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Half a million, what a milestone! Big congrats to the site staff who keep this site so stable despite the numbers. I wonder how many of that 500k are active?

So we have been invited to Maxis' studios at the main EA campus to get some first-hand impressions of the game and to interact with the developers. Up for this trip will be Zelgadis and myself to represent the Simtropolis community. We will be getting some hands-on time with the game itself, and some time to speak with the developers. We will also be attending the Maxis live broadcast the following day, where SimCity will also be a topic of discussion! This is super exciting and we're looking forward to seeing the new game in person and will be getting some chat-time with the development team. I'd love to bring down some of your burning questions to ask in person, so please use this topic to let us know what you want us to try to cover. I can't promise we can get answers for everything, but you know we'll try our best! Both Zelgadis and I will be visiting with Maxis Oct 8 and attending the live broadcast event Oct 9. We'll post frequent updates via the website and twitter, so let us know what you want us to say or keep an eye out for. We'll also give you a full debriefing when we get back, as well as our honest to goodness first-hand feedback of this new version of the greatest city simulation game. EDIT: Thanks for the feedback everyone, we'll take the top most voted questions down with us and try to dig up some answers as best we can!

At last, the new Real Highway (RHW) Interchange Guide board has been completed! All RHW interchange tutorials throughout the SimCity 4 community can be found there. Each guide has been indexed by type, and organized in a way that it is easily accessible from the table of contents. ----- For those who are new to the RHW Interchange Guide, or do now know what it is, here is a brief introduction: With the release of RHW 3.0 (and subsequent releases), there is virtually an infinite number of ways you can construct your highways and interchanges. However, this is not a simple task, and takes quite a bit of getting used to. Many folks have looked at several pictures of RHW interchanges and asked "whoa! How'd you do that?" and have tried to construct something similar themselves, sometimes with much difficulty that eventually causes them to give up. This guide will show examples of various interchange types and will describe how they were made. Feel free to ask questions after a guide has been posted if you are having difficulty. I will attempt to show how to construct these interchanges as simple as possible, using only the necessary downloads. If you'd like to submit your own guides to this thread, please post your guide in the submissions thread to have it reviewed. Also be sure to follow the format set up in previous guides. Thanks!

It's that time again . . . the first top-secret feature reveal video for the upcoming NAM Version 31 release is now up. The RealHighway system, celebrating the 7th anniversary of its first release on Friday, now "flexes" some new muscle.

Developer Maxis has released three screenshots for the new SimCity, depicting the reboot's in-game environments. SimCity is the fifth main installment to the long-running series by EA Maxis.

Part 3, Scenario 2. - In this video, we talk about how the water system works, from the pumping of the precious liquid to its distribution to your thirsty Sims. This system uses almost all the tools that our simulation engine, GlassBox, has to offer: units, maps, agents, paths and resources. By Guillaume Pierre, SimCity Scripting Lead Read More: http://www.simcity.c...ater-everywhere Note: Tech demo video originally presented at the 2012 GDC.

The closed beta for SimCity 2013 is now accepting sign ups. You will have to be picked to get the beta, but anyone can sign up. The signup is now live and can be found by clicking this news item. You will need a Origin Account.

Cities in Motion is making a huge overhaul of its game for its next release. Check out what development has to say... you may be surprised at how they are steering a course towards simcity.

A new article released today on the SimCity website gives us information on the traffic simulation, UI, and music of the new SimCity. The game's traffic system will feature sounds based on the movement and speed of the cars. Pictures of the UI have been released, revealing more information about the simulation and its elements. There is also an example of what the new SimCity's music will sound like. Check out the article for all the info!

This video shows some gameplay of the game and includes information about the new Simcity game.

TORONTO — Ontario's elementary school curriculum spells out that all Grade 3 students must learn about the similarities and differences between urban and rural communities, although it leaves it up to teachers to figure out the best way to impart that knowledge. As unconventional as it might sound, some kids are getting a lesson by playing "SimCity" on an iPad. By Michael Oliveira, The Canadian Press | Associated Press Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CT.../#ixzz1rbXUfgRC

SC4 Devotion, a major website in the SimCity community (like Simtropolis) is celebrating it's 6th birthday this month! A number of festivities are planned in honour of this, including a special showcase from the NAM Team! Who knows what we'll see, but I'm going to assume it's good!

