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.

Will Wright wows GDC with new Sim Will Wright gives a sneak preview of his upcoming game Spore, delighting those present. SAN FRANCISCO--On the final day of the Game Developers Conference, Will Wright's Future of Content presentation contained a special treat for the bursting-beyond-capacity audience. The treat was an extended demonstration of his next game, called Spore--a sim that allows the players to control life on all conceivable scales--an emergent and beautiful simulation game that ranges from the cellular level all the way to the galactic level. The game allows the player to begin with developing a creature as a cellular entity and eventually creating a creature with more sophisticated brain functions, which will change the nature of the game to a more RTS-type game (he cited a particular favorite of his, Populous), where players will control herds of creatures. Once you upgrade the hut around which the creatures centralize, the game changes into what he called a simple version of SimCity where the player manages technology and interacts with other cities that have sprung up around the world. He demonstrated how the player can eventually purchase a UFO to travel between planets--and eventually star systems--to populate, conquer, or simply observe. Particularly impressive was the game's emergent gameplay and seemingly infinite possibilities for playing creatively--two qualities that define Will Wright's celebrity status in game design. His demonstration of Spore was framed through a design lens, as is the custom at GDC. The hub of the game, he asserted, was its compression. Since all the creature meshes, textures, animations, and behaviors are procedural (based on a set of algorithmic rules), this allows for an enormous quantity of player-created content, which he emphasized as another key element of the game's design that he has always fought for--the encouragement (in Spore's case, perhaps the necessity) of player creativity. More so than in other games, he explained, he wanted to create a sense of both ownership (of the unique creatures and civilizations the player creates) as well as mastery (over the interface, which becomes more complex as the game's scale increases). The goal is to give the player simple tools to make them feel like they have tremendous leverage on the nature of the game itself. The game, then, becomes what he called a creative amplifier for what the player has done. Because of the compressed nature of the content, he went on, it allows for the generation of enormous content libraries. Moreover, the small content is easily portable. Players can interact with creatures, buildings, societies, planets, and star systems that other players have created. Wright's presentation indicated that the passion that went into the design of Spore spoke to particularly inspirational television shows and toys from his childhood: Star Trek, Care Bears, War of the Worlds, Kid Pix, Pac-Man, Legos, and erector sets, to name only a few. Seemingly, Spore's emergent editors are the embodiment of the toys, and the content and gameplay the embodiment of the films. It made it seem almost as if he had been waiting his whole life to design this game. When he fantasized about Spore years ago, Wright admitted, My own imagination was my biggest bottleneck. He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right. The demonstration of the stellar zoo that is Spore might have given hope to a new generation of game designers.quote>

Date: 3/16/2005 11:30:55 AM Author: J.O. Vil: LOL! at the mate part... I recon that Spore will have a built-in exchange system, not relying in browsers since will stated that the other races are from other players... yet we shall wait for the official site and chat events...quote> It's quite sure it will. It downloads stuff when the game needs it. Like AI creatures, cities planets etc.

they managed to get the creatures, vehicles planets, universes Etc. all code only. The filesize of the creatures is only 1k

pictures!!!!