croxis

I would rather have that features as an expansion pack/DLC and have the primary development resource all go to the main core game.

Rock paper shotgun has more details: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/08/back-from-simulation-city-inside-maxis-glass-box/

I've always felt I took the role of the entire city government instead of a single person.

We know very little at this point: We know they are going for a Tilt-Shift art direction (intro video) We know maxis wants to do modding (I suspect there might be resistance from EA on this) (Rock paper shotgun) We know maxis is focusing on single player experience (Rock paper shotgun) We know the engine is different now modeling more basic units and letting the complex system emerge, so bottom up instead of top down. (GDC) That is about it at this time.

Rock paper shotgun has more details: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/08/back-from-simulation-city-inside-maxis-glass-box/

I'm not sure if those rules are the actual syntax or just a simple psudeocode/plain text version. I hope that modders will have easy access to these as it would give them untold power over the simulation (simulate broadband and other telecomunications paths? add more resource types?) We will find more in the next 4 hours

I forgot to add, here is another article from Rock Paper Shotgun about it going into more detail of multiplayer vs single player: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/08/back-from-simulation-city-inside-maxis-glass-box/

I fail to see how this is anything like Societies

Looks like it is just a developer UI

This is fantastic. It shows that the engine is totally capable of doing deep meaningful economic simulations.

Of course EA is milking as much money as they can. They are a publicly traded company and have obligations to their shareholders. I know a lot of people complain about this, but they still buy their games anyway From what I have read from game devs on reddit /r/gamedev and /r/games is that they almost never take anything out from the origional plan to make it a dlc. DLC projects have their own seperate budgets from the main game. It also helps keeps the employees employed. For example: in the last phases of development which is mostly bug sqwishing many programmers and art people are moved on to other projects or their contracts expire. With DLC and expansions they can continue working on the game and release new content much faster than traditional expansions, sometimes on day 0, due to the faster quality assurance process. Now I am not trying to excuse some of the practices with DLC we have seen, but I do want to point out that it is a lot more nuanced than many gamers think it is.

Seems like most of the concept art is more tilt shift style than cartoony cell shading. The more I look at it the more the tilt-shift style is growing on me. It is very unique. Having a vivid color palate is also a very good thing. The engine ages better than going for a hard-core realistic art direction. World of Warcraft or the CG from Babylon 5 held up for years because they went with vivid art direction. It also improves gameplay. The player can reconize different elements better and faster if there is a stark contrast between them.

This is a weak argument. Should people not have bought SC3000 because the custom content of SC200 didn't work with it? Should people not have bought Civilization IV because Civ IIIs custom units would not work with it? Of course a new game will not have as much content as its predecessors because it is new! And of course a new game should have to try maintain compatibility with older, outdated technology. Societies and CitiesXL did not fail because they are 3D. They failed because of sub-par gameplay and shallow simulations. Taking money away from the art department and giving it to the programmers wont fix that either. It takes good design and vision to make a great game and making it 2D doesn't make that magically happen.

You have to remember there has been almost a decade of custom content developed for SC4 and who knows how many decades or even centuries of man hours. There is no reasonable way a company can invest in that. Sim City may be famous but the IP doesn't have the selling power to push boxes like Star Wars. The new engine can even make some modifications, like NAM or RH, moot points. As long as EA designs the game to allow for and provide tools to create custom content (maybe even a scripting language please oh please oh please?) the community content will come. It is like saying people shouldn't get SC4 when it came out because SC3000 had more custom content at the time.

Deep, complex simulation that avoids being complicated with needless features that adds little to gameplay (Main Power lines? Makes sense. Water mains? Sure. Laying down every little power line or telephone wire? Little too far...)

The concept art style looks a lot like tilt-shift photography which would continue with the vivid art pallet of the previous games.