The developers of the latest SimCity learned a valuable lesson Friday during a Reddit AMA, one that will hopefully be passed on to other developers: people -- you know, the downstream consumers you're hoping will purchase your software? They hatehatehatehatehatehatehateHATE DRM. The first answer back, from Kip Katsarelis (Senior Producer) was far from comforting: Sorry, I replied to it below. Not avoiding. Here was the reply... "I actually just ran over to our online engineering team to get the latest info. We do handle "short" internet outages gracefully. Meaning, if your internet goes out while you're logged in and playing the game, we can can recover gracefully. You shouldn't notice a thing. "Short" is still being defined." At least Katsarelis somewhat acknowledges that the term "short" is woefully undefined. And whether or not players "notice a thing" isn't really the sort of issue that should be getting sorted during an informal Q&A. While that answer was less than satisfactory, Kip's followup was downright laughable. We will allow you to play for as long as we can preserve your game state. This will most likely be minutes. The response to that bit of "online imagineering" was full of win, however. My computer happens to have a hard drive that's suitable for preserving game state. Should I consider buying your game, or is it crippled to online-only?

According to Maxis the city sizes are due to performance issues and better simulation. They also said making city sizes too big made players "repeat parts of their cities". For the 16 city limit per region, Maxis said it was due to performance issues on the client (not computers) and budget.

Electronic Arts' games label boss Frank Gibeau has revealed that he's not let any solely single-player games pass through his gates, ensuring that absolutely every single title the company publishes has an online component I gues this is why our beloved SINGLEPLAYER has gone Multiplayer

Lucy Bradshaw has written a blog on the EA site to respond to the controversy over the Reddit AMAA. There are some interesting bits of information in here.

It's that time of year again... Record-breaking time! The 2012 Chat Record Breaking Attempt is scheduled for Saturday, September 29th, at 11PM GMT. During this event, we will try to break the current record of the most people in chat at one time, which is 90. For more info, see topic. Thanks to Jack3oh3 for his help!

Maxis' trailer for the new SimCity at EA's E3 presentation on June 4, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SObs9KnK0Ng

Part Two of the SimCity Gameplay Strategy series featuring Lead Designer Stone Librande. "...Some time has gone by and Stone's Casino Empire is thriving. How should Stone customize his casino to pull in more tourists and make more Simoleons? By adding a celebrity stage, blackjack tables or more hotel rooms? Watch what happens when his city becomes so big he runs out of power! Casinos attract a lot of crime, but Stone can use the crime data layer to diagnose his crime problem and plop an impressive Police Precinct and Helipad upgrade to increase his coverage. When a disaster strikes, will Stone's neighbor Dan send fire trucks to Casino City to help rescue his Sims? With new multi-city play cities can work together to solve their problems. You can play with friends or control an entire region by yourself!"

Sim city 2013 or sim city 5 will support mods. Just Not at launch. The Team at maxis stated that the ability to support mods in built into the glassbox engine. But because Maxis is working hard at making sim city 5. They won't start to think about mods just yet.

It is rumoured that EA Games has been put up for sale. While it's still the second largest games publisher in the world, EA has seen a 37% drop in market value this year. Private equity firms KKR and Providence Equity Partners are said to be interested.

An article explains more about SimCity World and its features. Information on the Global Market will be released this Friday.

This article from The Verge (Polygon is their gaming hub) basically reaffirms what we already know (deeper simulation, animations describe what the simulation is during, tilt-shift, exaggerations, etc.) But around the middle confirmation that cul-de-sacs and roundabouts will be available.

