leaks, poor peformance, random glitches (trees that suddenly disappear) and the unpredictable and unstable behaviour of the game when you apply mods. And funny enough, I missed the grid in CitiesXL, which is really helpful to "aim" your city plans...

sorry mate, I don't know what you are talking about. other than the memory leak (which can be solved by loading the city again) all works fine for me. graphics are awesome. you probabely don't have strong graphic card, mine is quite old and performs great showing 100% trees and 60% traffic and pedestrians.

city is dead?? I don't think that seeing people sweeming at the beach or dancing over nightclubs is dead.

I don't see much of the CitiesXL community lately, nor I've seen a mass-transfer from people going from SC4 to CXL.

How do you know? you should visit XL nation for facts. there you'll find lots of new mods includes RHM, CLM, UIM. lots of new buildings and transportation features as well as simulation add-ons. me myself do my best at modding this game so I guess you were unlucky with your experiences.

even watching the city journals there will take your breath away...

http://xlnation.net/xlex

CitiesXL tried to take SimCity's place, but it was not the right time yet and it was not done by the right company, leaving us with a sloppy programmed, buggy and bad performing game.

CXL took sc4 place way long time ago. those of you who keep hanging on it are nothing but blinded maxis's fans.

how can you compare this

to this??

And where did you read that, if I may ask?

well, actually it's even worse than I though! just read OcramSeattle post up there...

By the way, how is this going backwards in time?

mate, 4km^2 is going back in time to the 90s and no "glassbox" engine or "agents" method will change this fact!

You can stick with sc4 even for another 20 years and miss a real pleasure of playing CXL which is the best for now.

If Maxis won't change their mind about the map area as well as the online-only thing they don't have a chance. I just hope something will happen and they will get themself together to solve this issue, after all they want this game to be popular. (not that they have too much to worry, seems like many guys here will go buy it on blind)

I hope I opened your eyes a bit guys, cause you realy missing a lot...

  Edited April 16, 2012 by Ohadi195  

[Cob92 360]

Cities XL will be comparable to SimCity when the mods finally make the simulation interesting enough to actually play the game. I don't sculpt, I play. I need a city that will fight me at every turn, that has crime issues, and urban blight, and ghettos, and a need for education, and disease, and grime, and fires. Cities XL is only now getting a decent crime simulation; there's still really no consequence for having no fire protection other than rich people maybe not moving in (and even this has been dumbed down massively; CXL beta was a much more challenging game than what we have now). Where are my riots on Main Street? Where are my transit strikes? Where is my gentrification? Why do I have to micromanage the placement of every godforsaken house? Why doesn't my downtown ever change? Cities XL out of the box is not a proper game.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I certainly hope that I can have an XtraLarge city made of 25 neighborhoods (5x5 grid of "city" tiles in Glass Box).

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

The purpose of this topic is to discuss tile playing size, not to discuss CXL vs Simicity.

Thanks

Craig-Abcvs

Moderator

[MandelSoft 2,770]

I really just want to say one thing in defense (or move this discussion to a separate thread when necessary):

@mrtnrln

LOL and again LOL, I think that being addicted to SC4 is one thing and it's ok, but to slander a decent game such as CXL for no reason is really meen.

Dude, you don't even know what you are talking about so I'll do my best to help you.

...

what is this then if not a light train?

...

wrong again!

...

is so?

1) That's AFTER inclusion of mods (NEXL). It's not a game feature that comes right out of the box. Also, trams are INNER-city transport, not INTER-city transport (AKA across city borders)

2) Again, after the inclusion of mods (again, NEXL). I can't remember having inter-city trains in CitiesXL 2009, nor in 2011. Only the metro system was available with some quirks (like, not being able to place stations above ground). SimCity 1, 2000, 3000 and 4 had railway right out of the box, for both passenger and freight transport. True, the stations looked horrible, but at least you had that kind of functionality.

3) Again, after the inclusion of mods (RHM v2.0). You don't remember these interchanges, do you?

Those were those rigid and illogical interchanges I was talking about. These came with the game. Now, Maxis also delivered some prefab interchanges (I'm not really a fan of that either), but these had a more logical design (like not making unnecessary bridges) or take up more space technically than they visually do (before you come up with "not true", yes, I know there's a mod that counter-acts that, but still, in the basic game this was a huge annoyance).

...

sorry mate, I don't know what you are talking about. other than the memory leak (which can be solved by loading the city again) all works fine for me. graphics are awesome. you probabely don't have strong graphic card, mine is quite old and performs great showing 100% trees and 60% traffic and pedestrians.

city is dead?? I don't think that seeing people sweeming at the beach or dancing over nightclubs is dead.

