Maxis live broadcast

[aereus 106]

This event wasn't really meant for diehard fans from SC4 imho -- it was designed as a Marketing Leverage to get Sims3 fanbase into buying Simcity. Hence why they made it a combo event for Sims3 and Simcity despite Sims3 being 3 years old now.

That's why you had a replay of the video and a bunch of softball or already answered questions -- because it's all stuff that the casual facebook crowd doesn't know about.

[Hattiwatti 1]

I'm most disappointed by removing terraforming, and even the meteors don't seem to be doing any damage to the landscape.

1. Is the main highway pre-determined?

2. Are city slots right next to each other, if so, can I connect cities ?

[Greyflame 54]

I hope they have agriculture either as a zone or regional filler with food as a resource.

There are tram lines that go separate from avenues, I saw those in the videos.

Subways are rather expensive and are more appropriate for XL cities or regional networks.

--Ocram

I'd like agriculture, but if they don't relax a little on the city size there isn't going to be anywhere to put it. You'd have a single farm for your entire city.

I know the actual tram lines can disconnect from the avenues, but that only goes so far if you need to be on an avenue to have a station. 4 lane roans are big, rare deals in my corner of reality, and the light rail system here has stations in parks, suburbs, and all sorts of areas with only 2-lane road access.

As far as subways go I'm less heartbroken that they aren't included, though I'm hoping trams will be able to be 'tricked' into acting like elevated rails.

Also, the questions didn't "suck." They were valid, well though out questions. While they might have been about features we already know are in the game, they were still good questions.

Yeah. I just wish they'd been a little more elaborate. Or well, new.

I'm most disappointed by removing terraforming, and even the meteors don't seem to be doing any damage to the landscape.

1. Is the main highway pre-determined?

2. Are city slots right next to each other, if so, can I connect cities ?

1, yes.

2, no.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Not learnt much more to be honest, 10 minutes is not very long to gain a greater insight.

Although it was nice to see more gameplay, I didn't like how they answered most of the questions using it, instead of responding directly. We already knew most things they said, or had good knowledge of before.

Overall, while it was great that Simtropolis was invited, I thought we would learn a bit more from this broadcast. Hopefully more information was obtained behind the scenes!

[MarjaSpaceOddity 14]

Overall, while it was great that Simtropolis was invited, I thought we would learn a bit more from this broadcast. Hopefully more information was obtained behind the scenes!

I would think so. The whole SimCity part had a nervous vibe, resulting in the live gameplay being too short to mean anything. They should have relaxed a little and taken more time. I hope they put up the recording soon, the video was very choppy for me, missing even the bits that were there.

[Eurofighter1200 0]

So now we know the Map size is not so small we think like in this Thread:

Today we see in the Live Chat that the Train go through the Map this Map looks much bigger then from the first gameplay Video. So in the Thread i have linked is say only 14 buildings from the half of the one side to the Train but now we know the Trainline is not always the Boarder of the Map so we have 14 Houses for maybe 1/4 of the Map length.This means we can build approximately 56 Houses from one side to the other side of the Map this is also small but not extrem small i think. I like the idee that ther goes a ready Trainline througt the Map and we can just build a Station there. Link of the Video is following its not there now!

Edit1: because some mistake

  Edited October 9, 2012 by Eurofighter1200  

[Greyflame 54]

Hey guys, got a big reply back from Guillaume on the maxis forums, thought I'd share it here as he addresses each of my questions to some extent or another:

Serentropic wrote:First off, I want to thank Guillaume Pierre, who's been really good so far about answering questions on the forums, and has alleviated a lot of my concerns so far. (You should have let him participate in the interview, haha.) I was a bit frustrated in the broadcast that some of the more elaborate questions weren't brought up, but hopefully we'll see some of them here!

I write better than I speak...