E3 2012: Gameplay Walkthrough (Stream) HD Posted: Jun 5, 2012 More details and background emerge on the brand new SimCity revamp in this All Access Live walkthrough with Lead Producer Kip Katsarelis! http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2012-simcity/731180

College Humour - Sim City Mayor Vote or die. Literally. Super Funny Mayorial Campaign Advertisment (as a sim city mayor) From the video description: See exclusive articles and pictures on http://www.collegehumor.com ! LIKE us on: http://www.facebook.com/collegehumor FOLLOW us on: http://www.twitter.com/collegehumor FOLLOW us on: http://digg.com//collegehumor WATCH exclusive videos we can't put on YouTube at: http://www.collegehumor.com/

This new SimCity brings a whole world of change. As it turns out, PCs have gotten significantly better at running simulations in the nine years since SimCity 4, and Maxis is putting them to good use to create what's already looking like an incredibly detailed and flexible blank slate on which to found our cities. Also, though you'll be able to play alone if you want, Maxis is pushing hard to get us playing together -- or at least side-by-side -- with other virtual mayors. On that note, those of you who can't tolerate EA's Origin and online-only games should tap out early before you get excited about this: Yes, you will have to register an Origin account in order to play, and yes, you must be online at all times while playing in order to start playing. EA has confirmed that you will not be kicked out if your connection is interrupted.Moving on. The actual game looks kinda like this, except not a painting. "By himself, he doesn't seem too complicated," observed Lead Designer Stone Librande, with the game camera focused on a lone, ant-sized Sim citizen. "But what I love about it is that when you get 10,000 people, it's really fun to watch. Even though everybody's basically a stupid, very simple little algorithm, when you get enough of them, and some people are shopping, some people are at schools, and some people are at parks, you get these really rich flows through your city." It's an impersonation made possible by a mind-bogglingly detailed simulation. It may be a stupid little algorithm, but it does a great impression of a crowd of pedestrians. A few hundred Sims strolling around a small loop of road bears a striking resemblance to the movements of a real crowd you might see leaving a movie theater after the show. It's an impersonation made possible by a mind-bogglingly detailed simulation -- one that simultaneously keeps constant tabs on up to 200,000 of these guys as they go through their daily lives. By comparison, the four prior SimCitys are primitive, basing their simulations on statistical guesswork that has only a foggy idea of where a particular Sim might be at any given moment. Sweet Curves What's more, those sorta-smart Sims were walking down smooth, curvy roads. "This isn't a grid-based SimCity, it's a free-form SimCity that's all structured by the roads," explained Creative Director Ocean Quigley, a 17-year Maxis veteran who's had a hand in every SimCity except the original. When he demonstrated how the new cities are laid out, first laying down a road and then attaching residential, industrial, and commercial zones to that framework, I had to imagine someone at Maxis smacked their forehead when they thought of that. After four games of the old style of drawing zones arbitrarily and then trying to make sure that there was a road within four grid squares of every zoned square, this simple design tweak might just kill off one of the series' more frustrating quirks. And with those curvy roads, the map has effectively become a game of urban-planning Draw Something in which we'll be able to create any city layout we want, not just a gridded Philadelphia clone. You can tell how wealthy an area is by how shiny its buildings are. Maxis is bashful about showing actual screenshots because it hasn't yet put a lot of attention into the graphics (hence the concept art you're seeing here), but a few showcase buildings -- like the fire station -- looked sharp and colorful, with detailed animations to show when they're operating. Quigley pointed to model railroads and scale models as great sources of inspiration for the look and feel, and also pointed out a bit of diorama-like texture trickery used to efficiently create an illusion of interiors to buildings and even cars without slowing down the framerate. That's a first for a SimCity game: there's a full resource economy. This city, however, wasn't doing so hot. It had no power, and no police or fire protection. The citizens were picketing at city hall in protest, and rightly so -- no one was picking up the garbage on their front lawns, which (due to a lack of a sewage system) was technically at least partially poop. At the root of the city's woes was the lack of juice flowing from the coal power plant, which didn't have any coal to burn. That's a first for a SimCity game: there's a full resource economy, complete with a form of supply-chain crafting, and to use them we'll be need to either buy raw materials from the global market or extract them from the land ourselves. Throwing down a mine in a coal-rich area set off a chain reaction: miners (actual Sims who now had jobs) dug out the goodies, a truck carried a load to the power plant, and the power plant sprang to life and began to process the coal into electricity and an unhealthy dose of pollution. Power pulses shot out from the plant along the electrical grid, lighting up the town as they went, and solving half of the problems facing the town. SimSocialism? Wait a minute -- I thought this was a civic simulator, but this all sounds like a business. What gives? "If everything just came from off the screen, from stage left or something, then