EnigmaticUK

I think it would be great to have an aesthetically pleasing city, wide variety of transportation options, plausible financial model.... and NO DISASTERS WHATSOEVER in the out-of-the-box release.

Though, I can say that Ill Tonkso, according to what he says in his thread (or uploads...whatever) that his recent models are compatible with a game such as Cities XL.quote>That'll be a great start then, assuming that Cities XL interests him enough to convert the models...

Square lots are OK provided there is reasonable ability to customise the gaps in between lots so we can match pavements/lawns, add railings and filler features (benches, chairs, piles of crates etc, so that they blend in with the adjacent lots.

I think it's a very clever and logical move by the game developers, but I won't be playing online. I hope that the existence of online options won't have a detrimental effect on the completeness, upgradeability and customisability of the offline game.

You seem to be getting unnecessarily emotional about this... http://www.2404.org/downloads/CITIES%20XL/12084617766.jpg I can see a four lane avenue and a two lane road. The four lane avenue is about the same width as the orange building opposite the junction, and the single lane road is a little over half the width of the orange building. The orange building would be a 2x2 building on the Simcity grid. Therefore the proportions are more or less the same in this screenshot as they would be for roads and avenues in SC4. And since the XL engine isn't based on a grid system, it isn't all that difficult for developers to create roads less than half the width of the orange building - maybe no wider than a single car. As CitiesXL is based in a country with no shortage of narrow roads, it's not a possibility the developers are likely to ignore. It's not a finished game. I can see both parks and "green empty space" in the Vancouver picture. If you can't I suggest you look more closely at the gaps between the skyscrapers, particularly on the left hand side.

I couldn't disagree more. If anything, the contrast is a tad soft,apart from on the stadium, though the houses in the distance should fade a bit more. Nothing some thin mist generated by the graphics engine can't solve though. The green space is absolutely fine for many densely packed cities, especially when surrounding modern apartment blocks on the edge of the city centre. Here's Vancouver, which might well have served as inspiration for the Cities XL screenshot There's certainly nothing remotely "cartoonish" about a city having parks and gardens in amongst the 'scrapers The Vancouver pic shows that the roads are fine in this shot too - if anything in a city that dense they ought to be wider avenues. Of course, the wide sidewalks and lanes wouldn't suit an area filled with row houses and XL certainly needs narrower streets to be an option (so that suburbs generally don't look like ), but that's not a detail I'd expect a European developer to miss in the final release of a game not bound to a strict grid system. A simple comparison of roads with the footprints of the buildings suggests that they are using pretty similar proportions to SC - if anything the depicted roads are narrower in XL. SC roads don't have curves either... I do agree that some of the trees look a oversized (nearly as oversized as some of the original and modified SC4 trees, in fact) in that picture. These trees look pretty good though... http://www.citiesxl.com/images/stories/blog/General/CXLBuilding05.jpg I mean, you're not seriously trying to argue that this screenshot looks less convincing than SC3000...

An odd set of screenshots to show, not least because some of the Cities XL shots look better than the SC4 ones you've picked out, in my opinion. The main areas in which they are lacking are the smaller details on some of the lots, but there's plenty of time for the XL developers to add in a range of props similar to those in SC4. The proportions of the street are absolutely fine for a major thoroughfare in a dense city centre - not really sure why you're comparing this with an Eastern Bloc suburb. And take a look at some of the better thought out screenshots Monte Cristo have given us Even with all the wonderful BAT content in the world (because the SC4 vanilla skyscrapers weren't too great) you can't get the benefit that 3D perspective offers in this screenshot Or the street level realism of these photos There are two main components to good graphics - one is the detail of the render, which is inevitably going to be inferior in 3D to the 2.5D deployed by SC4, but this is compensated for by gaining perspective. If you can get over some of the buildings looking a bit blocky in close ups and the lighting looking a bit odd at some angles, Cities XL is going to provide you with other angles which offer much more of the look and feel of a real city. The second aspect is the art direction, which wasn't all that hot in CityLife, whose odd architecture certainly contributed to a cartoonish appearance. Cities XL seems to have taken a much more observational approach with the in game buildings being heavily influenced by real life examples, and the results are positive. Some of the buildings for Cities XL shown so far are fantastic. The ability to freely integrate custom content should do the rest.

Originally posted by: aking88 They as developers wouldnt decide which should be and shouldnt be private, but rather you would in game. So the player would decide that. As for your technical concerns, these private services would depend on your city growth and conditions in the first place, to be able to be developed. Which means that the different services cant develope out of nowhere and create unrealistic conditions. Ultimately, you would have to approve the development of services as a city, so you would indeed control it. It would just be a different approach than to finance it and control the service completely. So, basically, just because you have offers to have a hospital, seaport or anything else developed by private interests, which would trigger the option, doesnt mean you need to make use of that if you dont want it in the city. I did not imply that the developers would have an agenda, im just suggesting how these options could be expanded.quote> The basic idea is good, but you're missing the most important downside to private sector development - the inaccessibility of services provided to those who can't or won't pay. In game this would be represented by 10%+ of the population performing very poorly on whatever health/education/satisfaction indicators the developers choose to put in, and possibly a few placard wavers outside the buildings. In pratice, the parameters the developers choose to set for public/private services will have a pretty big impact on usual player choices, even if the choice is left entirely down to the player. Make it easy to build big cities by using the private sector's deep pockets and few gamers will take the public sector route. On the other hand if pockets of poverty lead to unmanageable social breakdown then gamers will prefer public provision. Even if the developers don't have an agenda they might end up implicitly pushing one. For example in Simcity there was always an implicit assumption that $$$ > $$ > $ and therefore mayors should strive to maximise the number of sims from the former social group an minimise the number in the latter, at least for the showpiece cities. The normal way to this would be to set tax rates much lower for $$$ sims than $. Therefore the game design essentially favoured a regressive tax system (aka the worst idea ever). Only in a US designed game... City Life, of course, infamously favours social segregation as the only means to social cohesion

in fairness to the modernist Euston station, it is at least moderately pleasant inside. Birmingham New Street on the other hand...

Coventry ringroad and the majority of the construction inside it.

I'm far too overwhelmed with the strangeness of people's ideas to post my own rather mundane predictions

love the realism of the surveillance video. Maybe the police should have hung around for longer to ensure there was no hurling of pizza though? The flats themselves look great too, and the perfect compact size for us UK city builders coughSTEXpleasecough