ScaryMonkey

Originally posted by: Hybr1d I have another question: Do the residential squares eventually up to apartments, and then to skyscrapers when you hit a certain amount of citizens?quote> No, the buildings in Cities XL never evolve... one of the main drawbacks IMHO.

Sorry to double post (again!) But one last update on this: All of the reformatted Cities Unlimited articles (at least the ones I have) are now up, you can see them here.

Originally posted by: Ilikeseattle Would you rather this: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=365.0 OR this: http://themetropolisproject.org/forum ?quote> Haha, thanks ilikeseattle, you beat me to it

Can't say this comes a surprise at this point, but it's nevertheless sad to see one of the few studios doing something other than FPS/RTS/RPG close its doors. Best of luck to everyone at the company in your future endeavors.

Yeah, wrong forum I think... btw mentarman that's a great book, you should read "The Power Broker," which is a pretty good biography of Robert Moses.

Originally posted by: spa The Sim City community may be small, but we're the core group and I believe we have influence beyond our small numbers. quote> This is a good point; Lately I've seen this idea of "city builder fans are a small, niche market" thrown about as a truism quite a bit, but I don't think Sim City fans are a small group at all; all of the past Sim City games sold millions of copies, and while the number of people going so far as to write City Journals or make mods is limited the broader fan base for this kind of game is pretty substantial.

I thought this was amazing too, and then I showed my wife and she totally didn't get it... she just said: "What? It's just sped up." And then I said "But it looks like a miniature model!" and she's like "No it doesn't." Maybe its like one of those magic eye things, where some people just don't see it.

Originally posted by: Mootilda There seem to be a lot of people here who have no idea how much money it costs to create a modern game. Where did all the money go? MC used it to pay their programmers, designers, artists, writers, managers, etc. It's very likely that they had 50+ people working full-time for several years at $100,000 or more per person plus benefits, plus the cost of offices, office furniture, computers, phones, advertising, etc. A quick calculation says that the game cost a minimum of $30 million dollars. MC was counting on far more sales; 100,000 sales is nothing, compared to the cost of creating the game. It's very likely that MC lost a lot of money on this game. quote> If they paid everyone on their staff over 100k they deserve to go bankrupt You're exactly right about how much a modern game costs though, although I doI think you're overestimating just a bit; while it's true that they had a large staff (I believe I read a figure of about 80 in an early interview with the CEO) there's no way they were all paid that much; Senior programmers might pull down that kind of money, but testers, artists, and support staff sure as hell don't. But you're right in that 100,000 sales is dismal and couldn't possibly have covered their costs. Originally posted by: Asgardi "A quick calculation says that the game cost a minimum of $30 million dollars." LOL. Anti-piracy corporate propaganda seems to be working. First of all CXL is not "a modern super high quality game". It takes 400k to create a modern high quality engine so it does not take even 100 000 to create CXL engine. Then there is the extra money for content. One experienced guy can certainly create two models per day and one guy texture those models. That makes 700 models per year. How many models are in CXL? Not more than 500. So they don't have 50 people making the game. My quess is 10. So with over 3000e/month salaries it would cost 400k to create CXL. Then there are rents + computers + software + etc. So 500k is a good quess per year.quote> That's lowballing it a bit, though... they certainly employed more people than that (as I said, their CEO mentioned about 80 staff). I don't know where you got that figure for developing the engine, but there's no reason to think designing the engine for CXL would be significantly cheaper than a "modern high quality engine," CXL may not be Crysis but it' reasonably full-featured graphically. Besides, even if the engine isn't as good doesn't necessarily mean they spent less money to make it. Also, I think two models a day per artist is pretty optimistic, and even if that were true your math assumes these two guys are working every day, with no weekends or holidays Based on the size of the company and how the game turned out, I would guess they spent 5 to 10 million on it, all told. Which means a pretty heinous loss, financially. Edit: Oops, just saw that other thread with the French article about their situation, but looks like I was about right: about nine million euros in development costs.

Originally posted by: IntoxiNation Originally posted by: ScaryMonkey As I've said before, it might be worth considering a Blender-type effort to buy up the source code in the event that MC does go belly-up, or even if they simply decide to abandon CXL; It seems like something they might be amenable to, considering they were previously willing to sell the rights to StarPeace to fans.quote> MC didn't have the rights to sell to the people. The game was developed by Oceanus and that's who released the source code. When that happened, MC had nothing to do with StarPeace. It had sold the distribution rights to Sega a couple of years before. There's also other issues that need to be considered. Does CXL use any third party libraries? I know of one used in it, FreeImage. That has a free distribution liscense, but if they use any commerical libraries in it then that can be a deal stopper right there. For example, the scripting engine. If they are using a 3rd party engine for that which prohibits releasing to open source, then they would have to strip it out before letting the code out. Now you are stuck with pretty much their graphics engine. That's a problem that always comes into play with changing a game from closed source to open source, and a reason you don't see it happen a lot. That's the bad side of it. The good side is that these libraries allow for more rapid development of games. quote> Ah, my bad... I'm not too familiar with the details of the StarPeace deals, that's just what I heard secondhand. Yes, the libraries are certainly an issue (I've heard elsewhere that they also use SpeedTree, which is proprietary). But that would most likely be something we would be able to assess if we started negotiating to buy the code.

As I've said before, it might be worth considering a Blender-type effort to buy up the source code in the event that MC does go belly-up, or even if they simply decide to abandon CXL; It seems like something they might be amenable to, considering they were previously willing to sell the rights to StarPeace to fans.

Originally posted by: chocolate_city SimFox - Squidhy - All of those ideas are easily implemented and more .... But the program is called CityEngine 2009 ... Not CitiesXL*.* The current price tag: $3.500.00 ...quote> And CityEngine's not even a game, it's just a scene builder for 3D rendering (not that I wouldn't enjoy messing around with it!)

Couple more of these up... there will be 18 eventually, just need to take the time to strip out the message board formatting from the cached HTML files; Easy, but boring

I play it, and to my mind it's the best WWII game out there... It has a steep learning curve, but it's really engrossing once you get into it. I'll grant it's not for everyone... but bear in mind that a lot of people consider Sim City "boring."

Cityscape's not really a game, though... just a modeller for 3D environments. Plus you can't save what you build, unless you have a full version licence... at only 19,000 dollars a pop :/

Royale with Cheese