The graphics are not the problem, those run fine. Heck, my graphics card has no problem to render my city full-detail. No, the actual SIMULATOR and game processes are the things that slow my game down. And did you ever heard the multiple laggy "click-click-click"-sound when clicking a button? The problem is that CitiesXL is still single core. True, SimCity 4 is also single core, but that game came out in 2003, when nobody had a multi-core PC, and the creators had no idea that this game would last that long. CitiesXL came out in 2009 (at least, the first version), when quite some PCs do use multiple cores. Even after TWO new releases, the multi-core problem, as well as the memory leak problem, still isn't solved.

Also, the ambient sound still sounds off, the skies are always cloudless (in SimCity 4, you can't see the sky, but you can turn clouds one), the water doesn't seem to move that much, the stoplights don't actually work, little to no construction sites when buildings are built... these may be small annoyances, but together they count up to lose interest in the game.

(small detail: did anyone notice that the moon comes up on the wrong side of the sky? You never see a full moon and a sunrise together side by side. That's technically impossible, because what does light up the moon then?)

...

How do you know? you should visit XL nation for facts. there you'll find lots of new mods includes RHM, CLM, UIM. lots of new buildings and transportation features as well as simulation add-ons. me myself do my best at modding this game so I guess you were unlucky with your experiences.

even watching the city journals there will take your breath away...

http://xlnation.net/xlex

I do keep an eye on XLNation, trust me. But I see way less traffic there than I see here or at SC4Devotion.com. Even though SC4D's activity is in decline, as we noticed there lately, it still shows much more activity then I see from my point of view at XLNation.

In general, I'm not too impressed by CitiesXL journals. There are always one or two things that really bug me. When playing the game myself, I always had the feeling that I couldn't make an aestetical pleasing city, mostly because although the roads can be layed down organically, the lots are still square...

Mind you, I do check my facts

...

CXL took sc4 place way long time ago. those of you who keep hanging on it are nothing but blinded maxis's fans.

how can you compare this

to this??

You're showing one of the worst pics of SimCity 4. I can counter-act your statement with this:

(or if you're really good with SC4, this):

A lot has been improved since 2003. Not only the content, but also city building strategies.

...

well, actually it's even worse than I though! just read OcramSeattle post up there...

Read it, seen nothing about the 500K limit. By the way, cramming up +500K people on a 2x2 map, heck, even on a 4x4 map is a bit unrealistic. That would mean that if you do that on a 4x4 map, the population density would be 31.25K per square km. Quite some metropolises don't even reach that density; they are more spread out.

...

mate, 4km^2 is going back in time to the 90s and no "glassbox" engine or "agents" method will change this fact!

You can stick with sc4 even for another 20 years and miss a real pleasure of playing CXL which is the best for now.

If Maxis won't change their mind about the map area as well as the online-only thing they don't have a chance. I just hope something will happen and they will get themself together to solve this issue, after all they want this game to be popular. (not that they have too much to worry, seems like many guys here will go buy it on blind)

I hope I opened your eyes a bit guys, cause you realy missing a lot...

Like I said, we're on the same side with that fact. I find 2x2 too small too, I'd personally prefer 4x4 (or even 8x8 when possible). Yet, with region play, you can make your city larger than the map by forming one large agglomeration. I've seen quite some people using that strategy in SimCity 4 and they make huge urban sprawls, spreading out for more that 20 or 30 km, larger than you can ever make on an isolated CitiesXL map. That's a strong point of region play; your city isn't geograpically isolated, it's connected to its environment. You can have one city tile with the CBD, while the surrounding city tiles are part of the urban sprawl, so you can have numerous of city tiles acting like one large metropolis.

But I can see our biased view of both games doesn't get us any further in this discussion, and I think it would not be productive to go further on with this discussion. We can't convince each other and so this discussion would be endless and it would be wise to end it here.

(I've put the text in a Spoiler to hide the wall of text for people who don't want to read it )

Best,

Maarten

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I am in general agreement with Maarten and others. If this game really is as described so far, I won't give a rat's patootie for it, let alone eighty bucks. Waiting will fill, but many answers to the basic questions should come out at E3.

IMHO the builders are making a game, not for us, but for a new market that someone has dreamed up for the Gen x and y.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

No, no, no, no, no! You both have it wrong! The population limit is 200,000 (which is perfectly reasonable) 200,000/4 = 50,000/km². That population density is even higher than that of Bombay/Mumbai (29,650). I reached a population of 183k with 77k commercial jobs and 44k high tech industry jobs. My city is jam packed with buildings. As a matter of fact, I will show you with my City Journal.

