guuz

This video confirms that regions can be set to private or public. You can play on your own region just like sc4.

How do you imagine social mobility in a game like simcity while keeping the results of your decisions to build or not build that high school/prison/homeless shelter in a certain area clear? Houses can improve if you make the area nicer to live in, or worse if you remove services or add NIMBYs. You don't need to simulate citizens to do that, only the houses. If you change jobs from company A to company B and move to a new home closer to B, another person will take your job at A and probably move closer to A. You don't have to model this movement as one 'sim' replaces another, it doesn't matter for the big picture of the city.

A school could produce education agents that drop off "knowledge" points at houses. If a house builds up enough of those points it triggers a rule that makes the game build a house that produces more intelligent sims every simulation cycle. The game doesn't need to keep track of sims if you only simulate a production cycle. A house produces workers, shoppers and children.

As I've said before, single day sims don't affect the modeling of a city enough to be worth the processing power. There are no sims, there are only houses that supply a certain amount of workers every day to perform the jobs at factories, public buildings and construction sites. If there are not enough residents to perform the job, or they can't get there the other buildings won't work. Having sims keeping their jobs can be even frustrating and make your city building decisions less noticable. If you build a new highway you want the new connection to be used as soon as possible. Your residences will recalculate workroutes and jobs next day so you'll notice it immediately. If sims would keep their job every house would have to decide (dice roll) if changing jobs for a certain amount of reduced travel time is worth the economic risk, this would result in a part of a neighborhood driving long distance to their old jobs, and part of the neighborhood driving to new jobs. In the meantime you sit there watching from above why all those sims keep complaining about long distances to their work, even after building that highway. Modeling something is reducing details until you reach a point where you can simulate it at a certain cost. Reducing it to a level of residences that supply a workforce, instead of sentient sims is imho a good way to reduce power without compromising a realistic, logical simulation.

I don't expect any online fee. There are not a lot of games following this path anymore. It only makes sense for large MMOs with huge amounts of server based gameplay (e.g. world of warcraft). There are even plenty of free to play games with a lot of servers (League of Legends, Team Fortress 2). In the glassbox presentation it is mentioned that they don't need a dedicated live server for the game. I don't think they'll use a lot of bandwith/data and don't require a monthly fee to pay for that.

I expect these glassbox rules and features will influence mods quite a bit. If you want a building to function within the game you'll have to write those functions or copy them from other buildings.

Here are the slides from the presentation.

We have to make sure they don't remove regions from single player though. Like Cities XL did. I couldn't agree more, I very much doubt that I will be playing MP so I would really like to see that they keep regions for Single Player too. If you look at the slides from the GlassBox presentation, multipayer seems to work like regions influencing each other by sending "boxes" of information.

Here are the slides from the presentation.

We have to make sure they don't remove regions from single player though. Like Cities XL did. The 1-16 multiplayer suggests that you can share something like a region with up to 16 players to build cities with. This system would allow multiplayer city building without changing the core of simcity. It also is an easy way to incorporate multiplayer without having to create a whole new game mode.

It sounds like the regions from SC4 now have multiplayer options and citytiles will influence each other more than before. Overall they seem good changes/options.

this is becoming interesting...

Cities unlimited looks exciting. They clearly are listening to the simcity community. Monte Cristo is looking for realism, solid economy and transport options. O, and you can click the screens in the article to get even higher resolution images. I love the detail in the Paris suburb building, the shops below are brilliant.