joshphillips999

Gregory said they finished making cities xl 2011, so it would be daft for them not to release it.

Originally posted by: Klausio the game has problems with video cards with Gddr5 memory, so the new ati and nvidia's are using this type of memoryquote> Thanks so much for this info! Looks like all high end ATI cards are off limits for those who want to play cities XL mostly (like me). GDDR5 is on the ATI 4700s and up (other than 4830 + 4850, and a few low end 5000 series cards) i think, on pretty much all of them. Nvidia is the way to go! Ofcourse, the GTX 400 series is off limits too... So I would say the best ATI card without GDDR5 is the 4850, which has performance just under the GTS 250. Leaving the best and most compatible card for this game at the 295. You have a 285, so actually you've pretty much maxed the game already in terms of graphics (although a 295 may be a worthy upgrade, with about 20% increase in speed).

Very sorry to hear this, I wish all of MC's employees good luck in finding a new job. However I dont really fully understand what is going on, is the game still going to be improved with CXL 2011, therefore some will keep their jobs, right? Or is the game just going to continue to be sold as it is? Don't want to sound insensitive about this, but I am genuinely confused.

Umm, my siteadvisor says that site is dodgy :S

your 5850 lags? Well then the rest of us have no hope LOL. In the next few weeks i'm upgrading from a 2005 ATI 1xxx series card to a 4770, and people say they can almost max out the game (high and 6x AA) without lag on around 1440x900 on a 9800GT (slightly worse perfomer than the 4770, especially when AA is on), when they have cities less than 750k. What other cards have you used with this game? Maybe the newer ones perform worse? (5850 technically isn't supported).

Originally posted by: warrior For something that is meant to be like the core of the UK, we haven't pulled it off very well. It's very unfair how some people have gotten to vote after 10pm and some haven't. But not every polling station being the same size an therefore the smaller ones not being able to fit as many people inside the doors at 10pm then others which are larger make using the doors as a cut off point at 10pm ridiculous. This year with the debates, there has been quite a big increase in people getting interested in politics, now by turning people away and not being able to cope with the demand it will only undo and possible do more damage than what the debates did right. The truth is this voting system is completely out of date and not suitable to a country like the UK. It doesn't represent the country very well, and not everyone can vote. For example in the constituency me and my parents are in (I'm not allowed to vote as I'm too young) noone was allowed to vote for the 3 main parties Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem. because our MP is the speaker and is meant to be natural. So for country who's criticized others for not dealing with votes and democracy right it turns out we not very good at it either.quote> So your in buckingham? Who did your parents vote for? Mine voted UKIP, but the speaker won anyway.

Originally posted by: Boggy1 The polling stations have closed. The votes are being counted. The first EXIT Poll is as follows: Conservatives on 307 seats Labour on 255 seats Liberal Democrats on 59 seats Others on 29 seats This means a Hung Parliament, with the largest party being the Conservatives, short of a majority by 19 seats. The Liberal Democrats seem to have actually DROPPED seats. If this poll is accurate (they never are), then Gordon Brown and Labour will stay in power until they can sort out a coalition. If that cannot happen, then the Government may collapse and we may have another election. For anyone who is interested, you can watch Live what is going on here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/liveevent/quote> It was extremely accurate. The conservatives are at 305, and two more seats are to be declared. One of those is likely to happen today (predicted conservative), and the other is going to be held on the 27th may, but thats a conservative safeseat. So its 307 for conservatives, as predicted. Labour at 258, up three, still pretty close. And Lib dems actually down two, so they dropped even more than expected. Not a good day for clegg. Then the 'others' got one less seat. So in fact it was pretty accurate.