Serentropic wrote:1 ) In regard to agents/sims and mass transit: how do busses and trams determine their destination? Are the routes pre-defined, such as by the player? If not, what if agents on board have destinations in different parts of town; how do the busses/trams prioritize their destinations and routes? Do they attempt to reroute if an accident blocks their path?

If the vehicle is empty, it will try to go to a stop that has people waiting to be picked up first, and otherwise go to stops at random, based on distance.

The routes build themselves in an emergent way, with the vehicle looking for a stop to drop off its passengers based on what type of destination they want to go to, and what is available near reachable stops.

They do the same type of micro decisions as other vehicles do, so if there is road congestion ahead they might make a turn into a side street to reach their eventual destination.

Serentropic wrote:2 ) Can we expect more tilesets in the future? Might we pick and choose our loaded tilesets so that we could, say, have a city comprised exlusively of traditional Japanese shoin-zukuri style and ultramodern Dubai structures?

Can't talk about that yet.

Serentropic wrote:3 ) Will larger (3*3+km) city tiles be available? Might there be a way to 'expand' the default 2*2 tile aside from linking to other cities? (kind of answered, but ... still hoping)

The size of our boxes is a direct product of the fidelity of our simulation. We needed to keep the size limited in order to support such high volume of buildings/cars/sims/etc... this is a very complex simulation!

Serentropic wrote:4 ) Will the game feature agriculture, either as a zone or a resource?

That's a great suggestion.

Serentropic wrote:5 ) I'm a suburban planner at heart; I love trams, but don't want a city that relies heavily on avenues/bigger roads. Can we build tram stations independant of avenues?

Yes, you can lay stand-alone tracks, but the stops need to be placed on avenues with light rail (otherwise Sims on foot wouldn't have anywhere to go.) I usually lay a small piece of avenue where I place my stop, and then have smaller streets stem from it.

Serentropic wrote:6 ) How extreme of map features can we expect? I picture cities built on massive cliff ridges, tiny island towns, cities at the bottom of craters, etc!

We're still working on our region pipeline, but from what I've seen Ocean make so far, the terrain is going to be awe-inspiring.

Serentropic wrote:7 ) Any chance we can seduce you into including some maps?

I'll have to show this to the region team

Serentropic wrote:8 ) The road overlay graphics for the service buildings (politce stations, etc) suggest they only have a range of a couple city blocks. Why so small?

We're still tuning the range feedback, but you'll see that you'll often have to make decisions on whether you should expand your current civic building if your city is densely packed, or place another one if your layout is more spread out.

[baertooth 330]

One thing that was said was interesting and it seems they have now put some though into it and that's concerning around what they termed "abandoned" cities and take over other cities as a result. And that indirectly allows one to create scenarios and share them.

Simcity one brought the game play.

Simcity 2000 brought isometric views and user controlled zoning.

Simcity 3000 brought realism, fine tuned control, and BATT'ing.

Simcity 4 brought regions and depth.

Simcity 5 needed to solve sharing cities.

The point about the abandoned cities is actually kind of good news to me. That means what I believe SC5 should have brought to the table was sharing cities as in I create a city and you get to play it is partially in SC2013. However, I think it should be you get a copy of my city and you can play my city for yourself. Here, it's I loose control over my city and you play my city which is only mildly desirable but a step in the right direction.

[aereus 106]

That's one thing to think about -- the basic small unupgraded police station range was small, but we didn't consider that you can add onto the station or build a larger one. And of course, as Guillaume said they are still tweaking the ranges.

I still don't buy into the statement about the city tiles size due to being a complex simulation -- holding us to 1 city tile size when the min specs of the game are a very dated system from 2005 means a modern system could handle at least 4x the city size. It can't be THAT demanding if it's designed to run on 7 year old hardware thats something like 10x slower than current stuff.

[jedrek18 1]

1. Is the main highway pre-determined?

2. Are city slots right next to each other, if so, can I connect cities ?

Reply from Guillaume:

Regional roads (the ones that connect cities to each other) are Maxis-built, and cities have a bit of space in between them.