There are two ways to consider multiplayer, intercity and intracity. Intercity, or multiple cities, is the easiest to implement with the current region system. Coding issues aside, that feature can be added to how sc4 is currently designed. Improve interaction between cities (pollution, land value spill overs, etc). Each player has their own city/cities that only they can edit, but others can visit. Different players/cities then cooperate and compete for resources and in their interactions. Interaction between players is the key for vibrant multiplayer. My idea: Turn the region into a bunch of 32x32 (or 64x64) sized chunks. A city starts with only one chunk. The city can then annex neighboring chunks, up to a predefined point (processor/ram dependent). This increases realism, another sense of achievement, and some friendly competition between cities (who will get that prime riverfront first?!) Intracity, or within one city, is a bit more difficult from a game design standpoint. SC2KNE tried to do this. SimCity has always used a "god mode" form of development. It great for instant feedback when developing, and a mess if something goes wrong. The two ways to make it work is separate players spatially (a player can only work in specific spots on the map) or by tool (one player zones, other transportation) My idea: Switch work to asynchronous. Players design their changes in a "blueprint" mode and then the mayor can click "Go!" and execute those changes. Players can work on their blueprints or set it up to let others work on them too.

I'm not sure how sc4 does the region data, but the tile method is obviously the way to go for large scale "infinite" terrain. My suggestion is investigate GeoMipMap, which itself can be tiled. There is also geo clip maps. There is also the Virtual Terrain resource if you havent discovered it yet, specifically the papers section. I would go so far as to require a DX11/OpenGL4 card. Going full 3d will need not just raw gpu muscle, but also the latest in shader tech, such as Compute shaders. This is a dev blog on how DX11 is used to render terrain. Though I'm an advocate of C# and XNA, I can definitely see the reason for primarily C++. If most of the game logic is encapsulated in C++ libraries, you can easily wrap those for any phone, tablet, or computer platform. It's never seamless on the presentation end, but it means not rewriting a lot of internal code for simulation. Instead of client/server model, have you considered a Peer to Peer network for the multiplayer? I did an experiment on P2P gaming in undergrad, building on top of DirectConnect at the time (horribly slow, too much for a real game, but fine for poker). Better protocols exist today (NodeJS would be an interesting option), but the main takeaway is that every player is both a client and server. Each city would, in effect, be its own server. Use public key encryption to keep things safe and you're good to go. This also allows you to do things like run your city during the day, and keep an eye on it from work or phone. The multiplayer code then becomes simple negotiation between multiple clients and servers. I say simple, but it's really not; you have a lot of NAT issues to overcome with this. But most P2P protocols can easily provide good functionality out of the box. Just something to consider. Sometimes, "running a server" is a complicated idea for a player, and it doesn't have to be if everyone's both a server and a client. My understanding of p2p is that it is difficult to design to join "mid game" as it would require the entire state to be synced. By using a standard client/server the new client only needs to be sent chunks of the state on an as needed basis. C/S also allows for more divergent hardware specs. I do not see my 1GHz ARM phone keeping up with my game running on a quad core, which is what it will have to do on a p2p system. Running a server can be as easy as hosting a mp game from inside the client, which is what has been done for years, to running it on a headless machine (to which linux support becomes important imho).

Another interesting thing about sc4 2.5d vs full 3d. SC4 rendered the scene to an off screen buffer. When the camera moved it would actually take the buffer bitmap, pan it, and then rendered the new view, instead of fully redrawing each frame. Offscreen buffers are now really common in game engines as they move away from fixed function pipelines to using shaders for everything. Shaders do offer quite a bit of customizable power that can scale based on hardware levels. It can also offer an unprecedented level of visual feedback to the player.

To veer off topic on there community project, the more I think about it the more I wonder if a sc4 clone would be the best option. Too much time is spent on discussion of "TEH BEST GAMZ EVAR!" If the project was locked to recreating the engine with compatibility with existing assets the discussion immediately jumps to technical implementation. That and much of the design work is already done as the modding community has done a great job understanding how the engine works.

Open ttd is an interesting example actually. If memory serves what happens was that one person reversed engineered the ttd executable and released his source code. What happed was the community project of open ttd had t heir version 0.1 from day one. Like I said I never worked for a company as a coder, but it sounds like a fundamentally different philosophy is needed, kind of like like the scrum model.

If you call selecting a region something worth playing At least it has multiplayer LOL!