Originally posted by: dedgren they just weren't financially stable enough to fulfill a lot of the outrageous requests that some of us made.quote> Well, there's a novel take. This whole situation was our fault. Yep, must be so. Our fault for: 1) Expecting a game that purported to allow the player to sim RL cities to have a bunch of really outrageous stuff... like, you know, trains. That sort of thing. 2) Expecting the game to actually work once installed, as opposed to setting up like concrete over the course of a half hour or so. 3) Expecting the game to be ours once we'd purchased it... the list goes on. Crazy dreamers, we were, eh? ...that may be the single most ridiculous thing I've ever read in a post on this website... Davidquote> Don't patronize me! That last bit wasn't the slightest bit hypocritical, was it now? Because you say I'm ridiculous whilst ignoring the rest of my post. If you spent any time on the original Cities XL forum, you would know that everyday there was a thread asking for something new to be implemented in the game, and a hate group to back it up if it wasn't implemented. And besides, if you actually took the time to read the rest of my post, you would see obviously it is MC's fault to a good extent, but people expected too much. Yes it was supposed to work, and they did spend too much time on things that weren't important to a lot of people (Planet offer etc.). I admit they released the game too early and couldn't promise everything. If you noticed, they never actually promised people trains before release. They also said anyway for things like trains that we would get them eventually. I never had any problem with installation and haven't really noticed many people saying the game doesn't work after. Installation was 5 minutes for me. And thats on a mid-range PC. And the last point doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you put it into perspective. You've also misunderstood my post. I meant that for things other than bugs, which is mostly what you listed. Most people are upset about the lack of gameplay, how its the same thing all the time and it gets boring. Not many types of building, GEMs, map editors, regions (this is one of the "outrageous" things I was talking about that, according to your post, you seem to find reasonable, it is also one that MANY people got VERY angry about on the original cities XL forum site, it would change people's decision to buy the game), and that it simply wasn't developed enough, is why people are dissapointed. I only came into contact with a few bugs, and from what I've seen the only real big problems which cannot be fixed are the ones when you have an incompatible graphics card, as well as a couple others. But bear in mind these are ones made AFTER the release, and that happens with a lot of well developed games too. I'm not being MC's pet here or anything, its clear they made some wrong decisions and could've done without the PO, but you seem to be attacking me for simply stating my opinion, without even fully understanding my point. They were financially stable enough to get these bugs out of the way, I never denied that. I was talking about gameplay. People don't generally talk about bugs online unless they're having trouble with them. Your right about what you said, okay? No need to be so harsh about it. I was talking about something else.

Originally posted by: Xidillon You people are seriously gonna make me buy one Im telling you. I really hope MC is aware of this graphical issue. If I buy this new hardware I want to know that the game will be updated to work with it as intended. $500 for a mammoth tree will be totally unacceptable.quote> Hmm, why would you need to upgrade for this game? Doesn't two GTX 285 max it out enough?

Originally posted by: Ilikeseattle Large cities eat up 3GB RAM sometimes so I recommend that unless you have a 64 bit operating system, you should run CitiesXL by itself. EDIT: Maybe it wasn't CitiesXL but at one point I minimized some game and it showed 3GB RAM used (about 2.75 used by the game), or maybe I had a memory leak while playing a large city I downloaded. I really don't care how much RAM any 32 bit program uses because I have enough memory to handle 2.5x the maximum any 32 bit program can access (8GB RAM). Tens of millions, I didn't make it. It looked like a skyscraper prison. Most of the population were executives, some were skilled and elite, (and a few unskilled for the services). Not a single low or medium density area. Virtually no pollution and a lot of trade going on. This city imported almost everything and exported a lot of executives. At least that is how I remember it. It is possible that I merely saw a long video and read that it was a memory hog (and saw a screen capture of Tasl Manager) but that city was in the top 10 recorded populations of CitiesXL cities. quote> Wow. I'd never make that much anyway, a couple million and its likely I probably would've messed it up by then. By the way, if you did infact download that city, where did you download it? I've been looking to download someone else's city to see what its like, but I couldn't find anything.