[DmainEvent 195]

"The size of our boxes is a direct product of the fidelity of our simulation. We needed to keep the size limited in order to support such high volume of buildings/cars/sims/etc... this is a very complex simulation!"

Which is what I thought. This is a classic computer science problem. I bet the requirements on you computer are linear as the number of agents go up. It might be as bad NXN as agents go up.

Here is an idea maxis. Go back to statistical simulation so we can have larger cities for Heaven sakes. Or at the very least find a way to segment your cities so you can allow for larger cities. I mean they said so themselves, in there Region play, they allow cities to save state if know one is playing them... Well take that concept and apply it to contiguous cities (Ill call them boroughs) and have them SIDE BY SIDE with a little more simulation running then in your average region. Viola... Now you have large cities with all that tiny simulation going on. If you absolutely feel as though that granular of a simulation is needed then you need to do that. No other way. I feel as though 2x2Km is unacceptably unrealistic. And that is just my feeling. I know there are others who feel differently but I think this is more of sim town than simcity. Cities grow to absolute Mammoth proportion. I mean China has a couple of cities of over 10M population. That is what we are trying to simulate. You guys lost focus and think we care about every single truck delivering groceries to the local grocery store... That's fine in a town simulation, but in a CITY simulation I don't want to sacrifice city scale for the minutia. I want to be able to Terraform my terrain in some way, and I WANT LARGE SPRAWLING CITIES. If for no other reason than I would like the option to expand without having to constantly switch cities.

I say back to the drawing board fellas.

[Hellken 1,658]

Any Controlled access expressways? http://en.wikipedia....-access_highway

So far the highways in SimCity 2013 are limited access roads: http://en.wikipedia....ted-access_road

I would really be interested to FINALLY build something like this....

  Edited October 9, 2012 by Hellken  

[Tramwhet 53]

I agree with DmainEvent.

Maybe it is too late for this Simcity, but think about it for Simcity 2.

If EA restricts the game and/or blackmail you for some changes in the game, tell us, left EA, and lets build the game independantly and with the help of the community. Money ? Just go on kickstarter and describe your project, you will get millions of dollars ( + make the game offline, you will economise a lot of money, we don't care about online gaming)

  Edited October 9, 2012 by Tramwhet  

[Greyflame 54]

I certainly wouldn't take the game back to drawing board; like I've mentioned, I'm pretty happy with the engine they have. The actually code they're building from is really strong. It does limit scale, yeah, but I think the degree that they're limiting scale for is more to keep the system requirements low. I'm really hoping we can convince them to do some bigger tiles for heavy duty computer users, haha. Just 2 or 3 times as big would make a world of difference I think. But I'd rather have the simulation depth, myself; I'm a functionality junky. I like to know that everything represented in the game is actively doing something.

That's just a personal preference though and I know there's a spectrum of what people want out of the game. But importantly, I don't think that this question is one of 'EA being the big bad evil guys and forcing something down our throats', since there's legitimately a community division between micro and macro management preferences.

[NCGAIO 562]

This event wasn't really meant for diehard fans from SC4 imho -- it was designed as a Marketing Leverage to get Sims3 fanbase into buying Simcity. Hence why they made it a combo event for Sims3 and Simcity despite Sims3 being 3 years old now.

I also found too obvious ... another maneuver without effect.

How many copies pre-sales that EA has already completed ? ...

many concerns apparent!.

"The size of our boxes is a direct product of the fidelity of our simulation. We needed to keep the size limited in order to support such high volume of buildings/cars/sims/etc... this is a very complex simulation!"

This idea of transforming the access roads in the distribution and fundraising (Agents) simplifies to the maximum the Simulation.

The name of the goal here is portability!

  Edited October 9, 2012 by NCGAIO  

[jacksunny 741]

Serentropic wrote:4 ) Will the game feature agriculture, either as a zone or a resource?

That's a great suggestion.