you wouldn't care about it," replied Librande. "Now you actually need people -- someone's got to be digging that stuff up. Your community is going to be wrapped around that. When you look at cities, like the big oil cities, the government is really involved in the big businesses... So I don't see it as two separate things. There's a police station, there's a school, and then there's an oil refinery, and these are all things you have to manage." Asked if there'd be a "libertarian mode" where the government would keep its hands off of business, Librande said that it's totally possible to ignore that aspect and simply buy the goods you need from the global market -- but it'll cost you more. Big businesses can move in if you give the mayoral thumbs up. It sounds to me like this economy is designed to make us more dependent on the new multiplayer aspects. It's an interesting setup -- players won't be operating in the same city map, so you don't need to worry about your friend bulldozing your stuff, but cities in the same "region" (a map made up of between four and 10 cities) can help or hinder each other. For example, a player producing a surplus of electricity can sell some to a neighbor, but if he's producing all that juice by burning tons of coal, he'll also unintentionally export pollution. Other than competing for leaderboard scores, though, there won't be a great deal of competition between mayors -- although I did catch wind of plans for a sports team rivalry system. Two or more mayors playing together and specializing their cities' production roles can make sweetheart deals. Maxis has come up with an interesting asynchronous multiplayer system that doesn't require you and your fellow players to be online at the same time to play together (which is great, because otherwise no one would ever finish one of those games), so it shouldn't have a traumatic effect on your city if your friend goes AWOL. But from the sound of things, two or more mayors playing together and specializing their cities' production roles can coordinate and make sweetheart deals that give all the cheap power, clean water, and other goods they need to build a metropolis-level city much more efficiently than a solo player. Specializing a city will give it a unique look and feel. So now the city had power, but there was still no police or fire protection. With no police, when a very conspicuous black van with flames painted on it started driving around the area, there was no one to stop him and ask if he was an arsonist. It so happens he was, and moments after he pulled into an apartment building a blaze broke out, so Lead Producer Kip Katsaelis paused the action to show off the new modular building system. He plonked down a basic fire station, which by itself would provide basic protection, but then he used a Spore-like modification system to add on an extra fire truck garage to increase coverage. I wondered if this system, which applies not just to fire stations but police stations, hospitals, schools, and more would increase the micromanagement load on the player, but Katsaelis seemed confident that wouldn't be an issue. "We feel like we hit a nice balance there with the amount of 'plopables' that you had to place -- the amount of fire stations that you needed to place in previous SimCities versus the number of modules you need to place in this SimCity -- and we're hitting about the same amount of management game." Gridlock Katsaelis resumed time, and in moments the fire station was fully staffed up and had dispatched a truck to the scene of the blaze, where panicking Sims were pouring out in droves. Again, those Sims are each represented individually, whether on foot or in a car -- and that proved to be a problem for the fire truck, which was caught in a traffic jam on a narrow road. It seems wider roads and smoothly flowing traffic are essential to a city's well-being, because this delay cost lives: before the truck finally reached the fire and extinguished it, several Sims in the building caught fire and ran outside before burning to dust. And that'swhy you pull over when there's a fire truck behind you. The arsonist is just one type of criminal we'll need to watch out for -- among others, Maxis says that the Limited Edition will include both the heroic Maxis Man and his arch-nemesis Dr. Lu, a supervillain (complete with lair) who will do some serious damage if left unchecked. I should not have laid off all those firemen. Maxis knows the power of a good mod community. "We're not idiots." I asked Quigley whether we'd see mods, and the news was encouraging -- a surprise, given the online requirement. "SimCity is a data set that sits inside a GlassBox. It's all just text-based rules. We've built an infrastructure that's moddable," he said. However, exposing all those guts to modders would take some work, and it's yet to be determined exactly when that work might happen. But Quigley added that he and Maxis know the power of a good mod community. "It's worth pointing out that the reason people are still playing SimCity 4 today, 10 years after we shipped it, is because the modding community essentially recreated it. They filled it with new content and fixed bugs, and made it as much of a hobby as a game. We're very cognoscente of that -- I mean, we're not idiots." For the grand finale, Quigley attacked some skyscrapers with giant marbles, shattering buildings and sending chunks flying everywhere to show off the demolition physics. Giant doom balls won't be a disaster in the final game, but we'll definitely see things like fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and (most likely) alien invaders. This will certainly be the most destructible SimCity yet, and for me at least, demolishing a megalopolis has always been the greatest reward for building one.

