Fornix

This mod allows you to RMB drag: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=406297458

And right now it's possible to get around this problem partially, due to zonable pedestrian paths: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409184143 Still need some form of connection, but the pedestrian paths make a nice attachment to things like parks. As well as buildings in more rural areas.

4. Traveling distance for myself to work is close to 3km, yet I walk it back and forth daily as well . So personally I'm glad my cims thing likewise . 5. I would think a charging station for electric cars. Not sure about where you live, but around here it's not uncommon to find them just placed on sidewalks like that. Weird little bug my girlfriend encountered yesterday was trucks at the train station to simply fly away towards after she removed part of the connecting road. Didn't grab a picture of it though .

It's been reported on the Paradox forums as well: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?843796-Custom-Assets-showing-nothing-on-menu On a limited number of assets previews are working, however close to all parks and interchanges are white boxes. A very small minority of parks display something else for me. But indeed, it's a bit cumbersome the way it's now. Hope it'll be resolved soon.

If going for aesthetics is what you desire, you can first build a connecting road. Place the park where desired, and then bulldoze the road. The park will remain in this game. I am not quite sure if the park remains functional in that case.

Indeed no biggy to me . It merely stood out to me as I was checking if there was a CS section up yet, to have it spelled as "mods" under SC4 and "modds" under Cities XL. If it's been like that for years already though, then indeed I doubt it'd change xD.

Just noticed "Mods & Tools" is spelled with a double-d under CitiesXL. Which I assume is in error.

Most definitely looking forward to these first let's plays. And with only a week following that day it's a nice warmup to starting my own first city in this game .

From what I've noticed it's primarily time which triggers traffic. For example at 11:00 PM, but also at I believe 7:00 AM is the correct time for morning, all sims want to head off for work simultaneously. Which instantly generates queues. And essentially from that moment on directly part of the issue starts. If in addition to that their destination is also far away (multiple residential blocks in between), the issue stacks. Sims lack any sort of intelligence to travel before or after traffic is congested. Another major issue is that industrial buildings can hold up a great amount of workers once high density. These workers do not carpool, and often also do not take the bus as there's already many others using the bus. So to a small number of buildings, you have well over a thousand cars trying to access. And unlike common in real life where roads leading to such major factories are well outside of the city, the small city limits force you to have those congestions already present within your city center.

The choice for square has probably partially been made to ensure an equal playing field for the leaderboards. Different shaped regions would mean some people may be at an advantage whilst others may be at a disadvantage in terms of sim traveling times and such and therefore have an easier or harder time ranking on the leaderboards.

I think they'll probably handle it similar as to how they handle it for The Sims franchise: - SimCity Store: including items created by developers for small quantities of simpoints, in addition to stuff packs and expansions. - SimCity Exchange: a place where users can upload content to distribute towards other players. Considering as to how it has an online only nature to the game I do not think there'll be an option for users to distribute their content through non-official channels.

The reasoning there doesn't sound quite sound. Because they're paid they can't match freebie work? Anyway, as for how it'll work, it's probably going to work like the exchange sims 3 has. Where both users as well as EA can upload content which can be delivered for free, as well as include paid content. EA will probably stick to releasing packs and expansions, similar to as to how they handle The sims. Whilst users can create the individual items. So for example a harbor expansion pack, or a shopping mall/center item pack, etc could come from EA officially.

I don't think so. Thing is, you could unplug your connection during beta and keep on playing for quite some time. This suggests that client-server interaction is limited to once every few minutes, and although we're not exactly sure on what levels it does interact with the server, I wouldn't be surprised for it to just be very basic figures of data. And to that, it doesn't really matter much how great the city size is. For example telling the server you have 13000 workers, 800 barrels of oil and 200 tons of coal or telling the server you have 150000 worers, 8000 barrels of oil and 20000 tons of coal will make very little difference. SimCity also barely used any bandwidth during my hours I spent in it during beta, it's a matter of megabytes over several hours. Playing a game such as BF3 for example uses much more bandwidth than that. Also online storing of your city states, is unlikely to form a real issue. Sure they'll need to invest in storage space, but plot save sizes are generally not too big in games. At 5 MB per plot size (which could be considered large), with 16 plots available in 10 regions, it's 800 MB per person. In other words, a 4TB drive may store the data for over 5000 players. Even if those don't all pay on Origin and EA sees only 25$ per game or so, such a HDD isn't going to cost the 125000$ gained there to not allow paying for the other expenses. What I consider much more likely to be the cause for the current decision is client based lack of computational resources. In particular CPU usage. If people can reach 500k sims on current scales, that's a lot of units moving around. Add to that garbage, waste, power, water, vehicles, etc. and you have a high number of items to be tracked by the CPU. That's resource intensive. If you scale up from 2x2 to 4x4 you do not just quadruple that figure, but it exponentially grows as city density increases, more room for work, more room for residents, more power and water needed, more garbage, waste, etc. The average computer will turn into a slug, and even high-end systems may find difficulties. The problem is comparible to the issue openTTD has whilst playing on larger maps with a high number of vehicles. Top 750 vehicles and many systems start to struggle. Sure, that game isn't completely optimized. However, even after optimizing it further it will run into its limits at some point again once the number of units simply turns high enough. And SimCity is just a game in which numbers can easily turn high enough. If EA decided to go for having SimCity just like the previous games by working with the simple radius systems for coverage and have residents just be randomly moving sprites which appear and vanish, then there'd be very little for the CPU to do, and technically there wouldn't be any reason not to be able to handle 4x4, 8x8 or heck even larger if they'd go for seamless loading. 64x64 would even lie in the realm of possibilities. As simply you're not seeing all of that detail anyway! However, as they didn't go down that route, you may not see the units, but the CPU still has to do the processing for every single one of them.

