croxis

I laugh, hard, at the use of the phrase "engine limitations." A well designed game is composed of several specialized engines. Sometimes the design of the engine creates limits. The graphics engine of homeworld 1 will start choking past what we would now call a low polygon count despite the modern hardware you run the game on, because the engine was designed for the hardware from 13 years ago. They never considered supporting the millions of polygons we can now render on screen, or HD textures. They, rightly, didn't spend the time or money to have the software handle technology a decade in the future, so structured the code to handle the polygon counts for the day and the memory management for the texture sizes of the day. That is not the case here. The limitation is a hardware limitation. They chose not to do large cities not because the engine itself can't handle it, but because the computer resources needed would be too steep. The game already requires 4 gigs of ram which is still considered a steep requirement, especially if you look at the more hard core Steam hardware profiles. Is it possible that Sandbox is inefficient for the detail that it is running? Sure that is possible. It is also possible that the performance is as efficient as reasonably expected for the resolution of the simulation. Glassbox's objective is to abstract nothing into general statistical formulas - simulate everything using agents. I accept the possibility that our hardware just isn't quite there yet and that the engine can continue to scale breath and depth as our hardware continues to improve over time.

Random thought I haven't seen mentioned. With the green space it makes it possible to expand every city's size at a later date.

On the other hand I know people who didn't like SC4 for that reason and prefer 3K

Looks like we have Arcos! Its the blurring thing in the background

Stylized graphics also age much better. Part of the reason SC4 has aged well graphically is because its art is stylized as well.

I've found every vanilla sc game to be repetitive at a given value/density level

I and many others beg to differ. Simcity 4 was the most ugliest and bland Simcity game to date. It tried to hard to be realistic. Every other Simcity has had an artistic style to it. If you think the game to be the ugliest SimCity game to date. Even uglier than SC2000 and the original SimCity, then you should try it with some of the many terrain and building mods available. Thats the point. Mods are mods. You can't take the additional person hours of work that went into the mod, which go on top of the development person hours that went into the vanilla game, and declair that it is superior. That would be like saying Civilization V is inferior because you can install the Rhys and Fall mod for Civ IV to make it a better game. If you compare a new, only in vanilla game to its heaviley modded predicesor (which can have years of added, free, developer hours) then the new game will always lose. The point of reference really should be vanilla SC4 (yes, not including rush hour) and how that felt when it came out over SC3k.

So am I not a hardcore sim city player? So I am not a member of this community (even as just a lurker)? Because I am one of those folks who didn't want a 3d simcity 4.5. There is a reason I don't play Call of Duity, and that is because I like my sequals to be significantly different.

This isn't a glorified photoshop where you can paint cities for a useless region view. They are making Sim City a game. What a thought...

SC2013 is more focused on the simulation aspect than being a glorified city-themed photoshop. Those who played SC4 as "painters" are obviously upset. Those of us who prefer Sim City as a game are salivating.

Agents != citizens in your city. An agent is anything moving around that carries resources. A car agent holds people resources. This means your cities can, in theory, be much larger in population.

Is there a link to this?

This is true. But on the other hand many people who participate in these betas also treat it as a demo instead of participating in the beta process of systematiclly testing features and filing detailed bug reports. A smaller closed hush hush beta with select community members is probably going to happen first.

It is a really good reason. You can visually isolate an active city from a region, like sc4 did (to which people will then complain about not being able to see neighboring cities), as well as prevent terraforming on city edges with cities you don't own. It will also make city switching jerky like in sc4 instead of seamless in sc2013. Lots of people will complain about that.

There IS an advantage to being online only. All of your city's data is being sent to and from the EA servers. Armed with a packet sniffer it is, in theory, possible to reverse engineer the netcode making it possible to create third party servers. If they don't encrypt the data this will be easy. If they do it will be tougher.

I believe they said that the region size limitation is mostly a RAM (in computer) memory issue, not a save game size issue or a cpu issue. In SC2013 only one city is active at a time like in SC4, however unlike SC4 the entire region remains loaded and visible. Based on the Steam Hardware survay (which I assume is biased to more "hard core" gamers) about 55% of steam gamers have 2-4 gigs of ram. Sc2013 puts the minimum requirements at 4 GB which, even in todays market, is a heafty requirement.

According to one of the maxis devs in a reddit thread, they actually tried adjacent cities. The issue they ran into was both simulation and cosmetic. Unlike SC4 you can see neighboring cities in SC2013. To keep cpu costs from being stupid high they disable the simulation in neighboring cities. It resulted in the neighbor city looking "lifeless" with no people are cars walking around. If they simulated the neighboring cities so it didn't look dumb then the cpu and ram required would be beyond most people's computers. While it is easy to say to "make it an option," we don't know what the code looks like to determine how long that would take.

Sounds like what you guys are talking about is Level of Detail simulation. The further a city is from the one you are playing the more the simulation is abstracted. For many games this works awesome. Once I start thinking how it would work for SC2013 the more issues I run into. The big catch is the multiplayer component. Lets say you and a friend is playing two adjacent cities. You are online but he isn't. If his city is simulated, even in a reduced form, bad things can happen in his city that he wont know about until he comes online. Like his economy crashing, or downtown's land value falling apart. Unintentional griefing.

Here is a math analogy. Your cpu is only able to handle so much "area" of a simulation. You can have a shallow simulation using statistics to simulate the effect of things like crime and pollution and, as a result, have a wide simulation with large cities. On the other hand you can have a deep simulation where individual sims are simulated, power and water units actually flowing through pipes, real resources moving around your city. But, because your cpu can only handle so much simulation area, you have to narrow the width of the simulation by having smaller cities. Maxis/EA chose to go for a deeper simulation but have to make it a more narrow. This I am personally ok with. Also, because this is a totally new engine from scratch it can't use existing code from past sim cities. SimCity classic through sim city 4 used cells (the "grid") for much of the simulation logic. It would not surprise me if parts of SC4 used code that has been reused going all the way back to SimCity 1. Indiana: While that city looks cool and massive in the region view, in reality only one chunk of that is "alive" at any one time. The simulation of neighbouring cities is limited to only a few things. Not even pollution is spilled over. So while the region view looks very awesome, really you are only playing with a mostly isolated chunk.

One of the Maxis devs posted on reddit that the video capture team take weeks of footage to put a video like this together. They often use developer cheats when making these videos, resulting in wierd UI numbers.

Unlike some of my peers I am totally excited for the online component. However my worry is what will happen to my game when EA pulls the plug on the servers. Will my game be useless or are there plans to eventually release some sort of server or open the network protocol so 3rd party servers can be made by the community.

Don't forget that SC2k also had a passive tech tree where certain buildings only unlock after a specific year. Even SC4 had a "tech tree" mechanic where certain buildings unlocked only after certain conditions were met.

In the gamedev con demonstration that one of the resources buildings can have is money. My hunch (and it is only a hunch) that these places will buy these resources with their own wallets and not come directly from the city coffers. The trade deals cities can make are getting better deals or subsidizing the cost of that resource. This is just an uneducated huch of mine so take it with a lot of grains of salt. I recall reading in an interview that your city will output and input resources based on the last save. So even if you are not playing the resource flow of your city remains constant even though the simulation itself if not running. My hope is that they design the deals so they don't automaticly expire unless a player does it.

It wasn't that multiplayer itself is bad. Multiplayer could be really fun. CitiesXL just did it badly. This community is just really shortsighted on what could be done vs what has been done.

Most of the comments are about the always on requirement, not the multiplayer