View the video

Cities, by their nature, are a complicated patchwork of interpersonal relationships and infrastructures. In the real world, no city exists in a vacuum. It is always a part of pulsing organic matrix where events and decisions made at a distant city impacts it sooner or later. Sadly, when SimCity first hit the gaming scene in 1989, the technical infrastructure needed to create vibrant interconnected virtual cities was barely in existence. Graphics and processing technology weren’t very advanced and players are happy to play with blocky graphics and very basic AI. Thankfully, the Internet, graphics chips, and processors have evolved to the point that they can enable the developer of SimCity, Maxis, to fully pursue their grand vision for the city simulator series. In the upcoming iteration of the SimCity concept, dubbed by game followers as SimCity 5, players’ cities will interact with the supplies, materials, and weather patterns of nearby cities. Cities will no longer exist in a vacuum but will be members of a thriving community of cities linked together through the Internet. Screenshot from Sim City 5 (Credit: EA) Citizens will travel among differing players’ cities. Similarly, individuals in the cities are now empowered by modern processors with more unique personal details like education and particular needs and wants. Each separate city will be impacted by the trade and other decisions made by other cities. The same goes with weather patterns and natural resource availability. Based on these developments, SimCity 5 looks poised to take the city simulation genre to a whole new interactive community-based level. Finded on: Game Bandits

Granted it's a Facebook game, but I hope this is not a sign of how EA designs the new SimCity

Check out some great pics showing what Tilt-Shift Photography looks like!

Project Symphony is a project to change the Maxis Highways into something RHW-like. It will be more like an urban RHW when done.

everyone! I’m Tyler Thompson, the Gameplay Producer here at Maxis and I really enjoy helping the team make the new SimCity into a great game. The new SimCity’s simulation is driven by Sims, road networks and traffic. I enjoy explaining it with a biological metaphor: The roads are the city’s arteries and veins. The Sims circulate through those roads. They help keep the city alive by going to work, making factories run, keeping stores open, taking home money, going shopping with money, etc... Power, water, and sewage also flow under the roads. Almost every building relies on a vehicle to be effective: garbage trucks, police patrol cars, coal delivery trucks, school buses, taxis and more. The result is a city where the streets are filled with a variety of vehicles and pedestrians, streaming from place to place and keeping the simulation alive. Traffic jams strangle like a heart attack. Several times, I have looked up from decorating a casino to see dreaded lines of red tail lights.The consequences are pretty dire: Ambulances don’t get to injured Sims before they die. Police don’t make it to the bank in time to stop a robbery. The coal power plant shuts down from lack of workers. Homes and factories are starting to become abandoned at the edges of the city. In a panic, I start demolishing troublesome intersections, replacing roads, and adding new avenues across town. I also apply some civic “blood thinner”: I create a mass transit system featuring shuttle buses, large inter-city buses, light rail and heavy rail. This usually clears the major arteries and gets things flowing again. Combine this circulatory system with our curvy road tool, and it means that you can make functional, organically shaped cities. We’ve made face-shaped cities, concentric rings, guitar-shaped cities, and on and on. Often, the city’s topography encourages curves: River-side towns can have a snaking boardwalk. Mountain-side cities bend around the base. Lake-side cities with a high-wealth district hug the waterfront. Yeah, I love to play optimized grids, but this game is frequently tempting me to throw away the ruler and start painting roads with a brush. These curvy, organic cities can be effective because the simulation isn’t about distances – it’s about flow. When you start to understand this, it totally changes how you lay things out. When I place a fire station, I usually try to find a place that is central, well connected but not near heavy traffic. When I create a central avenue, I often limit the number of intersections with it so that cars don’t wait for light after light. I sprinkle commercial sectors at the ends of residential roads to encourage pedestrian traffic. As the city grows, I watch for the long line of red brake lights and plop down bus stops like crazy. Many times, I find myself just sitting back and watching the flow.

