croxis

Do what all the other games do: disable multiplayer, (see: Civ V), or run modded games seperatly from everyone else (see: Civ IV)

That isn't quite right. Each building has a population that is persistent. It is not generated new every day. What are generated are the agents, which transports resources (which include population) around the map. So a house Unit gets the time for work message, creates a car Agent, moves a population Resource into the car Agent, and the traffic system drives the Agent to work. The population Resource is then moved into the factory and the car Agent is destroyed. At the end of the work day the factory Unit creates a bunch of car Agents and puts population Resource into the Agents (it may even also add money Resource into the car Agent too, we did see this in the GDC videos), then the traffic manager drives the Agents to the nearest house with room and transfers the population Resource into the house Unit. The agents are then destroyed.

The global market has always existed in sim city. The only change is that the market values are set from a different source instead of being black blox voodoo.

The other thing to remember is that even though individual sims are not simulated, individual buildings are. Like I said in the other thread the dirty secret in game design/programming is to take advantage of human's unique ability to find patterns in everything, even if there isn't one. Lets say that you have a slummy neighborhood, you plop down a new high school in it, and after 5 in game years 5% of the slum trailer shacks upgraded to small wood homes. The game could of simulated the change by individualy simulating sims and modeling social mobility. Or the change happened by houses collecting invisible education resources from the school (which may be how it will be done in GlassBox) which represents social mobility of individual sims. So does it really matter if individual sims are not persisted?

Humans are really good at finding patterns in things that they don't exist in. One of the dirty secrets of computer game design and programming is the use of psychology to trick the player into seeing complicated behaviors when the simulation behind it is very simple. The opposite is true too. If there is a complex simulation but only a simple presentation to the player (ie your AI has 12 emotional states but there are only happy, sad, and angry face animations) the player's internal model of the game is only going to have the simple version and you wasted programmer dev time. The social mobility discussion is a really good example of this. If the player drops a school in a low income house area and watches some houses change to mid income. The player will apply a pattern (social mobility or gentrification), but the simulation behind it is as simple as the school sending education resources to the nearby houses, and the houses follow their unit rules that change the house and occupents when enough education resorces are stored up.

No it really doesn't. I have no idea where you are drawing this conclusion from. Please show us your evidence, because right now to a lot of the people who are already nervous about the mp aspects this is borderline FUD.

We have no idea if multiple people can play the same city at the same time. So far there is no evidence of it. The entire narrative from the devs are individual players working on their individual cities and the multiplayer is the interactive between these cities. If it was as you suggest they probably would of talked about it.

That wasn't how cities xl worked. The very *basic* design of cities xl was that the simulation was run client side and the server just hosted the save game and the world market. SC2013 is going to work in *basicly* the same way. How the games runs on online mode compared to each other doesn’t really matter, if they charge people for the privilege of trading it’s the same thing and they will end up with the same result. Well you did say that! You are right though. We have 0 evidence so far of any of this mmo-serverside monthly fee. Only that saved games are stored online, global supply/demand, leaderboards, and optional multiplayer regions that operate asyncriously.

That wasn't how cities xl worked. The very *basic* design of cities xl was that the simulation was run client side and the server just hosted the save game and the world market. SC2013 is going to work in *basicly* the same way.

This is massive multiplayer games work. The client is a dumb terminal with enough information of the game state to display it and maybe some client side predections. Most client-server games (tf2, counter strike, etc) work this way as well. We know however that SimCity 2013 does not work this way, all simulation is client side and the servers just store save games and other global information. I don't think a client-server model would work well either. That is a LOT of data to transmit from the server to client. Every building and agent. Eve-online chokes up on space battles with only a few hundered players/agents (that is mostly cpu limits, but the bandwidth costs are not anything to sneeze at either, but still worth discussing*). If you are simulating a large, full city that is a lot of data to be sending to the clients. For a dumb client the postition of every car and the changes of every cell in the water table has to be send. To easy up on the bandwidth the client can be smart and simulate some of it client side. So you simulate traffic and water and before we know it we are esentally simulating almost all the game on the client, so why bother doing it on a server? *Lets assume that with the multicore design an average city simulation tile takes up the processing power of one cpu core. Even if 100,000 people play the game at any given time that is 100,000 cpu cores needed. That is A LOT. If you look at the online user graph at steam it fluctuates a lot during a 24 hour period. EA/Maxis would have to anticipate enough hardware for peak conditions and then have it sitting idle during off hours. And what happens if active simulation count gets above the server farm's capacity? Do you REALLY want want to wait in 40 minute queues on launch day, which is what tends to happen with MMOGs?

