croxis

Poppycock. What "should of brought with the original game" is just opinion, nothing more. Lets looks at Civ Expansions. What did Civ II expansions add? Scripting language to make scenarios! Should that of been included in the original game? Well I think so! What did Civ III expansions add? Multiplayer! Should that of been part of the original game instead of a DLC? Well I think so? What did CivIV expansions add? BETTER AI. Should that of been a patch of the original game? Expansions and DLC are both the same thing -- extensions for games created during or after an existing game's development. They have their own budgets. Your artists and programmers wont have much to do during the last bits of development. They can be sent off to other projects, or work on day 0 dlc.

People seem to be making assumption that these are hard and fast rules, ie if it is on a highway it MUST be high zoning. This may not be the case - road type and traffic volume influence the zone density and what actual building type shows up. It will all depend on the zone rules.

There is an option not in the poll: Setting up regions with other community members for rping or planned/themed development.

Yay fanboy mentality. Simcity has always been a game. Through modding players have taken that game and made it something else. Now they are throwing a hissy fit that EA is making a game and not their glorified photoshop program.

Origin is an issue, however I see it as an overlapping but seperate issue to the multiplayer gameplay. Sim City 2013 can require an always on connection without Origin, and it can have no multiplayer features but still require Origin. Best to make sure you are specific on your objections if it is the former, latter, or both. The only mechanic, that we know of, being forced is the global economy. What we don't know is how the global economy impacts gameplay other than the cost/prices of goods, and we don't know what degree that has on a city. I do agree with Maxis on this: It may or may not have been Will's initial goal, but SimCity has made players think about the world they live it. While there is definite room for the mindless Counterstrike or angry birds, there is a big open space for the thoughtful games. Our world is a very connected place, how can we have a thoughtful game using a 30 year out of date world view?

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/sll6l/game_informer_simcity_preview_reveals_a_few/ The player wont specificly zone density. Density is set by the road type connected to it and general traffic. Water, coal, oil, and ore are in as terrain resources. This is new to me: regions consit of cities and great works -- so these large projects are not part of a city specificly. We will have to see the region mechanics to see how this works out. They give an example of a solar farm which would provide power to the region.

So far a 8 point percentage split with the "no"s in favor. Remember that the sandbox engine's multiplayer system is data driven and asynchronous (GDC) so players can play their cities at their leasure and not require everyone to be on to play. So far it sounds like only one player per city (they only been advertizing multiplayer regions, not multiplayer cities). We also know that a player can abandon their multiplayer city, other players can pick it up. Think of it as a unique scenario. I am personally interested in both playing with friends and fam, and I think random play would be a lot of fun - maximizing the faults of other cities to my advantage.

Too much bloom x.x

How about we wait and see how the internet and multiplayer features work before we drink from either punchbowl?

They could of prevented this if they had examples in their GDC demonstration, chances are it wasn't even ready yet and they didn't want to show anything until they delivered. Also just because CXL had multiplayer doean't mean it will be the same game as CXL. We just have to play the wait and see game until E3.

A living, evolving city that always needs a little nudge to keep stable. My issue with CXL, and even SC4 to some extent, is that it is easy to get a stable system and expanding the city feels artifical.

I'm happy for no more pipes. The interesting choice to the player for water is placement of the wells/pumps in relation to distance (infrastructure cost), pollution, and the water table. Placing all the pipes isn't interesting gameplay and it is a shoddy mechanic to control housing density. Linking the road system with an automatic pipe is a fantastic sollution. Those wells and pumps need service roads anyways, right players where realism always wins?

The reality is that the game design documents has probably been set and finalized a while ago. It doean't mean it cant change, but the chances of sweeping changes is very low.

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

As mentioned this simulation type is not a new concept. Caesar III (and probably 2 and 1, but I never played them) used a similar resource system, although i think it was limited to 256 agents due to performance needs of a 1998 90 MHz so they used an unsigned char. Ignoring multicore and improvements in architecture, cpu speeds improvements alone could do about ten thousand agents using Caesar III system. We both know they benchmarked the simulation engine and are confident it can handle thousands of agents simultaniously.

Don't focus on what the simulation is doing, but its results. Why do a highly complex detailed simulation when a simplified form gives you the same, or very similar, results?

So far we know only a few things: The EA/Maxis servers deals with data asynchronously. If it was their server's running the city simulation it would have to be synchronous. They also said in a dev block that their servers are dealing with region and global simulation -- the relationship between cities. If they were doing the city simulation I think they would of said so.

Thats great I already know about it. It isn't part of the OpenGl package. Never underestimate the desire of people in charge having things in nice pre made packages. It is also *only* on the front page as a news item which is very telling. One more news post and it would be off the front page.

There has been no suggestion otherwise so far.

If memory serves in the Reddit AMA they hinted that all games are stored online.

We can see the logic with statistics! Let us look at traffic. When you drive to work/school, leaving the same time every day, and taking the same route every day, you can figure out the average time it takes to get to your destination. but we also soon find out that not every day is the same. Some days there is little traffic on the road, other days it is unusually bad. So not only is there the average commute time but there is variation as we look at the day to day data. As we record enough data and graph it we get a normal distribution: Left-Right is the minutes it takes to get to school/work, and up-down is how often that travel time happens. Now when we play simcity we really don't care about individual sim travel time to work. I know a lot of people think they do, but individual sim travel time is an indicator of something else. What we are really interested in is the traffic pattern - the volume of cars on the roads. We set up the simulation so indvidiual sims go to and from the same location every day. We run the simulation a thousand times and get the traffic data on the roads which will end up in a normal distro. Now we change the simulation to work like GlassBox does, run it a thousand times, get the traffic from those same key road and that data too will form a normal distribution. Then we use statistical tools to compare the two different graphs to see how similar the two simulations are. If the graphs are very close then we can say that we get the same behavior even though the underlying simulation is very different. When my own game engine is ready (still doing the basic stuff at the moment) I'll test it for you

opengl adn directx are not quite the same thing. OpenGl is graphics only. Directx is graphics, audio, keyboard/mouse, and probably some other things. DX is generally more attractive and, from what I have read, better graphics API than opengl 3-4.0

Because they are supporting windows xp we know it can't be directx 10 or 11, unless they make dual versions (see: civ v). So it is either 9 or at least opengl 3.

The end behavior of social mobility, or of gentrification, is where there was once a low income sim, there is now a medium income sim. How the actual data is manipulated to achieve that really isn't that important as long as the results make sense, is balanced, and is fun.

it is also standard for game devs to prototype their ideas to make sure they are viable before spending millions of dollars making a game. I would almost be willing to bet that EA/Maxis prototyped tracking individual sims vs what we now see in SandBox and found that the simulation behavior was close enough to the same so they decided to use the competitionally simpler option. If the end result is the same, does it really matter what is happening in the GlassBox (as opposed to a black box)