Hello SimCity fans! I’m Guillaume Pierre, Lead Gameplay Scripter on SimCity, and my team & I build the game’s simulation using the GlassBox Engine. You may remember my post about the water system back in April, but today I’m going to talk about something dear to my and transportation geeks’ hearts: public transit! When left unchecked, cars will quickly take over city streets, resulting in massive traffic jams and the economic loop coming to a stop. Your Sims won’t be able to get to work on time, robbers will get away as police cars get stuck, and trash will mount as garbage trucks can’t make their rounds anymore! To solve your traffic problem in SimCity, we’re providing a variety of public transportation options, starting with the shuttle buses and going all the way to the heavy rail trains and beyond. Shuttle buses are the cheapest and easiest public transit system to set up. These small busses carry a limited number of passengers and are appropriate for smaller cities. To set some up, you just need to place a bus depot, plop some bus stops on the sidewalks of your residential, business & factory districts, and Sims will start riding the shuttle. At some point, you may invest in the larger municipal buses by building a bus terminal, and Sims will queue up at the same stops as they did before to ride them. You can also plop some park & ride stops that Sims will drive to and park their cars at before taking the bus. In this SimCity, we’re also introducing streetcars, or trams, which ride on a dedicated track in the middle of avenues, and carry more Sims than the shuttle or municipal buses. Those tracks use up two lanes of car traffic though, so you may get more congestion at first as the system gets going. You can also connect two separate parts of town with light rail tracks placed by themselves, without car lanes or sidewalks. Some of the biggest vehicles going through your cities are heavy trains, which come from the region and bring in tourists and neighbors into your city, more so than could ever drive in from the regional highway. Your Sims may even ride the train between two stations on opposite sides of town, or use them to go to neighboring cities. Rail is by far my favorite mode of transit; it really makes the city feels like a model train set. Much like in real-life, people will only walk so far to take public transportation, so when placing public transportation stops, we show you that distance as a green bar directly on the sidewalks via a data layer. As a result, you can easily tell which neighborhoods are accessible, and which ones Sims will have to drive out of. Each stop is responsible for figuring out what kind of destination exists near it, be it a work place, a home, or even another stop that may lead Sims to their eventual destination. Your Sims may very well start their journey aboard a local shuttle bus, then transfer to a streetcar, and eventually to a train in order to work at the factory town next door. Players will be able to evaluate the performance of their systems by: 1. Checking how many people are waiting to be picked up. 2. How long they have to wait on average, 3. How many passengers are currently riding in vehicles, and 4. How many have been dropped off that day. Each stop will also have similar information available, so it’s possible to really drill down on the data and make decisions on whether to add more vehicles or turn off infrequently used stops, for example. Be sure to check out SimCity Insider this Friday for even more details about how the GlassBox Engine simulates traffic. Ok, now this is me speaking. Sorry i got the last 3 news I don't know if I'm the first to find it or what.

The Lead Designer explains the Global Market of SimCity. *You need an Origin account to access the information

The second part of the community interviews has finally been released. Quote: Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to do this without you, our amazing community! All of us here at Maxis want to thank everyone who took the time to ask us your questions. We love hearing from you, so this won’t be the last time we ask for your feedback. Trust us! So make sure to keep telling us what you think about the game by liking us on Facebook and following us on Twitter. =.=

Zynga has found itself in quite a bit of financial and legal trouble recently, with this just the latest in a series of lawsuits against the company. This follows two from investors in the company about not being informed of financial troubles, and an investigation into a large sale of shares before a sudden share price drop. Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager for Maxis, gives her view here.

The June winners have been announced, and there's a little history in the making this month. Stop by to congratulate the winners - all three of them!