What I personally did was not to regard the parks as a park, but just as an element within it. In several cities I created that way I created park simply as follows: Regular street and avenue pieces forming the outer border. Dirt streets used as a form of paths within my park. Trees used as filled to fill in the gaps. Is it perfect? No, you'll get bloody cars going through your park! But it allowed me to do more with creating parks than just trying to plop a few of those pieces somewhere on a grid and never really fitting in. If they'll introduce pedestrian only roads at some points, I'm settled tbh. The park elements can easily be connected to it, and you can lay down your roads in such a fashion to angle the park elements in the way you desire anyway. Some more variation in trees, and addition of plants and flowers to plop would be nice as well of course, but let's hope we'll be able to see the community add such things sooner than later.

Yeah, that irks me as well - what's the point of complaining how "bad" vanilla SC4 has looked 10 years ago? This is the year 2013 and I'm looking at SC4 now, and I expected SC2013 to take it as far, if not beyond the current look and visual appearance. click for full size Not only for the green stuff, but generally for textures, building styles, details and so on... In terms of textures, we can't be sure on what we'll get till we have the official game. Download size of the game was suggested to be 12GB, whilst the beta client only made up for less than 2GB. That may be a lacking of high-res textures for example playing part. Only time will tell (or a dev confirmation at some point). As for building styles, greens, etc. I was personally not expecting Maxis to outdo that. To be fair, I think we've been spoiled a bit by people such as yourself Paeng . With thousands of items to pick from, being able to create a desert world, a rural area, Asian, historical European, etc or even a Mars landscape is what has become our expected standard. If they throw in modding tools, we may see an overwhelming amount of content 10 years from now as well if content creators jump on. As for the OP, a lot of it is highly subjective, such as point 11, 13, 14. Point 12 I personally had no issues with after playing for a few hours. Sure it's different than what we were used to in SC4 or what NAM made possible. However, as nice as NAM was for certain things, a lot of it also took quite a bit of taking use to. Point 16 is also just a matter of playing the game enough. In SC4 you could also scale large, but then run into things not building out well if you zone whilst turning off auto-roads. Same goes for here, just a matter of a couple of cities and you'll know exactly what will fill in. Point 17 and 18 pretty much point back to the first part of my post, years and years of modding support have sort of spoiled us I'd say . Some of the other things mentioned may still see improvements, such as lightning, performance, etc. Especially in terms of performance it was far from a general issue, or at least to me. I could run the game fluently on max settings at around 80 ~ 90 fps, turn my camera into the direction of "something" and suddenly have a whopping fps drop of roughly 90% reducing to around 10 fps. Turn away from it, and the fps would normalize again. Which suggests there are some buildings or things such as certain vehicles causing the slowdowns. Myself I couldn't identify exactly what it was, however if a few did and submitted a bug report, those might be out in a 0-day patch already. In regards to town sizes, yes, myself I loved creating large scaled rural areas. So I'd prefer to see them larger. However, I can also see as to why they went for the current decision. On several other gaming fora people already reported high CPU usage with just 50k+ inhabitants. You can scale that figure up to well over 10 times that number even. If zones would be larger the performance of the game would be even worse than the performance of SC4 was when it just came out. Personally what I'd have loved to see however in terms of the regions was to still tile zones in the traditional sense, allowing for use to still create the bigger picture as we used to. But beyond that I still see a lot of potential for this game. Cities in motions 2 however doesn't deal with tens of thousands of units moving around, and that's what cripples SimCity. It's like playing openTTD with a great number of vehicles (e.g. 750+ or so) and you'll lag as well. Not because openTTD is GPU heavy in any shape or form, but because your CPU is struggling to keep up. Having units for sims, transport, water, power, garbage and waste (any missing?) end up being a lot of data to process.