Personally, I'd like to see the empty space between cities filled in with farms. The cities are just too small to zone agriculture.

I still don't buy into the statement about the city tiles size due to being a complex simulation -- holding us to 1 city tile size when the min specs of the game are a very dated system from 2005 means a modern system could handle at least 4x the city size. It can't be THAT demanding if it's designed to run on 7 year old hardware thats something like 10x slower than current stuff.

The problem isn't computer hardware. The simulation engine is so complex that it can't support a massive metropolis. It doesn't matter if you have the best hardware on your computer, the simulation engine can't handle a city with 10 million people.

[aereus 106]

The problem isn't computer hardware. The simulation engine is so complex that it can't support a massive metropolis. It doesn't matter if you have the best hardware on your computer, the simulation engine can't handle a city with 10 million people.

Then it needs to be redesigned or scaled back. Because that also means that 5 years from now it would still run just the same. I'm not an expert in simulation design, but I am a programmer, and I just don't see that type of bottleneck being at play here. The simulation is a myriad amount of basic decision trees at work. Given more CPU cores and more GPU power, you should be able to scale the simulation up quite nicely. Especially if the GPU mechanics had Load on Demand and Falloff implemented.

[brynhyfryd 222]

The problem with the game is MULTI PLAYER.

If the game was offline all these restrictions would not be present in the game.

[kwetzel345 101]

Exactly brnhyfryd, that's the one thing that's holding all other aspects back. It needs to be gone!

[jacksunny 741]

The problem with the game is MULTI PLAYER.

If the game was offline all these restrictions would not be present in the game.

I disagree. Name a single restriction caused by multiplayer. I can't think of any.

[NCGAIO 562]

Simulation.

[Greyflame 54]

I don't think multiplayer places any restriction on the actual structure of the game, especially since it's asynchronous. You don't need to 'line up' people's processing power. Granted, it leads to some design decisions (mostly related to region play).

In any case, I disagree; While I of course support an offline/single-player OPTION, there were a lot of dedicated SimCity 4 fans (myself included) who really do like multiplayer. It feels very deep and real when other cities interact with yours; ie, where there are 'NPC' entities in the world. That, and despite the bad name 'social' has gotten, interacting with other people is ... you know ... healthy xD Again, it's a preference thing, and not everyone is going to want multiplayer. But the feature is there, it's solid, and there's no reason to REMOVE it.

Simulation.

What? Is that an answer to the previous post? The syntax of the English language usually works best when you provide more than one word. How is simulation restricted, if this is the case? Please elaborate on your points.

  Edited October 9, 2012 by Greyflame  

[jacksunny 741]

Simulation.

The simulation engine isn't there because of multiplayer, it would be in the game even if it was offline.

[brynhyfryd 222]

The problem with the game is MULTI PLAYER.

If the game was offline all these restrictions would not be present in the game.

I disagree. Name a single restriction caused by multiplayer. I can't think of any.

Easy....Multiplayer affects the game in many areas due to the low system requirement. These affect things such as:-

1.City Size.

2.Game play.

Multi player also affects the design strategy of the game. This is why there is no terraforming, Ability to determane regional transport, small cities ETC.

Glassbox engine is being held back due to multiplayer system requirements.

  Edited October 9, 2012 by brynhyfryd  

[dgawin 4]

Please wait for the First Patch/Upgrade Pack. SC4 without Rush Hour is also Not the Game we want!

  Edited October 9, 2012 by dgawin  

[jacksunny 741]

The problem with the game is MULTI PLAYER.

If the game was offline all these restrictions would not be present in the game.

I disagree. Name a single restriction caused by multiplayer. I can't think of any.

Easy....Multiplayer affects the game in many areas due to the low system requirement. These affect things such as:-

1.City Size.

2.Game play.

Multiplayer does not affect city sizes, the small city sizes are a result of the Glassbox engine which, as I mentioned earlier, would be in the game even if multiplayer wasn't.