The first thing that an old-school SimCity fan is likely to notice about the series' upcoming revamp, due on PCs in February 2013, is the level of detail. This includes graphical detail for sure; cities are finally rendered in full 3D, and you can twist, pan, and zoom the view to your heart's content. The graphics system uses tilt-shift effects and saturated colors to make it seem like you're viewing a tiny, living model world, an impression that is only enhanced by the satisfying thunk and cloud of dust that comes from placing buildings and objects.

Found on a French website, simcookie.com. Seems interesting. http://www.simcookie.com/2012/06/04/12-nouvelles-images-de-simcity/

The release date for SimCity has been revealed and it is sooner than you think: February, 2013

Part 4, Scenario 3. - When we were designing the fire system, we wanted to make sure it was satisfying for both types of players. If you want to protect your city, then you have many options. Of course, your primary line of defense is a fire station. Like most of the civic buildings in the city, your fire station is composed of multiple parts: garages, fire trucks, dispatch towers, hazmat vehicles, helicopters and more. - By Stone Librande, SimCity Lead Designer Read More: http://www.simcity.c...-fire-or-did-we Note: Engine tech demo video originally presented at the 2012 GDC.

Please join us in congratulating our March Members of the Month. They are two very deserving members who have contributed greatly to our community here at Simtropolis. Great job, you two!

This is a map that shows how much power each building in New York City uses. Not directly SimCity related, but it does give a pretty good view of how each area of a large city uses power. Certianly a cool map to check out.

EA released there Simcity disasters trailer today showcasing the tornado, earthquake, meteors and UFOs. They also explain what means to use to avoid further damage after the disasters have taken place in the form of a 1970's educational video. Enjoy!

From MacRumors

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Society has always pondered tough, philosophical questions: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Do dinosaurs really exist? If a tree falls in the forest, would anyone hear it (and moreover, would anyone care to pick it up?)? We here at Maxis, however, only care about one particularly chin-rubbing query: Can a city really be built on rock 'n' roll? Well, thanks to Associate Designer Chris Schmidt, it sounds like the answer to that question is an ear-splitting, “Yes!” Chris recently took his creativity to 11 when he built this guitar-shaped city (and accompanying amp) using SimCity’s new curvy road tool. Like we showcased with our past Cool Looking City, part of the fun of playing the new SimCity is not only building (or destroying) the city of your dreams, but also using the in-game tools to create fully functional metropolitan works of art. Of course, while this design may look rad, it certainly ain’t practical – since Chris built all of his commercial zoning up the “fret board” of the city, he ended up creating a massive traffic jam for all his Sims trying to visit stores and restaurants. But if you think about, traffic and rock 'n' roll concerts go bumper-to-bumper, so it almost makes sense. Almost. Do admire the creative touches, though, like the six water towers signifying each tuner. Pretty cool, eh? Because we think his city rocks, we spoke with Chris to find out more about it. Community Manager Michael Donahoe: What was the inspiration for building this city? Associate Designer Chris Schmidt: Well, our Producer Tyler Thompson told me I should try making some different city layouts, because classically with SimCity, I make a grid-based city since it is the most efficient. So I was thinking about weird ways to build a city and the Internet radio station I was listening to just so happened to put on Starship’s “We Built This City.” Next thing I knew, I was making a guitar-shaped city. [laughs] MD: Theoretically, what are the chances of us seeing a rock 'n' roll-themed restaurant and/or hotel appear in your city? CS: Actually, my city is more industrial, because I’m focusing more on mining and metals. MD: What kind of music do you think fits this city? CS: Since I was trying to design my city like a classic Fender Stratocaster, I’d say a little classic rock. Maybe a little bit of metal. MD: What’s next? A Drum City? Trombone City? Bagpipe City? CS: Really, I just focus on crazy designs. I did a zen city, which is a yin yang. I made a city out of the phrase “Curvy Roads,” just to see if I could make it work. I don’t know what’s next. Whatever inspires me. MD: Do tell us: Is this city really built on rock-n-roll? CS: Well, I do spend most of my time listening to classic rock while I’m playing, so perhaps it is!

Review of Simcity 2013 from a Kiwi's perpective.

Promotional photos released by EA for Maxis' new SimCity game. Cool beans, but I'm still looking for highways and interchanges. Link: http://imgur.com/a/mMfk5