EDIT: I proved myself wrong, I reached 207k sims. Here is my City Journal:

https://community.simtropolis.com/journals/3482-mezaton-regional-experiments-2012/

  Edited April 17, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[Dewm 177]

No, no, no, no, no! You both have it wrong! The population limit is 200,000 (which is perfectly reasonable) 200,000/4 = 50,000/km². That population density is even higher than that of Bombay/Mumbai (29,650). I reached a population of 183k with 77k commercial jobs and 44k high tech industry jobs. My city is jam packed with buildings. As a matter of fact, I will show you with my city Journal.

I'm assuming that you got the population limit from the interview/article that stated "one that simultaneously keeps constant tabs on up to 200,000 of these guys"

​We aren't sure what he means by that. If you go back and read the whole article, at the that point he was talking about the "agents" and said that the simulation can keep tabs on up to 200,000. Well here is where it gets fuzzy, was he talking about 200,000sims? or 200,000 agents? Because factories have agents, commercial stores have agents... So we'll have to see.,

But even if its 200,000 sims.. I do not like the idea of a population limit at all.

(Example of what I mean with the agents: morning comes, factories start up, send out 40,000 "help wanted" agents, 40,000 "sim" agents respond, schools start, send out 20,000 "school" bus agents" 20,000 "kid agents" respond, the factories start producing stuff, they send out "delivery truck" agents to retailers, say 20,000 of those.

So here you have used 140,000 agents... but you only have a population of 60,000k)

So I dunno. we'll have to see..

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I think that the population limit would be 200,000 and agents will be running at most times of the day so that no more than 500,000 agents are running at any given time. Carpooling might reduce the amount of agents, as well as mass transit. Children might not become agents if the agent limit is being close to being reached.

[XXProtoXX 6]

Maybe agents are organized into categories and each category has a specific number monitored at any given time. Agents apparently doesn't mean population. And another thing, why would Maxis give SimCity 4 and CitiesXL an another advantage over SimCity 5.

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

...and now we are discussing population limits?

I think this thread has pretty much run its course.

**Unpinned**

If the discussion continues to wander away from city tile size then it will likely be closed.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Here's a howdy-do. I am generally building cities like this 4 x 4 tile. I don't think this would be too terribly possible in a 2 x 2.

My Lincoln County "city" which has a port, and an airport, and a farming pod, and other good things. All of these are populated, and nicely laid out. I like green space, as can be seen. How could one do this in a 2 x 2 tile??

  Edited April 17, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[XXProtoXX 6]

I think this is very possible to use medium size tiles effectively.

[croxis 150]

We have no idea how regions will work yet. This is all conjecture.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

A medium city tile with a population cap of 200,000 can still be fun (I would assume that residential demand will completely disappear or go negative once your theoretical capacity hits that number regardless of whether your population has filled up all your housing).

Here is an example with 180k population (that can be pushed up to 200k):

Later shot when it was 183k instead of 174k

  Edited April 18, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[DmainEvent 195]

I am personally hoping that clear up what the tile size will be eventually. I appreciate that they are contributing to how the simulation works, but while we are trying to simulate an economy, maybe it doesn't need to be that detailed? If we were simulating a business, then I think Glass-Box would be perfect for that. But a city is more of a Macro Level sort of thing. Maybe we the business simulations could be scaled down a bit, or simplified to allow for more business and people to occupy a simulation and thus allow for more people or agents? Or maybe, they could scale it so that when you are in a closer view or something, you see the agents and everything work just as described, but when you zoom out to a macro level, the simulation cuts down on some of the details, and just focus's on stuff that would occur at that level. It might be worth exploring how zoom could scale the simulation. When your out viewing your 100kmx100km region, very little agent simulating goes on, but when you are on the street level, maybe the maximum amount of agent simulation will happen. I should propose this to maxis and see what they think.

[DmainEvent 195]

I hate to bring up a dead thread, but I haven't heard anyone's critique of my idea yet, and I can't find the original map size thread, so I thought I would just restate here....