[Catchin22 299]

This is a terrible excuse for SC5. IMO the graphics are childish, I could live with them reluctantely if the game was open for modding but it seems that's not going to be the case. Aside from that the maps are ENTIRELY too small, there wont be ANY large sprawling cities and NO teraforming! If you noticed the zoomed out part of the video the tiny ass road section for the casino was nearly 1/2 the map! Absurd.

For the "designer types" which I really think, is most of us, this is insulting. They are obviously marketing towards children and FB Zynga game players. As a long time gamer and a professional designer I am seriously considering putting together a top notch game design team to blow this crapware out of the water.

This feels like a rushed half assed project where they concentrated on numbers more than game play and what the community has been asking for.

And on top of all that, the censored comments in the "live chat" was a complete joke! I don't believe any of those comments were even real, just some prop to make it look good. So insulting.

[brynhyfryd 222]

The problem with the game is MULTI PLAYER.

If the game was offline all these restrictions would not be present in the game.

I disagree. Name a single restriction caused by multiplayer. I can't think of any.

Easy....Multiplayer affects the game in many areas due to the low system requirement. These affect things such as:-

1.City Size.

2.Game play.

Multiplayer does not affect city sizes, the small city sizes are a result of the Glassbox engine which, as I mentioned earlier, would be in the game even if multiplayer wasn't.

Glassbox engine has been scaled back due to the game requiring a low pc hardware spec and this is due to the multiplayer aspect.

Because the system requirement is low this in turn affects the capability of the glassbox engine which in turn affects the overall city size. Therefore we wont see simcity with bigger maps unless multiplayer is dumped and the minimum system requirement increased.

[Hamish 1,369]

I thought this was a really good interview by Zelgadis, and a really good showing by Maxis.

Was really nice to see the game running, and it looked really stable. The most impressive part for me was going from region view down into city view in one swift movement, takes out the long load times. Reminded me of spore.

The questions that Zel asked were indicative of what we wanted to know.

And I am happy with the answers that was given. Terraforiming looks fine to me, there's a bigger emphasis on the mayor side of sim city, rather than the mayor/god gameplay of simcity 4. While some won't like that, I don't have any problems with it, it looks like it will make the game more challenging, which is great.

I am happy to give up subway for trams. They do exactly the same thing, except one is far more visual and dominant. Why include a transportation option that we can't see? Better to use those resources on something that we can see and can more easily plan with the visual aesthetics of the glassbox engine.

Good to hear boats will be included in the game, shame we couldn't see any of them yet, but I'm sure there will be some gameplay including them soon.

Buses look good, especially the stops. Much better having on road stops, rather than the buildings of SC4.

I was impressed with the customisation options of the clinic too. In SC4 the clinic was under-utilised by me, but it seems that it may be a better option to modularly upgrade it, rather than plop a big hospital down.

Good work Zel and Dirk, you represented the site with pride, and it sounds like you had a really great time out there

[Mizari 23]

I must say the restriction of large buildings to large roads is absolutely preposterous as well. In most actual cities, particularly new developments (even going back to the 50's and 60's housing estates, etc), buildings are generally advisable not to be set directly against large roads because this is a traffic bottleneck waiting to happen. Instead service roads will serve access-departing traffic and major avenues through-traffic with limited number of connection point between those.

With commercial the tendency for organic growth to cluster around large throughfares is more predominant, but for housing this is not the case. You don't see the 1970's tower blocks line large avenues, they were intentionally set in parks, with narrow roads serving the final access. This traffic-dependent outlooks limits the planning potential for the player and restricts the style and course of development taken in a very unpleasant way, I feel.

Furthermore, as regards city-sizes: sure, fine, medium-size, I can live with that, if I can make a metropolis of interlinked medium-sized tiles. DIsconnected city tiles with swaths between them, I cannot say I feel impressed (though I do feel better about the game in general than initially, indeed, I must confess that I am slightly excited.)