ScaryMonkey

Nice to know that at least some venerable franchises haven't been abandoned :/ http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/214082/civilization-v-announced-on-next-gamepro-cover/ Looks pretty good!

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.

I've started reposting some of the "concept" articles from the old CIties Unlimited boards by tr0ub1e, or edcase2k4-thugangel1983 as he's known here, on the Metropolis Project website (with his permission, of course!). The comment threads are also preserved with them. If you want to take a stroll down memory lane you can read them here. There's only two up right now, but I'll be posting some more soon. A massive thanks to Ephemeron for keeping, sharing, and formatting them! Almost forgot to add: if you were one of the original commenters and don't want your comment reposted shoot me a PM and I'll take it down!

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

Originally posted by: IntoxiNation Originally posted by: ScaryMonkey Interesting thought... there's certainly precedent for that sort of thing, it's exactly what happened with StarPeace (although that didn't turn out so well) and Blender (which *has* been quite successful since then). It would certainly be a shorter path to an open source city builder. quote> Blender's source code wasn't just "released". There was an active fundraising campaign that ended up raising around $100,000 to get the code released. It would be interesting to see if that kind of energy could be stirred up in the city building world. Funny though with StarPeace. That was actually published by MC. quote> Yes, should have been clearer on that point... when Ephemeron said the community might "get access to" the source code I was assuming he meant we would have to raise money to do it, like they did with Blender and Starpeace (although as I recall Starpeace might have been bought by several fans as an investment, rather than by the community at large.) I guess my question is, from a technical standpoint, if we had the Cities XL code in hand, how much could be done with it? Would it be possible to graft a deeper simulation onto the graphics engine? Or would it need so much reworking as to not be worth it? I suppose there's no way to know without actually seeing the code... although the lack of multicore support makes me wonder.

Originally posted by: Ephemeron Hmm, I know I shouldn't be having these thoughts but... Monte Cristo said they were putting all their resources into this game. So if it fails they'll go bankrupt. Bad news? But if they do go bankrupt then we (Simtropolis, the modding community) may be able to acess the source code! That means we could do all the ground-breaking, game-changing mods that weren't even possible in SC4. I'm thinking massive changes to gameplay mechanics for a start. New transit networks would come eventually - trains, subways, monorails (In SC4 the networks are hardwired into the game code, which has always been a problem for the NAM team). It might even be possible to expand the 10x10 map, once computing speeds catch up. quote> Interesting thought... there's certainly precedent for that sort of thing, it's exactly what happened with StarPeace (although that didn't turn out so well) and Blender (which *has* been quite successful since then). It would certainly be a shorter path to an open source city builder.

Thanks for clarifying, Gregory. Originally posted by: Gregory_C Again, these plans are not final, as MC don't have the final say in this (we have business partners and other people who have a certain weight in those decisions).quote> I'm glad that's finally been made clear, I suspected all along that was the situation. At this point in time all scenarios are equally possible. quote> I just better not find a dead cat in the box if I buy the game ;D

It'll probably be up at the end of the day... still only 1:30 in Paris

Originally posted by: nonessentialnoodle Looking through these just reminds me how much potential this game originally had and why i was so excited about it. I didnt realise all the 'patches' of new intersections and missing features they talked about coming after release would cost a fortune. Or that many key features like the multiple lane feature or cloud and sky system would never materialise. What a shame quote> It is a shame, but fortunately not a waste; although we didn't get the Mythical Sim City 5, the ideas that were floated for CU didn't die; and the whole experience showed how powerful a creative force fans of this genre can be. Furthermore, we had an instructive lesson on what the community *doesn't* want from a next-gen game. Hopefully in the future we can learn from the mistakes that were made with CXL to create something even better.

Originally posted by: rsd6000 well if they go bankupt - usually things come first - they will send the pack to commuity to take over (that what happened to starpeace) and they will send big patch and shut down the website or transfer the website to commuity then release patch then before they go out - they could send servers to someone that could recover and restore if its needed quote> Not exactly... a group of players got money together and bought the rights to Starpeace, MC didn't give anyone anything. There's no reason to think that they'll issue any kind of patch if they go bankrupt, they've never stated any intention of doing so (that I know of); and they certainly won't open the source code: if they're in bankruptcy all their assets, including the CXL source, will be under lien from their creditors.

Good article; While I think the piracy issue gets blown out of proportion somewhat by game companies, it does present a real economic problem that's only going to get worse, and could eventually undermine gaming for the PC. Online subscription might be a good way to defuse the problem, but I only think that works if the online element adds something of value; it will be a long time before gamers accept the idea of "renting" their single-player games. But even if the traditional way of making games becomes unprofitable, there are alternatives; For Metropolis we are using an assurance contract model, which solves the free rider problem nicely. (Players decide what they're willing to pay in advance, but the game isn't made if there's not enough support.) I think in the future we'll see an end to traditional box sales and a combination of MMOs and open source titles dominating the PC market. It will be interesting to see if MC can turn the game around on an expansion-pack basis (which is where they seem to be heading with CXL2011); If they go the extra mile to increase their transparency with the community they might be able to do it.

Originally posted by: soltangris Yeah, cudos to Tarkus for a very well-thought and funded analysis! quote> Yeah, I'll add my kudos to that Tarkus, that was one of the most intelligent posts I've seen in this whole thread... I'd mod you +5 insightful, if this wasn't, you know, Simtropolis... and not Slashdot... It's a little scary, though.... I remember when I was playing SC4 (on a not-that-top-notch machine) - it was a real pain to play cities over 2 mln, just like here with CXL. If we think about it: - When SC4 was relelased, it pushed the technology to the limit, (even a bit further) - The same happens now with CXL. - Where would it go if more features were implemented into the simulator???? But even if we leave the technical problem aside, we have to admit that creating a product that would satisfy all our requirements of a next-gen city-builder ('the mythical SC5) will take not years, but many years of patient development! Even if we assume that the graphics engine won't become old for that time (which happens very often), the company that undertakes this development has to be ready and able to devote all this time and resources. Hm, where is this company? quote> Just a quick point here, it's possible to separate the graphics engine from the simulator, so they could be upgraded independently of one another... it's just not a way that commercial game companies do things, they go for standalone "package" releases instead. Another good reason to go open source (ahem.) The alternative we saw with CXL - they released an underdeveloped product and they were hoping to continue the development with our (the players) funding. Well, the community was not ready (obviously) to support such a model. quote> I'm not sure that's true, I just think that MC went about it wrong (if that was indeed their model). In order for that to work the community needs to trust that the developer will follow through on their promises, and that means either having a long track record of fulfilling those expectations, or a high degree of transparency and accountability to the commmunity. All of those were unfortunately lacking during the CXL release. I sincerely hope that MC will have some success now developing a series of upgrades for CXL in the comming years. This is the only realistic way of getting a new city-builder in the forseeable future quote> On that I must disagree... (ahem, ahem.)