Why don't they have some kind of progressive simulation, where the scope of the simulation is dynamically affected by the amount of the map you can see? For instance, if you are at the closet zoom level (since this is in 3d I am not sure how they would granualize the zoom levels, but say you can see maybe 10 autonoma at a time), then all the features listed in glassbox can be seen, ie, you can see factories moving boxes and creating goods and services and so on. If you can see 1000 autanoma at a time, a sort of state of each autonoma will be saved, something that can be a very simple integer struct 1-bad shape, 2-fair-, 3-good, 4-excellent. That state would be used to indicate to the simulation how it would show other autonoma interacting with it. For instance, if a factory/commercial business is 1, there would be limited trucks/cars/sims visiting it. You could apply that to just about any other other autonoma unit per 1000 seen. Each autonoma would have how-ever many integer structs it would need for water, fire, economy, ect... it would need to run the glassbox engine. You would go on and in increments of autonoma that make sense. Right now we are just movking along powers of 10, but it could be 100 or 1000. All the time you are saving state of units of autonoma progressively till you get to a point where you can see an entire region and things are still being simulated but the entire region is not being simulated. I am thinking you could view an entire region by doing that. All of it being simulated. By the way, the state of each unit of progressively saved autonoma units could be changed. For instance, if a power plant, blows and an autonoma unit is affected, that autonoma's state could change so that it's power unit goes to 1. You could see this at the region level, you couldn't see this at the lowest level, but it would be simulated.

This idea allows for autonoma to be simulated in parallel, so you can focus on one autonoma at a time, and also simulate an entire region without affecting performance to a large degree. I originally got this idea from the region idea of simcity 4. But I figured, why couldn't you break down the region concept a little bit more, so that more is being simulated the closer you get to your cities, but only things that you would need to focus on at the point would be affected. For instance, you don't worry about fires or water outages at the region level, why should they occur at all except at the closest view? Let me know what you think. If you could forward this idea to maxis, I would be eternally greatfull? Who knows, maybe I can brought on as a consultant on this project?

[Supertask 29]

DmainEvent, if I've understood your idea correctly then a potential problem I foresee is that just where you're looking and at what zoom would affect the simulation rules. I can imagine a strategy guide that says, say: "after zoning the residential, zoom in on it at the closest zoom and set speed to cheetah, zooming in will increase simulation of agents and this will help because...". That would seem kind of weird.

So if we are limited administratively speaking to 2 by 2 kilometres, I'd still want to be able to see beyond that, even if it was just a frozen snapshot.

Well one of the first trailers showed two separate players cooperating to build a nuclear power plant that straddled their cities boundaries, so it may be far more integrated than we are imagining. Lacking any other context, people are imagining all new features almost as if they were implemented in Simcity 4, but city tiles may be very different from how they are in Simcity 4.
  Edited May 30, 2012 by Supertask  

[DmainEvent 195]

I am just hoping that they are considering this or something like this. I am not much of an algorithms guy, and there would probably be many repercussions to what I have listed. But I think it could work if you optimize some of the aspects.

[alex macnamara 139]

Looking at the new gameplay trailer it shows that 2 different (and distant) cities are being displayed in "pan view". Just look at how far the airport is from the skyscrapers! Its about a good 3 to 4 miles away! This could confirm smooth city transition gameplay

[TEBB_Dipsy 13]

What concerns me is what seems the large "tile size" for individual buildings. What I've always liked in SC4 was that a large city could feel large because you could fit row after row of dense housing or have several large suburban areas and a downtown. So far the cities looks so small and unrealistic.

[Urban Cartographer 601]

Notice that in much of Toronto, a superblock is a 2km by 2km area bordered by major arterial roads. A medium-sized city tile would essentially consist of the area surrounded by the nearest major arterial roads. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concession_road This is why 2km by 2km seems too small for a city (probably a city ward at best).

[Ocram's Razr 964]

A region is merely a multiplayer city.

[Mark Waybill 242]

A region is merely a multiplayer city.

Or, by the looks of it, a multiplayer assortment of citys scattered across a vast unpopulated expanse of grassland... I sure hope that that video was showing that scenario purely for demonstrative purposes, to make it clear there were two cities and an aiport, rather than showing the capabilities of regional play. I'd like to think two cities could have a border shared.

[WiiGoGetter 65]

Some real malls would be able or almost fit a medium tile in SC4. And take like a fourth of a large tile. Some people told it all about airports

some real airports would not be able to fit a large tile. Im all for larger tiles but as a option.

[Essex 322]

It's called "Sim City" not "Sim Village" so yeah large tiles are a must.

[TheDinozRule 77]

I've seen the E3 trailer, the new features and multiplayer mode were okay, but there was someting concerning. Map sizes. I seen the size of the cities, and they are ridiculous. They are the same size as the international airport. I want to create skyscrapers surrounded by vast surburbs, not an over-developed village. Even the announce trailer had small cities. I'm pretty worried about this.

[Fatherted 129]

I know they are about the size of a municipal airport with the landing strip tacked on :/

[DmainEvent 195]

I am pretty sure they are going for "fun" and not "realism" in this game. Quite frankly, if they had just tuned up the simulation and graphics a bit (+curvy roads and all that) this would have been a no brainer for me. Now I don't think I can justify paying for this game. Sorry to say, but I have am officially un-excited about this game.

[Vahr 341]

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