Disclaimer: I am a hobbyist programmer only. Never been to school for it or worked in the field, so my culture differs greatly. I've found that a lot of trained coders hold engineering ideals of speed and size very close to their heart. I think these are good things that we should try for and always iterate on, but it seems more often than not it gets in the way of community-oriented proejcts. I can't tell you how many Bukkit plugins died because the developer was waiting to release the code when they got it smaller/cleaner/faster/better documented, but they left before that ever happened. Thankfully java is easy to reverse compile My other view on it is a little more data driven. Yes certain languages are faster and small, and vitally important if this is going to try and run on a notebook with an atom processor. If the assumption that this is a game going to be made for desktops and high end laptops then, while you don't want to go to the opposite extreme and be lazy, I question to what degree language A is faster/smaller than B and if it is worth it. If it takes an extra 6 months to code the complete game in pure C, but you only save 100 megs of ram in a world of 4 gig systems, is it worth it? And like I said, in the case of python specifically those heavy lifting simulation modules can be written in C/C++ and used by python code no problem. My quick check in top shows that python interpreter seems to have about 35 megs of overhead in ram. (Granted there is also the issue of the GIL too)

tl;dr: Tough, its going to be long I was another dev on citymania, I did a lot of the server, net, and client code (omg I need mipmapping). Here are my thoughts and experience, assuming EA says no and assuming you go open source (WHICH YOU SHOULD): 1) Use an existing cross platform engine. There is no need in 2011 to reinvent the wheel. The anti-cross platform argument is complete rubbish for exactly that reason, the only case is if you are writing a graphics engine from scratch. With the correct engine (panda, ogre, irrlicht, unity, etc) it is just as easy for one as is the other. What WAS difficult was making the simulation engine from scratch to make it "light weight." All it did was waste time trying to recreate something that already existed in the game engine we were using. 2) Frequent code updates. Code is never finished, only forgotten. Tomkeus did a lot of awesome work on the road construction code, but he never published the code to a public repository, so we could never use it. This happens all the time in the FOSS world. Someone works on something great but never publishes their code because it is "poorly documented/not finished/needs cleanup/etc." If it works, push it so people can use it. I see no purpose on hiding source code until you release. 3) Release often. One of the things I noticed working with minecraft/bukkit is that the most successful plugins use a special project page. Every time new code is added to the source the page compiles a new build of the program. Devs then select specific builds that they consider stable and has the features they want to make a release. FOSS survives on releasing early and often, although with making a game there is a bit of leg work before there is the first release. If the project shows life, more devs are interested, you get more pull requests, and it is a positive feedback loop. 4) Keep the lead. There needs to be a single person in charge of the game design and vision. While there can be discussion about game design and features there needs to be one person in charge. Games can not be designed by committee. If that person has to leave due to real life, it should be clear who the next head person is. This happened to us. 5) Language. Everyone has their pet language that they adore, here is mine and why. Developer time is very important. C/C++, while one of the fastest, takes a while to develop for. Python is faster to develop in, but is slower than C/C++ especially with a lot of mathematical computations. However python modules can also be written in C/C++, so if there is a chunk of code that is slow in python, it can be written/rewritten in C/C++ and integrated seamlessly with the existing python code. That is what the Panda3D engine does. The question isn't which language is faster, but what is fast enough. CCP also uses Python for Eve online, especally their server code. They found that when optimizing code they generally get more performance per developer time refactoring the game logic more efficiently in python than rewriting the code as a C module. My notes: I think a full 3d game is still the most viable option UNLESS you are specifically making a clone of the sc4 engine -- which isn't a bad idea in and of itself. I would still use an existing cross platform engine for that task. Doing so would give clear targets on what to develop for and, once the engine is feature complete, bug fixes and new features can be added. The hard part with using 3d graphics is getting art assets (which this community has more artists than coders, opposite of many other projects, leverage that to your advantage) and, for this game, the geome count. Graphics card can render an object with millions of polygons in real time, but throw on just 500 different cubes on screen and even the most robust gaming card slows to a crawl. Most engines come with features to merge geoms, and they can be recreated on the fly if you need to change a building, but it is something to consider in the game design. We were going to accomplish this with our "blueprint" layer. Instead of the player making changes directly (causing the need for a lot of geoms to be recreated and merge on the fly), the player would draw their plan on a blueprint interface. Once they were happy with the plan those changes were then committed in the world. A bit more realistic and we would have more control over how these changes would work in simulation and graphically.

I believe the current city graphics are also placeholders as the actual assets were not yet finished.