During the GDC demo each place of employement sends out an invisible agent with an "I need employeees!" message through the road network. House units respond to the message by creating an agent, putting a person in it, and the agent drives to that place of employment. It is a safe assumption that almost all industry and commercial will do this. The result is though that sims wont keep the same jobs Time is probably variable up to a threashold set byt he game or hardware limits. Many game engines run on a tick per second system and sleep if it gets done with a tick early it sleeps until the next cycle. Game slowdowns happen when the engine can't finish a tick before the next one is suppose to happen. Speeding up the game is just a matter of speeding up the number of ticks in a second.

No. There is no such thing as a 3D sprite. A sprite is defined as a 2d/billboard object. This isn't 2002 anymore. A 3d character is not animated with a sprite sheet. They are usually animated with a bone based system and keyframes.

They designed the game engine to be generic for all their future games, the idea to make SimCity with it came much later. So yes, SimEarth and SimTower (and please SimMars! Why did you cancel!!!!!) and all those others are possible.

+10 points for ReBoot

The city area is made up of a bunch of overlapping resource maps with one resource per map. Each map is divided into a bunch of small tiles (think like the grid in past sim cities) and each little block holds its own amount of that resource. The map can have rules which impact how reseoreces are made or moved on the map (they mentioned wind direction for air pollution for example)

That is probably the case due to litigation issues. If they end up reading your proposal and implementing said feature it opens themselves up to a lawsuit from you. God bless our current copyright laws no? Also you might want to read up on how GlassBox does multiplayer before you give out incorrect information.

I don't think they will be sprites (a 2d item or billboard) but a 3d object as well.

I personally would rather have one tileset with a lot of diversity, less US-centric, than multiple tilesets with less diversity.

The only evidence about anything being on a remote server are saved games. I would love to see citations otherwise.

SQL doesn't perform very well for binary blob content like models and textures so as a data storage format it isn't great. Civ V does a hybrid approach by using a database (I think it is sql) at runtime but it is populated by xml. EA?Maxis isn't the only game that uses DBPF-style files. In fact it is an exception to find a non-indi game that doesn't use something similar, because it works much better than SQL, zips, or just having a bunch of files scattered around the harddrive. I too would love to see something like Civ IV model. The way the engine is designed it almost lends itself to Civ IV's model.

I hate to say it, but this is a really badly constructed poll. It is heavily biased to the advanced end: writing an os and writing drivers are separate when programmer is just one lump. It is also a slap in the face to all the other domains such as creating 2d art, 3d art, and audio. This poll is also looking at multiple dimensions (hardware competency, modding interest, programming operating systems), which isn't bad, but very difficult to get a lot of useful information in one poll. Here is how I would set up the poll keeping the same number of options: Ordinary user not interested in modding. Ordinary user interested in modding but don't know how. Scripting/programming modding experience (HTML, XML, lua (WoW, CivV), python(CivIV)) Full programming experience (Made own stand alone programs/games) 2D art modding experience (SC2-4) Real time 3D art experience (not the gmax --> SC4) Can build own machine.

I think the main reason is to help fill out the traffic system. Not only do actual sims go to and from work but freight and goods are moved around too. The result is that traffic planning has an even greater impact on the economy of the city.

Guys, remember that they just finished the engine. A lot of content that will be in the game probably hasn't been made yet.

Well it is 3D, we have curvy roads and probably curvy bridges as well, the whole pipe/power/road system is all based on the same code so adding new network options is relativly trivial for them. it is just a matter of balancing development time and making sure there are not too many options to overwhelm new players. They also showed that sims not only go to and from work but traffic also includes freight transport and shopping traffic. It is nice to see how a lot of this wishlist is already in the engine, or at least close to possible.

The only thing I can think of is that it has additional metadata that zip files do not, and/or uses a better compression-decompression algorithem that still allows for extracting, or streaming, the file.