What I'm worried about is whether those who actually have the game will still be able to use it, even if the game is a lost cause; nobody works on it, nobody's selling it, MC go bankrupt etc. Because think about it; we have to sign in to play that game. If they shut down that server, then we can't access the game. If the worst does happen, I hope they at least allow those who bought the game to be able to play it! I will still easily be satisfied with this game for years if it had no more updates, personally. Even though it is unfinished, and there is so much more to add: - Trains - Weather (though this seems particularly far away, if we were ever going to get it. This would be a huge plus though) - Bug fixes such as the highway bridge bug and incompatibility with many of the newest graphics cards, ripping textures etc. - More buildings (especially for high density, the same really tall high density executive building keeps popping up, it looks nice, but theres way too many). And a lot more. But at least, unlike a lot of other people, I'm actually satisfied to an extent by the game already. Any of the things above or other improvements is just a plus. Unfortunately Cities XL 2011 seems really far away, if it ever happens. And then, whoever takes it over is likely to ruin the game and turn it into something like Sim city societies. Unless we still have the original MC team working, with just a lot more people from elsewhere. Problem is, they are probably going to be like EA, and go all for the money, and forget about the customer. I know a lot of people say MC didn't care about us, they did, they just weren't financially stable enough to fulfill a lot of the outrageous requests that some of us made. We don't really know what it's like to be in their shoes. Although I can imagine they probably could have done better, it wasn't a total disaster on their part, in my opinion. But anyone who takes them over may not listen to us at all, and make some huge update where our game just falls to pieces, and we can't even get back to one we may have liked more. Meh, I'm only speculating. Hopefully that wouldn't happen. I don't really know a lot about this business to be honest.

Originally posted by: Cobhris96 Originally posted by: joshphillips999 Originally posted by: BorisS1990 Try turning on expert mode in the options menu. It unlocks all the buildings to you from the start. That may help. Maybe it's just some bug.quote> Exactly this, it doesn't really make a difference if you have it on or not, because when you hit 1 mil citizens; your supposed to have unlocked pretty much everything anyway. quote> I've heard about some buildings that don't unlock until 2 or 3 million people. quote> Yeah thats why I said pretty much everything, not litterally everything. It really hardly makes a difference with those few buildings. Thats just being picky

Originally posted by: billmallon to joshphillips999: in your reply to this post you mentioned the term 'anti-aliasing'. I have seen this term before but I don't really understand what it means and what its effect is on game play. Can you help with a very simple explanation that a dummy like me can understand ? thanks.quote> Well, you know when your playing on a game, and you change your position. On objects, without anti-aliasing, they may have rough edges and textures, much like this: If you click the zoom button, you can see on roads and buildings that they have rough textures which frankly look horrible. The rough textures also appear to in different directions depending on the perspective at which you are looking at the game. Anti-aliasing removes the rough textures to make it smoother, the higher multiplier you have of AA (anti-aliasing), the more effective it will be. They usually go up in 2's (ie 2x AA, 4x AA etc.). The highest amount of anti-aliasing on cities xl is 8x, and that pretty much rids the game of the vast majority of rough textures. This is an example of a screenshot with lots of AA: Although it is not perfect, it gets rid of all the horrible-ness you see in the first picture, and its not so bad really. Remember, both pictures aren't actually at ground level either; usually it would look a lot better than both of them. However, this comes at a cost. It requires a lot of graphics power to use anti-aliasing, and from no AA to full AA, could make your frame rate of the game (how fast the game is playing, whether it is lagging or not) decrease by a lot, because it takes a lot more power and time to do it. however, if you have a good graphics card, this will not be a problem. Anything around a GTS 250 or higher should be able to have high graphics AND 8x AA, for a long time. Hope this was a good explanation; if you need any further explanation just ask

Originally posted by: mr-tom Originally posted by: joshphillips999 Originally posted by: mr-tom Originally posted by: joshphillips999 Originally posted by: mr-tom Well I'm using an 8600 GTS so nothing special, and it's running full detail, all the candy, 1680x1050quote> You can max out the game with a 8600GTS? WOW, I thought people couldn't even do that with an 8800GT? quote> Yeah. Although I don't like big cities, so it may be that it would slow down if I built up a big population. I prefer wide, open spaces. quote> I see. Sorry, just one more question, does it lag on street level? Thanks quote> No, not at all. But everybody's set up differs. I'm also running an overclocked i7 920 with 6GB RAM... quote> Oh I see. Thanks for the response. Reason why I asked is because street-level is where it tends to lag; but yeah nice pc

Originally posted by: mr-tom Originally posted by: joshphillips999 Originally posted by: mr-tom Well I'm using an 8600 GTS so nothing special, and it's running full detail, all the candy, 1680x1050quote> You can max out the game with a 8600GTS? WOW, I thought people couldn't even do that with an 8800GT? quote> Yeah. Although I don't like big cities, so it may be that it would slow down if I built up a big population. I prefer wide, open spaces. quote> I see. Sorry, just one more question, does it lag on street level? Thanks